The Baring of Teeth
I am in way over my head.
She took a deep, steady breath, and continued to stare at the manila folder at her fingertips. It was there that a white paper laid glaring at her under the fluorescent lights. Biting her lip, she drummed her fingers anxiously as she read and reread the entailment. Her nerves were erratic, light and fluttering, as they butterflied within her stomach and sent tingles that winded along her spine. She did her best to ignore the mirrored, one-way viewing window her overseers were watching her from.
The lights flickered. Soon after, the door behind her opened as the subject was lead roughly along the outskirts of the room. She heard the resounding jangle of his heavy chains. There were grunts as the guard dragged and deposited the subject into the adjacent chair, where he now sat with his ebony locks of hair hiding his face. She could see the deep gashes at his wrists where the chains dug raw into sensitive skin. Blood was pooling, mostly red but tinged with greenish traces of ectoplasm. He refused to look at her.
Steeling herself, Sam cleared her throat.
During the past few weeks, Amity Park had been in an uproar. The detainment of the enigma ghost, Danny Phantom, coupled with the realization that he was actually somewhat human, had left the world as she knew in absolute chaos. Bystanders became protesters, seemingly overnight, while others became rabid in their quest for persecution. Though normally a divided body, eighty-five percent of Amity's citizens had called for his blood, because what the world could not understand also terrified it.
However, there were a small percentage of people empathetic towards him, and they challenged for an attempt at his reformation to be made. It was Sam, one of the louder voices of their group, who demanded he be given a chance to experience human rights. If his humanity could be proven, then he could be reconditioned, and possibly integrated into society.
Or reintegrated. They hardly knew a thing about him. For all Sam knew, he could very well have once been a citizen.
Her mouth was set in a grim line as she watched him pick with unkempt fingernails at dried blots of blood around his cuffs. He picked so hard that he drew fresh blood, and his expression became one of wonder as his finger slid unceremoniously into the slick darkness of it. Sam watched with furrowed brows as he brought his hand close to his face for examination, twisting it around so the blood rolled tear-like down to his wrist.
"So, Danny," she began in her softest voice, as if she were talking to an injured dog. Danny didn't look at her, nor did he make any inclination that he'd heard her. She continued anyway, "how are you feeling today?"
The blood from Danny's wrist dripped and pooled, red freckles congregating against the steel table that was between him and Sam. Ectoplasm pulsated within the redness of it, surging with power until it succeeded in its quest for domination. Now green, the puddle began to emit smoke as it burned acidly into the metal. It was then that Danny's blue eyes coldly met hers.
Sam swallowed hard and met his stare, trying her best to remain unperturbed by the animalistic fury that burned brighter than fire in his gaze. Not even when Danny's eyes began to swim with green did she look away, nor did she jump when the cuffs at his wrists sent an electric surge through his body in response. Danny grunted in agony. He braced himself against the back of his chair, teeth gnashed together as he fought through a fit of convulsions.
When his eyes met hers again a few moments later, they were no longer laced with green. His body now shook with tremors and aftershock.
Sam took another deep breath. Then she told him, "If you stop fighting it'll hurt less."
He glared up at her from under his brows, but otherwise did not respond.
After the human psychologists failed, the small percentage of people empathetic towards him had appealed for a second, more unorthodox attempt at his reformation. The judge begrudgingly obliged (much to the enragement of the general public), and somehow the case had been presented to her. Sam, the animal rehabilitator. Reformer of all things vicious and snarling.
The consensus had been: what could be more malicious than Danny Phantom himself?
The Danny Phantom that is supposedly more Danny than Phantom, Sam added in her head, watching him.
Someone must have moved in the viewing room. She knew this because Danny's head whirled with searching eyes towards the mirror. His expression reminded her of a caged animal being taunted from behind steel bars. When Sam made eye contact with him in the reflective surface, she offered him her warmest smile. He balked at the sight and sneered at her. And then, so low that she barely heard it, a low growl began emanating from his chest.
Sam sighed. Whatever this creature was, he would never be human, no matter how convincing his appearance and biology. She had been working with him every day for weeks now, trying in vain to draw the human characteristics away from the ghostly ones, to establish a wall that he could use for differentiation. But no matter what she did or how hard she tried, nothing seemed to be working with him.
In a way, she understood her inability to reach him. People never made sense to her, either, which is why she spent the majority of her time rehabilitating animals. Abused dogs and feral cats she could handle, but this . . .? She was at a loss, utterly confounded and plagued with the bitter aftertaste of failure. She was becoming desperate, now that his time was coming to a close. If she didn't make significant progress with him soon, he would be deemed inhuman by the court, and immediately subjected to the perils of scientific analysis and ripped apart, molecule by molecule.
