Ten years had passed since he'd help save the earth and became a hero known by the whole world, and surprisingly little had changed.
He still fought ghosts on an almost daily basis, although the ghosts which chose to confront him got tougher and tougher as his own strength grew. He still hung out with Tucker and Sam more than anyone else, even though he and Sam had broken up with each other after a few years when it became clear that they were starting to drift apart and didn't want to risk losing their friendship by clinging to a fading romance until they couldn't stand each other. He still wanted to be an astronaut, though with his schedule and dislike of schoolwork the degree required was proving to be a bitch for him to get; he was already two years over the four most people got their bachelor's degree in, but at least he only had a semester left.
And he still thought about Vlad Masters often, even though the man had been gone-from both his life and his world-for a decade.
It wasn't like he spent much time thinking about other ghosts he'd known back then. Most of them had started avoiding Amity Park as he got strong enough to make them realize that they had no chance against him, making way for new, stronger, ghosts who sought him out for the challenge. The only one he still saw often was Skulker, but the way things stood between them were completely different than they'd been back when Danny was fourteen. At some point he'd decided that the tougher ghosts coming to town were a sign that Danny was more useful as bait than he'd be as a head mounted on his wall. He'd declared that he'd 'captured' the ghost child and was keeping him in a 'nature reserve' that had been set up for him. A nature reserve that just happened to be Amity Park.
Danny thought the whole thing was stupid, but whatever. If Skulker had some weird hunter's pride issues that wouldn't let him declare a truce until he'd come up with some way of making it sound like he'd won, fine. All that really mattered was that it had been seven years since the last time he'd attacked Danny inside the city, and that he'd usually show up to help out with any really tough enemies. On the downside, any time he noticed that Danny had gone out of town for a little while chances were that he'd chase him down for 'escaping', but it was a small price to pay.
Mostly with his old enemies it was out of sight, out of mind. Some of them he'd started to get along with just fine if they happened to run into each other-Johnny 13 and Kitty had never been that bad to begin with, and Ember had become a lot easier to stand once she realized that she could make it in the music business without hypnotizing anyone-and some he didn't think he'd ever be able to get along with peacefully, but all were equally forgettable when they weren't around.
With Vlad, it was different. He didn't know everything that had happened in space, in fact he hardly even knew more than the tiny bit of information everyone in the world had; his dad and Vlad had gone into space together, and then his dad had come back again alone. The main thing that he knew for sure that the rest of the world could only guess at was that Vlad had still been alive the last time Jack had seen him. But it wasn't like he could just ask for all the gritty details. Only a giant asshole would press their own dad for information about how and why he abandoned the person he'd considered his best friend trapped in the void of space.
The other thing he knew, the thing that he never shared with anyone else and that kept him from just banishing Vlad from his memories like all the others, was that his dad had been wrong.
There weren't many things that Danny could think of that would be more horrible than being trapped and alone, with almost no hope of escape and fully aware of it, forever. In all his years spent ghost hunting there had only ever been one ghost who he'd considered completely, irredeemably, evil to the point that he deserved that punishment, and Vlad wasn't that one. Even Pariah Dark at least got to be unconscious in his sarcophagus, at least as far as Danny knew.
Over time he'd spent more and more time thinking about alternate ways things could have gone that would have made it easier for him to just write Vlad off for good. If he'd been a full ghost instead of another halfa Danny could have assumed that time passing felt differently, a decade less huge, to him; what were ten years when you could live for centuries? If Danny had never gone into the future, if he'd never seen the basically decent guy Vlad could have become, he would have accepted that if Jack thought Vlad was bad enough to deserve being stuck in space than he really was. If anyone had ever found evidence of Vlad actually going as far as killing anyone, instead of just completely failing to ever even successfully harm Jack, he could have written him off as a murderer who deserved whatever he got.
Instead all signs pointed to him preferring violence-free, if incredibly amoral and generally involving overshadowing or ghostly thievery, methods for getting whatever he wanted in the human world. And that was what it all boiled down to. He deserved to have been in jail for a decade to pay for his crimes. He didn't deserve to have spent all that time in solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.
Danny thought about going back into space and trying to find Vlad more and more often as time went by, and the thought of someone being alone for that long got increasingly awful. He'd known pretty much the first time the thought had crossed his mind that someday he was going to do it-if he was willing to even consider rescuing Vlad after everything he'd done it was proof in and of itself that Danny wasn't going to be able to stand leaving someone out there forever-but as of yet he'd never been able to bring himself to actually do it.
In part it was because of his dad. Even if Danny didn't know the full story of what happened, there was one thing he knew for sure; that Jack Fenton would never have abandoned Vlad Masters unless he'd said or done something pretty damned unforgivable out there in space. Worse even than taking over the world, seeing as when he'd left on the shuttle Jack had been planning on at least trying to preserve their friendship. And, okay, his dad was the type of guy who constantly overreacted. Especially in a fight. Especially when that fight was against a ghost. But Danny had to believe that just that once Jack had kept a completely clear head in the heat of the moment. It was too awful to think that his dad had doomed someone-someone who he'd cared about for longer than Danny had been alive-to float alone in space for god only knew how long just because of an overreaction. He had to have faith that there'd been a reason.
Then there was the problem that, well, he just didn't know where Vlad was. It was probably safe to assume that he'd been somewhere in the path the asteroid had followed to start out with, though even that he didn't know for sure, but who could say which way he might have gone from there when his power of flight made moving around in space much easier than it would be for other people? Every so often Danny would stand out with a telescope and scan the skies in the direction the asteroid had come from, but space was huge and he hadn't spotted a sign of him yet. His telescope might not even be powerful enough to make out the tiny speck of a human body in space even if he pointed it right at Vlad, though his mom had been the one to make if for him which made it stronger than any other he could get his hands on without begging his way into an observatory.
Without a better place to start looking than somewhere he might have been ten years ago, how could Danny go searching for him? Everywhere between Earth and where the asteroid had been the last time he knew for sure Vlad was still on the Fenton Rocket was just too broad an area, and that was assuming that Vlad wasn't stupid enough to take off for Proxima Centauri in the hopes of finding intelligent life in that area since he'd burned his bridges on Earth. Danny didn't think he'd ever be that dumb, but who knew what kinds of things would start to seem like a good idea after years spent alone?
Danny was never going to feel guilty enough about what had happened to Vlad to risk getting himself stuck in space too because he'd gotten so turned around in the millions and millions of miles that Vlad might be floating through that he'd ended up hopelessly lost and eventually out of fuel. He might be a hero, but he didn't plan on martyring himself for the sake of a giant asshole.
So he put off trying to search for him. He waited for some clue of where to begin.
And eventually it was taken out of his hands completely.