TRIGGER WARNING: Past abusive relationships.
0o0o0
The wishing ghost floats in an empty haunt.
"The ghost child," Desiree murmurs in wonder, scarlet eyes tracing his flaming hair and bloody gaze. She tilts her head in confusion as she watches from her perch, confident that he cannot see her.
The Sultan's Palace, it used to be called. Her own place of dwelling, tucked into the Ghost Zone, proud and glittering. It is her prison now, for she cannot bear to leave it. She travels its abandoned halls alone.
"I know you're there," he says, and she inhales sharply as their eyes meet. His voice is deeper, his gaze harder. "You can't hide from me."
There's no point in pretending, so she reveals herself. She may be curious, but she is careful as well. Her defenses are up, and her poise is cautious. He is different, she can tell, not just in appearance, but in his actions as well. It's apparent in the way he holds himself, the way his eyes bore into her as it never has before. His aura gleams differently: his ghostly core pulsing bright red where it used to be white.
No words are spoken for a long time as they take each other in. Desiree speaks first. "What happened to you?" It's a simple, innocent question, but the returning grin is feral and deadly.
She laughs at the irony. The wishing ghost wishing for days past?
His irises gleam brightly. "I'm better now," he whispers. "I'm stronger. I'm not held down by weakness anymore." He grins, teeth bare. "I'm free."
He is gone, and she is all that is left. She is what remains of a broken promise, and she is cursed by the weight that it brings.
"Free?" she questions. "How?"
He has abandoned her, and she is angry.
"It's gone."
And that's all she needs to understand. A diminutive smirk lifts the corners of her mouth as she looks down at him. "I see."
He has destroyed the passage into the human world, and any chance that she would ever feel him again, hear the baritone of his voice, see his muscles coil and move in a way she had never seen before on any being and would likely never see again.
"It's wonderful, isn't it?"
He nods, a small ray of his boyishness showing through, and she almost laughs. "It's amazing," he agrees. He is silent for a moment, weighing his words. "I killed him. Both of them." The way he says it shows the pride in his voice, and she shivers quietly.
She hates him irrevocably and unconditionally.
"I could kill you right now," he says, and his hands begin to glow. "I could blow that pretty head off your shoulders. You used to hurt me." He speaks as if he's surprised that anyone could have ever beaten him, that they could have once dared to cause him pain.
She shrugs. "But that's not you anymore, is it? We understand each other now."
He grins, revealing razor-sharp fangs, and the green in his palms die down. "Obviously."
The halls are empty, and she is alone. Yet still she floats, and she waits, hungry for the wish that would summon her back.
It is years later, and he has matched her in height. He traces the line of her jaw, and she leans into his hand, pressing her palm onto the symbol on his jumpsuit that once was a symbol for justice and now stands as a precursor for death and destruction.
His hand is on her waist, and her dark hair billows around them. They move in step, a silent waltz. The human world lies in waste around them, and she laughs.
Wishes continue to alight on her from afar. 'I wish Phantom hadn't destroyed my home' and 'I wish Daddy would come back from the Ghost War' and 'I wish everything could go back to what it was before.' Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. That's all anyone can talk about, can even think about.
"I wish that we could be together always." It is cliché, yet Desiree hums it anyway. Phantom shoots her quirking smile, but it quickly falls. She pays it no mind.
Her hands clench and unclench at her sides, unused energy bubbling in her veins. She was a fool, a stupid fool, as much as a fool as she had been when she was human.
"I wish I could destroy that stupid town once and for all. I wish it could drown in its own blood. I wish that their screams to be heard from miles around. I wish I could burn it to ash, then burn it all again."
Desiree flinches slightly. She hates when Phantom gets like this. It's happening more and more often nowadays, always coinciding with his sudden and ever-lengthening disappearances. Nonetheless, she whispers, "So you have wished it, so it will be."
A corner of his mouth lifts up in a smirk. "Good."
Something makes her lift her head slowly. She can hear mental wishes as well as verbal ones, and one pushes itself into her mind.
'I wish I could stop this. I need to stop this.'
Her breath catches.
It's the Ghost Boy.
