I am working on another multi-chapter story for FMA, but until it's ready to post, you may be seeing nothing but oneshots from me for awhile. Anyway, I had the scene pop into my head the other day where Jack got upset that Maddie brought up the time he apparently sucked the house into another dimension (It was in Maternal Instincts, according to princessbinas), even though I haven't seen Danny Phantom in years, and this was the result. Please enjoy.
It was an accident waiting to happen, or maybe two or three.
Maddie Fenton waved goodbye to her husband and her young son as she turned the knob of the Fenton Work's kitchen door that led out to the garage. "I'm just going to pick up Jazz from kindergarten." She fixed her eyes on her husband. "Now Jack, I know you're getting close on those calculations, but don't try out the portal until I have a chance to check them over."
"Whatever you say, Mads!" called Jack, but he didn't look up from the papers he had scattered across the kitchen table.
Little Danny stood up, holding a blue, plastic model rocket in his left hand. "Bye, Mommy!" he called, waving goodbye with all his young might.
"Bye, sweetie!" Maddie called, as she slipped out the door with a final kiss blown her toddler's way.
When the door clicked closed behind his mother, Danny sat back down on the tiles and resumed racing it up and down one of the wooden kitchen chairs. Only a few moments later, Jack suddenly stood up, knocking his chair backwards in his excitement. "I've done it!"
Jack gathered up the papers on the table and raced down to the lab. "Now to test it out. Danny, you stay upstairs!"
Danny didn't respond to hearing his father's voice, choosing instead to climb up onto the table with his toy rocket. The young boy remained oblivious as his father programmed the prototype portal on the basement wall and activated it with his faulty calculations.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the woods, two boys were at play: Edward Elric, who'd just turned eleven; and Alphonse Elric, who was almost ten. They were done for their alchemy lessons for the day, so they were spending the rest of the afternoon sword-fighting with some long, straight sticks.
Al's stomach growled as he pretended to stab his fallen older brother with a fatal thrust in the heart. Just after this, Al dropped his stick and looked around at the long shadows trailing from all the trees and rocks in the area, as well as from him and his brother. He found the sun starting to dip low in the west. "Brother," he said, "Teacher will want us back for dinner soon. She'll be mad at us if we're late."
"Fine," said Ed, hopping to his feet, "but I want a rematch tomorrow!"
Al chuckled. "You're such a sore loser. Earlier, I had to convince you to take one day off of working on how to bring Mom back so we could play."
"Well, we are close to…." Ed stopped as his younger brother started tapping his arm. "What is it?"
Al pointed toward something in the woods. "It's a ghost."
Ed turned toward where Al was pointing. There, mixed in with the beech trees, was a large brick building. His jaw dropped. "When…. How did that get here?"
The older brother felt warm breath on the back of his neck and his shirt bunching up behind him, as though his younger brother's hands were grasping it. Ed glanced over his shoulder. "Are you scared?"
Al nodded, burying his head into the back of Ed's mud-covered yellow shirt. Ed took a half-step forward and turned sideways, positioning himself to put an arm around his brother. Pulling Al against himself, he started walking to the strange house. "Come on, there's nothing to be afraid of. I'll show you."
The boys made their way over the forest's uneven ground, ignoring the bushes tugging at their pants as they walked through. Ed led the way up to a white door and knocked loudly.
Only a few moments later, a black-haired toddler opened the door and stared at them, his bright blue eyes meeting the Elrics' gold ones. "Are your parents here?" Ed asked, looking down at the boy.
The boy waddled off, calling "Daddy!" as he went further into the house. "Door!"
A few minutes later, a fat man of Sig's size, almost, came to the open door. "Oh, kids! Are you here to sell some sort of treats for a fundraiser or something?"
The younger Elric hid behind his brother again, but the older one stood fearlessly in front of the large man. "Houses don't just appear out of nowhere," he said. "Tell us how you did it so Al can stop thinking that you're a ghost or something."
"Did you say ghost?" the man asked. He started to ramble on about the topic, but his young son finally looked past the strangers at the door and noticed the change in scenery.
"Daddy?" he called quietly, tugging on his father's hideous orange jumpsuit. He tried this a few more times, with the Elrics unsuccessfully trying to get the man's attention as well, until he just pointed out toward the forest and shouted, "Daddy, look!"
The large man finally stopped and looked, really looked, out his front door. He let out a loud exclamation, something about fudge.
"Hey!" said Ed. "I told you to explain how your house appeared to come out of nowhere!"
The large man put a glove-clad hand on his chin and muttered to himself. "...but this doesn't look anything like the ghost dimension."
Al's grip on Ed's clothing tightened. Ed dug his feet into the ground and started shouting. "You're scaring my brother!"
Jack paused, looking down at the two blond boys without seeming to register the glare on the older boy's face. He stepped to side. "Come on in. Name's Jack Fenton. I'll show off my Fenton Por- I mean, tell you all about how my house ended up in your dimension so you can stop thinking I'm a ghost or something."
Jack led the Elrics across the living room, not even caring that the boys tracked mud across the otherwise spotlessly clean carpet. He brought them into the dining room and offered them seats at a glossy wooden table as the last of the loose mud on their simple leather shoes was knocked off against the white, flower-patterned tiles.
The man set out four small dessert plates on the table. Each plate was a milky white and had intricate designs along its circumference. Then, out came the cookies.
Jack put a couple large oatmeal raisin cookies on each of the china plates. "I'm not a ghost, but I study them! My wife and are I scientists who aim to unlock the secrets of the mysterious place ghosts go after they die. It's called the Ghost Zone, and we were trying to build a portal to it."
