A/N: This is a Danny Phantom adaption of CreepyPastsa's 'Tulpa' so story idea/plotline rights goes to him. Characters however are exclusively property of Butch Hartman and Nick. Studios.
It was the weekend before College began, Danny and Jazz where at the table eating breakfast. Jazz opened the newspaper and turned directly to the jobs section looking for anything in the way of Psychology – it's never too early to look for job prospects.
She spotted an ad requesting for a test subject willing to participate in a psychological experiment. She mentioned it to Danny with enthusiasm; he passed it off as lame until he heard that the subject would be paid handsomely. He got the details off Jazz, called the facility and arranged an interview.
They told him that all he would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to his head to read his brain activity, and while he was there he would visualize a double of himself.
'Like Phantom' he thought.
Seems like a good choice, and a good personal joke. They called it a "Tulpa". Danny vaguely remembers hearing that tulpa means a projection of ones inner self from a video game or Jazz's psychological ramblings.
It seemed easy enough, and he agreed to do it as soon as they told him how much he would be paid. And the next day, he began.
They brought him to a simple room and gave him a bed, then attached sensors to his head and hooked them into a little black box on the table beside him. They talked him through the process of visualizing his double again, and explained that if he got bored or restless, instead of moving around, he should visualize his double moving around, or try to interact with him, and so on. The idea was to keep the double with him the entire time he was in the room.
He had trouble with it for the first few days; it was kind of hard to visualize his ghost half walking around when he only saw his human side in the mirror everyday. It was more controlled than any sort of daydreaming he'd done; before generally he would daydream during a particularly boring class taught by Lancer.
He'd imagine Phantom for a few minutes, and then grow distracted. But by the fourth day, he could manage to keep him "present" for the entire six hours. They told Danny he was doing very well. He would start after school as he had a free period everyday as his last period, that way he would finish by 8pm in time for dinner.
Danny didn't really worry about ghost attacks of late, since stabilizing Dani, and Valerie starting to believe he wasn't some ectoplasmic scum, he could relax a bit more.
The second week, they gave Danny a different room, with wall-mounted speakers. They told him they wanted to see if he could still keep the Tulpa with him in spite of distracting stimuli.
The music was discordant, ugly and unsettling – nothing like Dumpty Humpty, and it made the process a little more difficult, but he managed to keep the phantom Tulpa nonetheless.
The next week they played even more unsettling music, punctuated with shrieks, feedback loops, what sounded like an old school modem dialing up, and guttural voices speaking some foreign language – a bit like the Ghost Zone. Danny just laughed it off – he was so used to the ambient sounds on the Ghost Zone that the added shrieks didn't faze him.
After about a month, Danny started to get bored. To liven things up, he started interacting with Phantom. They'd have conversations, or play rock-paper-scissors, or imagine Phantom casually tossing about an ecto-ball, or whatever caught their fancy.
Danny asked the researchers if his interaction with his Tulpa would adversely affect their study, but they encouraged it. So they played, and communicated, and that was fun for a while. And then it got a little strange, well, as strange as you can get while imagining a conversation with your ghost half.
Danny was telling Phantom about the first fight with Skulker one day, and the ghost corrected him. Danny said he was fighting an Ectopuss when Skulker attacked, and Phantom told him they were actually trying to capture the Box Ghost when they first met Skulker.
He thought about it for a second, and realized Phantom was right. It creeped Danny out, and after his shift that day, He talked to the researchers about it, swapping the fact that he was fighting ghosts as Phantom to discussing what meals his friends ordered at the Nasty Burger. "You're using the thought-form to access your subconscious," they explained. "You knew on some level that you were wrong, and you subconsciously corrected yourself."
What had been creepy was suddenly cool. Danny was talking to his subconscious in the guise of Phantom! It made sense; Phantom was his ghost half so what better visage than Phantom? It took some practice, but Danny found that he could question Phantom and access all sorts of memories.
He could make Phantom quote whole pages of books he'd read once, years before, or things he was taught and immediately forgot in class. It was awesome. Danny was thinking this could actually be useful in future tests and quizzes; he didn't have to study, he could just read over the material once and have Phantom tell him the answers.
It would save him a lot of time in his already overcrowded timetable filled with ghost fighting, hanging out with Sam and Tucker, keeping up appearances and sleep – that of which would be the thing Danny would choose to take over the unneeded study time - thanks to Phantom.
That was around the time Danny started "calling up" Phantom outside of the research center. Not often at first, the odd test here and there, but he was so used to imagining Phantom by now that it almost seemed odd to not see him. So whenever Danny was bored, he'd visualize Phantom.
Eventually he started doing it almost all the time. It was amusing to take Phantom along like an invisible friend – or a regular ghost.