The Ghost Zone is in shambles, and Desiree is in the eye of the storm. Phantom destroys ghostly haunts and their occupants in waves, using that new power of his, the power that she helped him gain. He screams, and the fabric of her world starts to unravel, leaving the Ghost Zone a barren wasteland.
He leers at her, pulling her into a kiss as he admires his handiwork. "Just like we wanted, isn't it?" he says into her neck.
She trembles. "Get away from me."
For the first time in almost 2 years, the wishing ghost leaves her haunt, and she feels like she leaves a piece of her dead soul behind with it. She steels herself, following the echoes of the wish. It isn't long before screams reach her, and she stops to watch the scene from afar, eyes wide.
The Ghost Boy is suspended and tied up, emerald eyes fearful and confused. "Wait! Wait! You have to listen to me!"
His cries go unheard of as the Box Ghost shoots him back towards Ember, who catches him in a deafening blast that makes Desiree wince. Between the tight ropes of his binding, she can see that faint edges of a hero's logo.
The Ghost Zone convulses, and she flees. She can feel a terrible and empty dread spread in her core. The entrance to the Human World is being shredded, never to be used again. Desiree ignores the ruins around her and finds herself in her haunt. She leans against its familiar walls, chest heaving with the movements of gasps she has no need to take. She squeezes her eyes shut.
An odd feeling comes over her. It's Phantom, but not Phantom. This is the child who protected that little town as if it were his obsession. She recognizes him, even after all this time. She always knew the Ghost Boy was a bit of a dunce, but how exactly had he managed to misplace himself by ten years?
She continues to watch as the Ghost Boy unleashes that power again, that Ghostly Wail, Phantom had called it. Interesting: she was the one to have granted him that power in the first place, so how could he, little Danny Phantom, have gotten it?
Her former, deranged friends reel back, scattered by the blow. The Ghost Boy takes a moment to recover before taking flight once more, freed from his bonds. Desiree begins to follow silently.
"We could have had everything," he growls, and she shudders. "We did have everything! Everything I did was for us!"
She shakes her head quietly. "No," she says, voice intense in a way it has not been for ages. "Everything you did was for you. I just happened to be in the way."
His irises blaze a sickly neon with anger. "Ungrateful witch."
She opens her eyes once more, and the illusion vanishes.
"You again?"
Desiree pauses at the disgusted voice, turning away from the Ghost Boy's quickly retreating form to face the angry woman. Blue fiery hair lashes in anger.
"You dare show your face again here? You dare show your face to me?!"
"Ember," Desiree greets, surprised by her own calm.
"Oh, don't you just 'Ember' me," Ember spits. "You did this to me!" She gestures to herself in disgust. "You did this to all of us! How stupid are you to come crawling back to us?"
Desiree clenches her fists in repressed anger. "I was a fool, Ember, but you have to understand-"
Ember laughs incredulously. "A fool? That's all? You think you can say, 'Forgive me everyone, I made an oopsie,' and it'll all be okay?" Ember is visibly shaking with fury. "I TRUSTED YOU, DESIREE! I THOUGHT YOU WERE THE SISTER I NEVER HAD!" She takes a gasping breath. "I thought you were my friend."
Desiree flinches back. "Ember, I ... I never ... I didn't think ..."
"Of course, you didn't think," Ember replies bitterly. "You were too busy being a lovesick servant to think. By the way, how is he? Your boyfriend? Phant-?"
Desiree lunges before Ember can finish, unleashed energy crackling as she shoves Ember away, causing the overweight ghost to tumble backwards. "You think he didn't hurt me too?!" she asks, enraged. "You think that he didn't leave me for waste as soon as I proved not useful enough for him?"
Ember glares back at her, the smallest hint of a smirk playing at the corner her lips. "Of course, he hurt you, Desiree. And you know what? You deserved it. You deserved all of it."
Desiree recoils in horror but says nothing to retaliate. Instead she turns away, relieved that can still see the Ghost Boy in the distance, disappearing behind a purple ball of some sort, a relic of some long-forgotten human game.
Ember follows her gaze. "Oh, him," she mutters. "Danny Phantom, back again. Heard he's tryin' to stop this reality from happening. Idiot. We should just kill him before he has the chance to do anything."
Desiree doesn't look at her. "Stop ... this?"