Sam cringed at the thought. She wasn't much of a people person, but even she couldn't help but be intrigued by the human mystery that was Danny Phantom. Never before had there been a ghost capable of maintaining a human form. But it was more than that, wasn't it? Phantom, or Danny—or whoever he was—was more than just a physical manifestation, hewas organic. Sentient, and alive.
It was simply impossible.
She began absentmindedly fingering the manila folder, her thumb flipping through its contents. Danny surprised her when he began watching her fingers with rapt attention. She arched an eyebrow at him, and folded the corners of the papers forward so they were perpendicular with the table. Danny's head cocked to the side. His own fingers began to twitch spastically from where they rested on his arms.
Sam felt a smile pull at her lips. Interesting, she thought.
With as much nonchalance as she could muster, she pushed the manila folder across the table towards him. Danny's eyes flashed to hers, narrowed and wary, but his hesitation was only brief. He snatched the folder from the tabletop and brought it close to his face for inspection. Sam blinked, amazed by the quickness of his motion, her human brain barely registering the action aside from the blur of his movement.
Danny remained unaware of her gaping eyes now that his attention was consumed with the bundle of papers in his grasp. He began tearing them apart. Sam watched on with a piqued curiosity, relieved for the redirection of his searing gaze. Never had she seen him this invested in anything before (save for his rationed food at mealtime.) It was oddly fascinating.
He began arranging each of the papers before him in a patchwork formation, and Sam noticed as his blue eyes began skimming over each of the documents. Almost as if he was reading them.
A new thought caused her brows to furrow. Can he read? Aside from being Amity Park's "Public Enemy #1," she really knew nothing about him. The unveiling of the infamous Phantom's human side had been monumental for the citizens of Amity, so much so that the implications of his humanity had been completely disregarded. They just assumed he had no concept of social etiquette, moral compass, or had any sort of traditional schooling in his past. When his fingerprints didn't register in any of the databases, they'd assumed he knew nothing—was nothing.
Sam chewed on her bottom lip. She watched Danny's eyes, closely following their movements as they flitted over lines of print on the paperwork. It was as if he was drinking the information in, and now a small pucker of concentration was forming between his brows. She waited until his eyes slid over the document containing his description and psychological profile, and then she saw it.
It was a movement so miniscule that if she hadn't been paying attention she would have missed it. It was the small, telltale movement of his brows and the twitching corner of his left eye. She noted the sudden rigidity of his posture, right before his sky blue eyes flickered for the second time over a line of print that was particularly interesting. Sam allowed her gaze to drift from his face to the paper before him. Then, as her lavender eyes skimmed over the words of Danny's interest, her calm façade shattered.
"PHANTOM MENACE STRIKES AGAIN," was the title, a snapshot of a news article recently procured from Amity Daily. The ominous heading led into an equally disturbing article that described the murders of various townspeople, accentuated by the author's plea for someone—anyone—to stop the spree of killings wrought by Amity's ghostly menace. Phantom.
Sam's heart leapt to her throat where it began pounding incessantly. Somehow sensing her apprehension, Danny's eyes slowly met hers and they were missing the hostility she'd come to expect from him. The icy blue now churned with something she didn't recognize.
They stared at each other, long enough for a cold understanding to settle within Sam. "You can read," she stated. What else didn't she know about him? What else was he hiding?
Forgone was the primitive set of his posture as he straightened in his chair. His fingers were delving into the slickness of his blood again, frantically picking at wounds, both old and new. He didn't look away from her accusing stare, nor did he make any attempt to reply to her. Blood and ectoplasm rolled from his wrist, beading on the papers and disintegrating them in puffs of smoke. There was a hissing noise as the ectoplasm seeped into the metal table below.
Sam didn't have to hear his voice to understand him. Years of working with and reforming abused animals had taught her how to look beyond what was on the surface. In Danny, she saw a caged, fighting dog that had been removed from its pit and shown its first lights of kindness. But kindness was not so easily accepted by a creature accustomed to loathing and hate. She recognized immediately in him the fear that was created in its wake—the fear of what is not understood.
"Danny," she whispered.
Danny jumped at the sound of his name. His jaw began working relentlessly as his eyes flitted between her and his hands.
She said his name again. "Danny."
Emotions flickered across his face, reminding her of a candle subjected to a burst of wind. The firelight of his eyes darkened, and then suddenly they were swimming with the faintest bouts of ectoplasmic green. Sam watched in amazement as Danny once again met her stare, but this time his brows were arched in confusion. He leaned forward, cocking his head to the side and looked at her as if he had finally noticed her for the first time.
