Disclaimer: I do not own 'Danny Phantom' or any of the characters, concepts etc. Those are owned by Butch Hartman/Nickelodeon, I believe. I make no claim to anything in this story, it is a perspective with hypothetical scenarios added in.
[AN: Welcome all to Knife's Edge, formerly titled 'Pre-emptive Strike'.
This is my updated and edited version of that story, and while it's not hugely different, it flows a bit better and the giant author's notes should be largely gone.
This is the first in a series of Danny Phantom fics that all follow on from this alteration to the Timeline, so if you enjoy this one then please check them out, a guide can be found on my profile. the only point you may need to know is that I imagine the characters to be about 2 years older than in the show, but that's a personal choice and can largely be ignored. /AN]
Knife's Edge
Ch1: Inevitability
"You don't get it do you? I'm still here, I still exist, which means youstill turn into me!"
Those words had haunted Danny's sleeps for weeks after his fateful encounter with 'Dan', his alternate future self. The destruction that that twisted creature had wrought and the complete lack of empathy, sympathy, even humanity he had shown had been, in a word, horrific. And the power…
That was the most disturbing, terrifying part, because that power was inside Danny; the Ghostly Wail had proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But he knew why he had turned into Dan in that alternate timeline. The loss of those few individuals he cared deeply about had so badly damaged his alternate self that he had purged his humanity just to make the pain go away; so he resolved to never let that happen.
At first he had flat-out refused to let Sam, Tucker or Jazz help with Ghost fighting in any way, but that plan didn't last long (no one can stand in the way of a determined Sam Manson) so he focused on ensuring their safety during a fight by whatever means he could think of.
And it worked; as the weeks and months went by, the threat of Danny repeating his fall into Dark Dan diminished in his mind until it was little more than a peripheral concern, always at the back of his mind but no longer the all-consuming fear it was at first.
Until a week ago.
Two things happened in that week that reawakened that specific fear and brought it back stronger than ever.
The first was an injury Sam sustained during a routine fight with Skulker. A small piece of shrapnel from one of his many missiles had nicked her inner thigh as she tried to throw herself behind cover. The wound itself was superficial, a band-aid was more than sufficient for it, but both Danny and Sam knew that it had come dangerously close to slicing into her Femoral Artery; if it had of hit a centimetre to the right and at a slightly higher velocity than it did, Sam might have bled out before Danny could finish fighting Skulker, let alone get her to a hospital.
Of course she just brushed away his concerns with an irritated glare and proceeded to shake the Thermos like a maraca all the way back to FentonWorks. But that incident rattled him badly, to think that Sam of all people had been that close to death… he couldn't bear to think of losing her.
His quite-a-bit-more-than-a-crush on his best friend was the worst kept secret in Amity Park, which was good because it distracted everyone from his rather more successfully kept one (you know, the whole 'Half-Ghost' Town Hero/Public Enemy #1 thing), but it meant that losing her would be a crushing blow him; he didn't even want to contemplate what he would do if something that terrible happened; although from what he saw of the possible future that Dan had created, he had a pretty good idea.
His surprise and fear didn't stem so much from the fact that she was in danger (it was far from the first time she had been in mortal peril; the Freakshow incident, for example). It was the fact that all it would take was a (un?)lucky shot for a tiny piece of otherwise harmless shrapnel to critically injure her or one of his other friends or family members. Ecto-blasts, sharp claws, fire-breathing ghost dragons, those were all obvious threats that Danny could see and respond to before any harm befell his friends, but there was simply no way he could protect them from every piece of shrapnel or stray discharge of energy during the mayhem of a fight; and that fact was a painful and terrifying wake-up call for him.
The second incident seemed determined to ram home his sudden realisation of human frailty.
Tucker's dad had been driving home one day in the rain when the pickup truck in front of him stopped suddenly. Mr Foley tried to brake but the tires aquaplaned and he ended up skidding into the back of the vehicle. No one was injured in the minor accident, but a 4m piece of steel rebar had come loose in the impact and sailed straight through the Foley's car's front windscreen, effectively impaling the passenger seat. If anyone had been in that seat, the results would not have been pretty.
Once again, it was a disturbing reminder to Danny that he couldn't protect all of the people he loved all of the time and that there was danger in common, everyday activities; not just fighting ghosts.
It was then that Danny realised just how easy it was for everyone he cared about to be taken away from him despite his best efforts.
The Nightmares started again that night.