The Elrics sat straighter at the table. "You mean the place where souls go after they die – the afterlife?" Ed intensified his question with his unwavering gaze turned toward Jack as he got out glasses.
"It's another dimension filled with all sorts of ecto-thingies." Jack got out the milk and poured himself a large glassful of it before dunking one of his cookies in it a couple times so eagerly that a little of the white liquid splashed out over the glass's rim. "Yum, delicious!"
The Elric boys exchanged looks. Grinning, they turned back to Jack. "How would you open a portal to the afterlife?" asked Al.
"Just out of curiosity, you know," Ed added quickly.
Jack's face lit up. "I'll show you. I'll go get the blueprints." Faster than the boys would have thought possible for such a large man, Jack shoved the rest of his cookies into his mouth, ran out of the kitchen, fetched the blueprints, and returned, unrolling the designs for a large, circular machine on what free space there was at the kitchen table. Jack swallowed the last of his treats and pointed a finger at the blueprints. "This was meant to be our portal to the Ghost Zone. The main idea is to draw power through this here to alter the fabric of reality in the contained space of this tunnel."
As Ed started to trace his finger around the portal's circular exterior edges, Al finished his cookies and got up. He headed toward the sink with the delicate empty plate and glass, but he tripped and the plate broke in two, the glass somehow escaping the same fate and rolling noisily across the floor instead. The sounds caused everyone to look over.
"I tripped," Al said. "I'm sorry. I'll fix this."
"Unless you have better glue than we have in our dimension, don't bother. We can take care of it later."
Al shook his head. "It's a simple fix, really, if you've studied alchemy." Al knelt down next to the broken plate and pulled a piece of chalk out of his front right pocket. He smiled as he saw the Fenton toddler slide off his chair and squat down next to him.
The toddler looked at the broken plate, then at the chalk in Al's hand, and then up at Al. As Al started drawing an array, he explained the process to the curious one beside him. "In alchemy, once you know what something's made of, you can take the pieces apart like building blocks and use them to make something else. In this case, I'm taking pieces of a broken plate that are made of porcelain and making a whole plate out of them."
"Porcelain and bone," Jack said. "My grandfather, Joseph Fenton, experimented with the effectiveness of animal bones at warding off ghosts. He got this bone china for his tests, and it's been passed down to me."
Al looked up. "There's bone in here? Thanks for telling me. If I forgot to account for it, it would have rebounded." He smudged out part of his array and drew some shapes in again as Jack downed a glass of milk, not having any reason to suspect the child's motives for learning how to transmute bones.
Al activated the array, letting blue light dance on the kitchen floor for a moment as he repaired the broken plate. In a moment, the lights faded, and Al picked the plate up and with a sigh. "There are still a few transmutation marks on it. I'm afraid I'm not good enough at alchemy to have it turn out smoother, but you should be able to use the plate again."
Gently placing the plate in the sink, Al thanked Jack for the cookies. He retrieved the glass and sat back down at the table, joining his brother in examining the blueprints. A small smile formed on Al's lips and he leaned closer to Ed to whisper, "When we transmute Mom, do you think we could get her soul back using an alchemical portal? We have the basic idea right here."
"Of course." Ed pulled a piece of chalk out of his own pocket and started drawing a design on some free space on the blueprints. "But I don't understand why the Fentons used a square within a circle here to try to contain the portal to their tunnel. I'd thought something like this would be better." On the blueprints was now two octagons inside a circle. "But I guess they wouldn't need the circle for the array if they're not using alchemy, and if anyone was using alchemy for this, there would be a better design out there than two octagons."
Ed had no way of knowing that in several years, the Fentons would take a chance on building a portal shaped much like the array he'd drawn on their blueprints and have it activate with an unintended price; he just kept studying their current designs for a portal to get a better idea of how to get his mother back from the dead. Reading through the calculations, the child blinked. "Nineteen and twenty-seven aren't thirty-six, they're forty-six. You did sloppy math, old man."
Jack leaned across the table and looked at the column of wrong calculations. "I always forget to carry the one. No wonder I ended up here instead of the Ghost Zone, but at least now I can get home."
Ed corrected the numbers with his chalk, rolled up the blueprints, and handed them to Jack. "Here, they should be right now. Al and I have got to go or Teacher will be mad." Ignoring his empty plate and untouched milk, he ran with Al to the door.
The Elrics called their goodbyes and, turning back briefly to wave, caught a glimpse of the toddler waving farewell as well. The two of them ran out into the soft, fading light of dusk.
"Al, I've already thought of several revisions to our human transmutation theory based on that portal. I mean, it didn't get Jack Fenton where he wanted to go, but it did get him somewhere. We'll need to work out the calculations and the array a bit, but I say we should have it in no more than a month." Ed was talking so enthusiastically that he nearly missed his brother gesturing for him to look back at the house that had come from another dimension.
The brothers gaped as something that looked like green energy covered the house and made itself and everything within its dome vanish with a bright flash.
Al looked back at Ed with a large grin. "We are definitely going to be able to get Mom back, aren't we?"
Danny Fenton opened his front door again after the green had vanished from the windows. He drank in the sight of the cement coming up to his house, and of his mother's sharp shadow as she stood there, glaring at the spot the house had previously been missing from. He even welcomed the sights of the tacky orange vehicle parked on the street and of his scared sister in a purple kiddie backpack, who was letting go of their mother's leg and running to kiss the house.
Maddie smiled and scooped Danny up. "Hey, sweetie? Where's Daddy? He is in big trouble."
Danny pointed toward the basement stairs and reached for the toy rocket he'd dropped near the door when he'd opened it for the Elrics. After his mother set him down, Danny made the rocket vroom through the air, just as carefree as the young Elrics before the accidents that would alter each of their lives.