So used to his hostile, unbroken silence, Sam nearly jumped ten feet in the air when he uttered a single word: "Phantom."
She'd heard his voice before—all of Amity had, in fact. There was no way to disguise the voice of the menace of her town, infamous to all who knew of him. What had astonished her was the raspy, broken sound of it. Even though malice had saturated every syllable, it was strange to her how deceivingly normal it had sounded. Gone was reverberating, spectral quality of it, now replaced with something much more . . . human.
Sam found herself attempting in vain to quell an ambush of butterflies in her stomach. She took a moment to find her words. "You don't want to be called Danny?"
Shifting in his seat so he leaned away from her, Danny's eyes narrowed. He slipped into his familiar glare, lowering his head so shadows danced along the planes of his face. He became a growling and suspicious Rottweiler, with hunched shoulders and quivering muscles that were ready to jump into an attack at any moment. She watched how he drew himself in, his eyes now burning bright and ferocious. All that was missing was the baring of teeth.
"Why do you want to be called Phantom?"
Not expecting him to answer so readily, she was surprised when he said, "It's what I am."
What not Who, she noted. "Is it?"
"You tell me."
She was sure the Psychs and Para-un-norms (as she so eloquently referred to the oddball group of professionals she'd had the absolute pleasure to be working with lately) were going nuts in the other room, noses probably buried in pads of paper and brows furrowed with theory. Danny's behavior was irregular, even for him.
Sam herself was more than a little disconcerted. A nervous fear was gnawing at the base of her skull. He was defenseless, with his hands bound by chains laced with ectoranium, and yet she still felt as if she was staring into the eyes of a starving, rabid wolf. Her eyes flickered towards the mirror of the viewing room, wondering if the guards were ready to subdue him if needed.
However, instead of lashing, Danny merely slid one of the documents towards her. Sam took it from him with shaking fingers. Her eyes widened as she realized he had handed her some of the photocopies of various newspaper clippings. She skimmed over them, noting that each article revolved around either murder or instances of property destruction. One of the articles contained a rare snapshot of Phantom, and Sam had to immediately suppress the shudder that tickled at her shoulders. Even through the blankness of newspaper she could feel Phantom's searing gaze.
"This wasn't you," Sam said with confidence she didn't have.
Danny's glare lightened into indignant haughtiness as he leaned backwards, heaving a sigh. His palms were flat against the table, causing a strange combination of blood and ectoplasm to roll along the curvature of his wrist, pooling and hissing as it dribbled onto the tabletop. The scarred metal where the ectoplasm didn't completely break through was oxidizing, now a bright, rusty orange.
"We have a theory," Sam said.
Danny's look was blank, bored even. He waited.
"Somehow you and Phantom are linked. He's controlling you like a marionette. You're being possessed."
He laughed at that. Actually laughed. Or at least that's what it sounded like. The graveled, incensed sound that reverberated from his chest sounded like a laugh, in a twisted sort of way. But then he was smiling at her, enigmatically, and it caused Sam's nervousness to begin pawing at her calves. She wanted to run. She wanted away from this predatory, inhuman creature that was grinning at her, completely Cheshire. She found herself missing his glare. Glaring was predictable and safe.
"Is that what they're saying about me now?" he asked, his dark mirth causing his eyes to dance. There was a flash of green. Another shock, and another fit of convulsions that left him panting. But the grin was still there, unwavering.
Sam went on the defensive. "We're just trying to help you, Danny."
"Don't call me that."
"Why not, it's your name, isn't it?"
"Nobody cared to call me that until I took off the mask."
Sam hesitated at that. So he was capable of metaphorical speech, then?
"What do you mean by that? What mask?"
If he heard her, he didn't show it. She noticed immediately as he retreated within himself. The change in his posture was instant: the hunching of shoulders, the figurative raising of hackles and the baring of teeth. He was shutting her out, completely and effectively. Their conversation was over.
For nearly an hour she tried rile him out of his silence, but the only sound he made thereafter was an imperceptible grunt when the guard finally returned to drag him away.
A/N: Hey! Welcome to whatever...this is. I dunno. It's a writing experiment I thought I'd try posting. I don't know if I'll continue it or not. Right now it's just standalone. A bit different from Epiphantos. Heh. I realize that both the timeline and leading events to this story are rather vague. That's the point. Fill in the blanks yourself. As of right now, I have no intention of continuing it, unless you guys really want me to. I just don't want this taking up space on my computer anymore. It's been there forever.
The quote "Nobody cared to call me that until I took of the mask" was totally inspired by the Dark Knight Rises movie. Hellz yeah!
Thanks for reading!
-Roar