Sam was getting (more) concerned about Danny. He had been even more tired than usual the last few days and he was sporting more and more injuries, though he claimed there weren't any more ghosts than usual to deal with. The worst part was, it all seemed to start after that stupid piece of shrapnel hit her.
Of course she knew how close that small shard of painfully hot and pointy metal had come to puncturing her femoral artery but she had really hoped that Danny hadn't realised it; his tendency to obsess over her safety could verge on smothering at times, not that she didn't enjoy the attention from her best friend/love of her admittedly short life.
But the hovering, paranoid way he was acting afterwards made her think that he most certainly had noticed (of course he wouldn't be clueless about something like the position of major blood vessels in the human body! Just about his best friend desperately crushing on him!).
She just marked it down as a bad week for him (he had those a lot), or at least she did until she helped him out with another of his fights with Skulker.
He wasn't fighting like the Danny she knew; gone were the witty remarks and biting retorts that normally featured as a sound track to his more routine fights, and Skulker's usual array of insults and challenges were met with stony silence. The nonchalance he normally exuded in these fights was also gone, replaced with dull, unfeeling apathy. He was being careless too, leaving himself open to attacks, opportunities that Skulker gladly took, but Danny just took the hits and continued fighting, pummelling the exo-suited ghost to a far greater extent than usual.
By the end of it he was ragged and bloody, with a particularly deep and painful-looking gash that ran across his chest already leaking a worrying amount of his ectoplasm-coated blood. And when the fight was over the bags under his eyes had grown darker than she had thought humanly possible; saying he looked listless wouldn't even begin to cover it.
Sam desperately wanted to ask what was wrong but he just picked up the Thermos and flew back to his home to deposit the rather beaten ghost back in the Ghost Zone, leaving Sam alone with her thoughts and her fear for her best friend's health.
Danny was not in a good way at the moment.
He was distracted by the sudden realisation of just how fragile the lives of his friends were and how devastating their loss would be to him (and by extension, the world).
This brought on the Nightmares; reliving the explosion of the Nasty Burger, visions of the wasteland future Dan, and, by extension, himself, had created; and worst of all, seeing himself in Dan's place, revelling in the destruction he could create with the power locked inside him. He would wake up from those episodes sweating profusely and invariably in his Phantom form. After a couple of nights of this he just gave up on sleep, patrolling the streets all night.
This complete lack of sleep meant that he was sustaining more and more injuries after every fight and his body just wasn't healing them as quickly as it normally did, as most of his spare energy was being diverted to keeping his cells functioning without a proper rest period. As a result, the various wounds were starting to compound rapidly. This only distracted him more and made him long for sleep, which of course only exacerbated the problem. It was a truly vicious cycle.
That last fight with Skulker had taken a lot out of him and he really wasn't sure how much he had left to give. He wasn't even feeling most of his injuries anymore; they had long since faded into background noise along with his body's cries for rest.
What he needed was a way to deal with Dan, once and for all, a way to ensure He could never happen, that the future he had seen could never happen. And after a couple of days thinking over this problem and battling past his fatigue, he found a solution.
A solution formed from a cold, disconnected logic that scared him almost as much as Dan did.
"You don't get it do you? I'm still here, I still exist, which means youstill turn into me!"
All of this time he had been so focused on stopping Dan that he hadn't noticed the most effective solution to the problem. He had been so desperate to separate himself from Dan that he had begun to view him as a separate entity entirely, all of his concern being on stopping Dan, the symptom, rather than dealing with the cause.
Dan was right, Danny turned in to Dan. As such, there was only one way to truly stop Dan from ever existing, one way to truly protect the world and everyone he cared about. Because the truth of the matter was that he wasn't fighting Dan, he was fighting himself, an internal struggle that he couldn't be certain he would prevail in.
In hindsight, perhaps he had already subconsciously come to that conclusion; it would certainly explain why he was all but allowing the ghosts he fought to attack him with impunity.
Only one course of action remained, the same course of action the Observants had originally charged Clockwork with; to permanently remove the threat of Dan Phantom, Danny Fenton/Phantom had to die.
It didn't take Sam long to come to a conclusion after Danny left.
Someone needed to talk to him, soon. This was more than an off week for him; Sam couldn't place exactly why but she knew something was terribly wrong with him and that this time it wasn't just his usual lack of sleep.
Normally psych stuff would be Jazz's job, but since she was snowed under with college assignments, Sam knew that ensuring Danny's continued mental wellbeing fell to her. As such, she stood up from the spot on the grass where she had sat in contemplation for the past half-an-hour, dusted herself off, and began the short walk to his house.
He would talk to her, one way or the other.