Ember snickers. "Going to go stop him, eh? Get back on your boyfriend's good side? If he ever even had one."
Desiree is careful to keep her voice neutral as she starts to speed off towards the lair Danny Phantom has disappeared into. "Goodbye, Ember."
He terrorizes her dreams and her memories relentlessly. She sees their tender moments together overlaid with the destruction that he – she – caused. She sees the betrayal and rage in those who she may once have considered friends, yet she does nothing to stop it.
It is during these times that she realizes that she only hates one thing above him.
When Desiree arrives, she almost fears that she is too late.
The human Plasmius appears to be trying to kill the Ghost Child, eyes wild and deranged. Metal gloves encase his hands, and he swipes them at the Ghost Child. One of the claws cut across the chest of the Ghost Boy's jumpsuit, slicing holes across his symbol. He lets out a gut-wrenching scream, falling to one knee. Plasmius stands over him, gaze gaunt and wrathful. Desiree hadn't even realized he had been alive all this time, but now wasn't the place to think about these things.
Something steels in Desiree and she crashes into the former halfa, lifting him off his feet and slamming him back into the ground, creating a sizable dent in the steel floor. Blood trickles down his forehead into his beard, but his soft breathing assures her of his survival.
She turns back to the Ghost Boy, who leans against the wall heavily for support as he tries to struggle to his feet. He watches her warily through his bangs, his earlier terror morphing into guarded suspicion. "Desiree?"
He looks so very familiar, she wants to hug him and slap him at the same time. Somehow, she refrains from doing both. "Danny Phantom," she says, more formally then she had intended.
He swallows thickly, grimacing slightly as Ectoplasm continues to drip freely from his wound. "You saved me," he says bluntly.
"Yes. And you're still injured." She frowns at him. "That won't do at all."
"Huh?" he asks intelligently. Desiree glides forward, placing her palm on the bloody gouge in his chest. "Hey! Get off me!"
"Trust me," she says. "Now wish for me to heal you."
"What?"
"Just do it!" she hisses. "Time is not on your side."
He continues to stare quizzically at her but nods slowly. "Okay ... I ... Uh ... I wish this stupid cut was gone so I can go destroy my alternate timeline psycho-loop self?"
Desiree gives a small smile and murmurs something under her breath. Her expression quickly turns into a grimace as she feels a deep gash opening across the top of her bare stomach. Danny barely manages to catch her as she starts to sway in mid-air. He gapes at her. "What? Did you... Did you just... Take my wound away and give it to yourself?"
She shakes her head to clear it, blinking black spots out of her eyes as she presses one green hand to the injury. "Exactly ... You ... You taught me how to do that."
Danny flinches, misplaced guilt flitting across his face. She scowls at him. "This is nothing. Now get what you need and go!"
He fidgets uncertainly before standing to identify various anti-ghost weaponry from where they're scattered around the cave and clipping them to his belt. It brings about such a wave of déjà vu that she almost laughs. He hesitates when he is done, first looking at Vlad's unconscious body, then at Desiree, then at the portal itself. He takes a deep breath.
"Wait!" Desiree stops him, voice wavering due to Ectoplasm lost. She manages to give an echo of a smile in his direction. "Give him hell from me."
Danny nods. "I intend to."
Phantom glances in her direction, face twisted with pain and some other emotion that Desiree cannot name. "I'm sorry," his voice is quiet, ragged, and it sounds odd coming from him, someone she had always thought of as the definition of strength.
"For what?" she asks quietly, concerned.
Phantom slowly reaches over, and takes her hand, squeezing her fingers lightly. Her heart flutters.
"For this."
Desiree looks at him oddly, wondering if perhaps he's being overshadowed, before he leans over and murmurs two things in her ear in quick succession.
The private grin playing at her lips morphs into a pain ridden scream, and Phantom gives a quick sigh of relief.
His voice grows fainter in her mind. "There we go. No more stupid human emotions for me."
AN: This story is actually an updated version of one I posted a few years ago as part of a one-shot series. I found it in my drafts and liked it, so I decided to clean it up and repost it as its own fic. TUE is my fave episode and I love spouting theories about it, and Desiree has always been my all-time fave villian-of-the-week.