Danny imagined Phantom when he was hanging out with Sam and Tucker, or around his parents, Danny even brought him along to a battle once. He didn't need to speak aloud to Phantom, so he was able to carry out conversations with him and no one was the wiser.
Danny found it kind of fun. Not only was Phantom a walking repository of everything he knew and everything he had forgotten, Phantom also seemed more in touch with Danny than he himself did at times. Phantom had an uncanny grasp of the minutiae of body language that Danny didn't even realize he was picking up on.
For example, he'd thought he was losing the fight between him and Plasmius - the fight he brought Phantom along on - but Phantom pointed out how Plasmius would favor dodging right, and leaning left before releasing an ecto-blast, and a bunch of other subtle clues he wasn't consciously picking up on. Danny listened, and let's just say that that the frootloop went home with more purple skin than blue.
By the time he'd been at the research center for four months, Phantom was hanging around constantly. The researchers approached Danny one day after his shift, and asked him if he'd stopped visualizing the Tulpa. He denied it, and they seemed pleased. He silently asked Phantom if he knew what prompted that, but he just shrugged it off.
So did Danny.
Danny withdrew a little from the world at that point. He was having trouble relating to people. It seemed to him that they were so confused and unsure of themselves, while he had a manifestation of himself to confer with. He found ghosts to be more simple and true to themselves more so than the humans.
It made socializing awkward.
Nobody else seemed aware of the reasons behind their actions, why some things made them mad and others made them laugh. They didn't know what moved them. But Danny did – or at least, he could ask Phantom and get an answer.
Tucker confronted him one weekend when Danny's parents were out. He pounded at the door of Fentonworks until Danny answered it, and came in fuming and shouting up a storm. "You haven't answered when I called you in weeks, Danny!" He yelled. "What's your problem?"
Danny was about to apologize to him, and probably would have offered to hit the Nasty Burger with him, but Phantom grew suddenly furious. "Hit him," he said, and before Danny knew what he was doing, he had.
He heard Tucker's nose break. He fell to the floor and came up swinging, and they beat each other up and down Fentonworks.
Danny was more furious then than he had ever been; even when he saw Vlad flirt with his mom and make fun of his dad at times, and he was not merciful. Danny knocked him to the ground and gave him two savage kicks to the ribs, and that was when he fled, hunched over and sobbing.
Sam visited him a few minutes later after catching Tucker at her house crying. She accused Danny of being worse than Dan since he still had his humanity. Danny retorted that Tucker was the one that instigated it to which Sam simply said, "You've changed Danny" and left.
Phantom was grinning the entire time.
They spent the night crowing about Danny's victory and sneering over how badly he'd beaten Tucker and Sam's bias actions against him. It wasn't until the next morning, when Danny's parents asked about the black eye and cut lip, that he remembered what had set him off.
Phantom was the one who'd grown furious, not Danny. He'd been feeling guilty and a little ashamed, but Phantom had goaded him into a vicious fight with a concerned friend and pushing away the girl he had known just as long. Phantom was present, of course, and knew Danny's thoughts. "You don't need them anymore. You don't need anyone else," Phantom told him, and he felt his skin crawl.
He told his parents it was just a bully at school he happened to come across yesterday and that everything was fine. Danny explained his strange behavior to the researchers who employed him, but they just laughed it off. "You can't be scared of something that you're imagining," one told him.
Phantom stood beside him, and nodded his head, then smirked at Danny.
Danny tried to take their words to heart, but over the next few days he found himself growing more and more anxious around Phantom, and it seemed that he was changing. He looked taller, and more menacing.
His eyes twinkled with mischief and had – at times – seemed almost… Red. Danny saw malice in his constant smile, 'no amount of money is worth losing my mind over' he decided, 'I don't want to be a frootloop like Plasmius'. If Phantom was out of control, Danny would put him down.
Danny was so used to him at that point that visualizing Phantom was an automatic process, so he started trying his damnedest to not visualize him. It took a few days, but it started to work somewhat. Danny could get rid of him for hours at a time. But every time he came back, he seemed worse.
His skin seemed greener, his teeth more pointed. He hissed, gibbered, threatened and swore. The discordant music Danny had been listening to for months seemed to accompany him everywhere. Even when he was at home – he'd relax and slip up, no longer concentrating on not seeing him, and there he'd be, and that howling noise with him.
Danny was still visiting the research center and spending his six hours there. He needed the money, and thought they weren't aware that he was now actively not visualizing his Tulpa.
He was wrong.
After Danny's shift one day, about five and a half months in, two impressively built men grabbed and restrained him, and someone in a lab coat jabbed a hypodermic needle into him. The attack took him by complete surprise he had no time to use his ghost powers to escape.
Danny woke up from his stupor back in the room, strapped into the bed, music blaring, with Phantom standing over him cackling. He hardly looked human anymore.
His features were twisted. His eyes blood red and seemed to be rimmed black like he hadn't slept in a long time. He was much taller than Danny, and his build was solid and strong looking. His hands were twisted; the fingernails were like talons. He was, in short, fucking terrifying, basically because he was a spitting image of Dan; his evil future self.
He tried to will him away, but he just couldn't seem to concentrate. Phan-no, Dan chuckled, and tapped the IV in his arm. Danny thrashed in his restraints as best he could, but could hardly move at all. He must have been too drugged up or the drugs were affecting his ghost powers somehow. Did they know about his halfa status?
No.
Impossible.
There was no way they found out, only four people knew he was a halfa and would never tell; one for the reason of self preservation and the other three out of loyalty.
"They're pumping you full of the good shit, I think. How's the mind Danny-boy? All fuzzy?" He leaned closer and closer as he spoke. Danny gagged; his breath smelt like spoiled meat and the closer proximity gave him an excellent view of Dan's fangs and forked tongue.
He tried to focus, but couldn't banish him.
The next few weeks were terrible. Every so often, someone in a doctor's coat would come in and inject Danny with something, or force-feed him a pill. Could these people be secretly working for the GiW, or Vlad?
They kept him dizzy and unfocused, and sometimes left him hallucinating or delusional. His thought form was still present, constantly mocking. Dan interacted with, or perhaps caused, Danny's delusions. He hallucinated that his parents were there, pointing ecto-guns at him, denying that he is their son, and then Dan blasted them and their blood showered him. It was so real that he could taste it.
The doctors never spoke to Danny. He begged at times, screamed, hurled invectives, demanded answers. They never spoke to him. They may have talked to Dan, Danny's personal monster. He was not sure.
He was so doped and confused that it may have just been more delusion, but he remembers them talking with the monster. He grew convinced that Dan was the real one, and he was the thought form – the Tulpa. Dan encouraged that line of thought at times, mocked Danny at others.
Another thing that Danny prayed was a delusion: Dan could touch him. More than that, he could hurt him. He'd poke and prod at Danny if he felt he wasn't paying enough attention to him.
Once Dan grabbed Danny's testicles and squeezed until Danny told him that he loved him. Another time, he slashed Danny's forearm with one of his talons. Danny still has the scar – most days he can convince himself that he got injured in a ghost fight, most likely against Skulker or Plasmius, and just hallucinated that he was responsible.
Most days.
Then one day, while he was telling Danny a story about how he was going to gut everyone he loved, starting with their lovely sister Jazzy, he paused. A querulous look crossed his face, and reached out and touched Danny's head. Like his mom used to when he was feverish. He stayed still for a long moment, and then smiled. "All thoughts are creative," Dan told him. Then he flew out through the ceiling.
Three hours later, Danny was given an injection, and passed out. He awoke unrestrained. Shaking, he made his way to the door and found it unlocked. He walked out into the empty hallway, and then ran. He stumbled more than once, but he made it down the stairs and out into the lot behind the building. There, he collapsed, weeping like a little kid.
He knew he had to keep moving, but he couldn't manage it. He still couldn't reach his ghost powers; the drug still lingered in his system.
Danny got home eventually – he didn't remember how. His parents weren't there; they must be out looking for him. Had they been looking the entire time?
He locked his bedroom door, and shoved a dresser against it, took a long shower, and slept for a day and a half. Nobody came for him in the night, and nobody came the next day, or the one after that. It was over. He'd spent a week locked in that room, but it had felt like a century.
His parents found him in his room when they grew suspicious of sound emanating from it. He told them most of what happened; that they had kid-napped him and experimented on him to the point of his delusion.
They contacted the police straight away.
The police didn't find anything. The research center was empty when they searched it. The paper trail fell apart. The names he'd given them were aliases. Even the money he'd received was apparently untraceable.
Danny recovered as much as one could. He didn't leave the house much, and he has panic attacks when he does. The Ghost Zone unnerves him now, when he hears the ambience of the Zone he feels as if someone is watching him.
He cries a lot.
He doesn't sleep much, and his nightmares are terrible. 'It's over', he tells himself. 'I survived'.
He uses the concentration those bastards taught him to convince himself. It works, sometimes.
Not today, though. Three days ago, Danny's family got a phone call from the University Jazz was attending. There's been a tragedy. Jazz was the latest victim in a spree of killings, the police say. The perpetrator mugs his victims, and then guts them.
The funeral was this afternoon. It was as lovely a service as a funeral can be, he supposed. Danny was a little distracted, though. All he could hear was music coming from somewhere distant. Discordant, unsettling stuff, that sounds like feedback, and shrieking, and a modem dialing up. Like the Ghost Zone! He still hears it – a little louder now.