Gah I spent too much time hoarding this
This is a request from TheDerpyChemist! I had a lot of fun writing this and I hope everyone enjoys it.
EDIT Feb 1: Isadorator pointed out some spelling/grammar mistakes and I've gone though and fixed them. Thank you!
Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom because that will be bad.
Danny dodged another white-hot blast of ectoplasm from the ghost, twisting his body in a strange dance to fire a blast back. He yelled something meant to insult the new ghost, but his words were lost under the drone of the fight. (It was probably about newspapers. This ghost had a strange obsession with newspapers.)
The blast hit the ghost in the shoulder, distracting him just long enough for Danny to whip out a thermos, beaten and battered from previous fights, and aim it carefully at the newspaper ghost.
"Did ya catch today's headline buddy?" Danny said. He sucked the ghost inside the thermos and capped it quickly. "Didn't think so!"
He mentally groaned. Even he knew that that was a bad pun, and not in a sense that it was good. Tucker will probably sock him in the shoulder and give him a lecture on puns later.
He heard sirens in the distance and chose that moment to disappear before his parents showed up. He didn't think anyone got hurt in that battle because the buildings were closed for the night and any pedestrians would have fled the moment the ghost showed up, but people are weird. Recently a lot of people have been swarming towards the fights like it was for their entertainment, even cheering him on to finish the ghost off.
(He noted that the people were mostly kids that looked about his age. He often saw Paulina and Dash holding cameras and always made sure to wink at them.)
Finding a safe alley (that smelled strongly of garbage, but he wasn't going to be picky), he checked himself for any damage.
A green colored bruise was peppered across his hip. His left kneecap was twisted to the side of his injuries will disappear when he transformed but still have a faint whisper of pain to them. He was about to transform back when he noticed that his glove was pulled back, exposing ghostly pale skin underneath.
His breath caught in his throat. His gloves wasn't supposed to come off. Curiosity taking hold, he tugged at the glove and admired the pale skin underneath. He noticed that there were no wrinkles or folds in his hand, not even the faint indents of fingerprints. His fingernails were short and neat and oddly clean.
But his curiosity was changed to panic when his melted glove into a green goop. He whispered some sort of wild profanity under his breath and stared at the goop for a full second before slapping the glove goop onto his hand in a mad attempt to get his glove back.
The goop splattered onto the cement ground and evaporated, leaving nothing behind but a thick stench of metallic.
"Alright," Danny said aloud, ignoring the waves of panic bubbling in his stomach. "It's alright. Everything's alright. I'll just transform and it'll come back."
He transformed, faintly acknowledging the pain in his twisted leg had lessened, and transformed back. He clenched a fist to swallow his panic, and looked down at his hand.
It remained gloveless.
Normally he would shrug a normal problem like this off. If he lost a regular glove, he wouldn't get this worked up over a tiny mistake. But he felt strangely naked without both gloves, and actually felt sorry for the glove when it melted. It was like watching his arm melt.
He wanted to hide his arm from the world. He didn't want anyone to see his ungloved hand. It was like having a secret that no one could look at until now, and Danny felt dirty and exposed without it.
He flew home invisible.
He couldn't believe his luck. His luck that always seemed to kick him in the butt one way or another had actually decided to help him out today. Danny wasn't sure if it was an alignment of the planets or the shape of the clouds or whatever (he wasn't about to get all zen or something) but somehow, the universe decided to be kind to him today.
He had found a white glove in Jazz's room.
Sure, it wasn't his glove. It wasn't made of the same materials to match his suit. But it fit his (still) prepubescent boy hands perfectly, and covered up any bit of skin that could have been showing.
And now he was in the lab, parents gone, Tucker just out of range of his ectoblasts and holding a clipboard.
And now Danny grinned as he shot another practice round at the targets. He almost liked the feeling of the thicker cloth between his fingers as he fired another blast. Tucker was afraid that it would throw him off balance when he flew, but Danny wasn't too concerned about it.
"Alright, intangibility is next. Try phasing through those walls," Tucker read off, pointing to some thick barriers of iron that had just pushed through the floor.
"Easy cake," Danny went intangible, relishing the cool feeling in his veins before flying through the barriers. "100%, Tuck!"
Then with bile rising in his mouth, he realized the glove had fallen off when he phased through the barrier. With a short cry of panic, he transformed back to his human self, falling a good seven feet to the floor and landing in a heap.
"Dude! What was that?" Tucker was at his side, gripping his upper arms in a comforting matter. "Are you okay?"
Danny gasped. "The glove..." Tucker followed his friend's gaze and spotted the slightly smoking glove by the barrier.
"That one definitely didn't work." Tucker scrawled an X on his clipboard.
Danny was desperate. Desperate enough to give a visit to good old Uncle Vlad, who laughed at the situation but offered to help him without renouncing his father. (Although he had demanded a sample of his hair for god knows what reason.) Vlad seemed to understand Danny's irrational fear of his glove and was perhaps even intrigued by the events behind it.
There was a bit more science behind the glove phasing off than what Danny expected. Vlad had come to the conclusion (after a few harmless tests) that because Danny's suit was fused with the same ectoplasm Danny got blasted with in the accident, it was a part of him. A living (dead? Half dead?) functioning organ, much like a second skin. When ectoplasmic energy flowed through Danny to make him intangible, it also flowed through his suit without a problem. In a sense, it was fused to him. Metaphorically.
But when his glove melted away (Vlad had figured it "disconnected" from the main flow of energy and couldn't maintain a physical form) and he found a replacement, it didn't have the same energy. Heck, Jazz's glove didn't even exist on the same dimension as the rest of Danny. When Danny phased through the barrier, he only concentrated on his normal energy flow, and that left the glove without a body. Had he been concentrating his energy on the glove, it would have phased through as well.
Danny digested the information, and flew away before Vlad could do any more tests on him. He didn't want the fruitloop to know anything more about his little problem.
"So Mom," Danny bit into a butter-coated roll. "Just hypothetically speaking, if a ghost lost a limb or a piece of clothing or something, is there any way how they could get it back?"
Maddie raised an eyebrow. "Is this something to do about Phantom?" She asked just as Danny took a sip of his water. He choked, and swallowed in a gulp painfully.
Maddie seemed ignored his choking. "Because Phantom lost that glove of his recently, correct?"
Danny sighed a breath of relief relaxed. "Yeah! That's why I'm asking. It seems kinda dumb that Phantom will have to go around gloveless for the rest of his afterlife. I was just wondering if there's a way it could zap back into existence or something."
"Well, there is. Jack could explain this better than me but he's out on a patrol right now, so I'll try my best." Maddie scooted her chair back and wiped her lips on a napkin.
"Ghosts have a constant replenishing energy that's created in their cores. Their cores have a set "look" for them to look like that's similar to human DNA. Jack and I haven't figured out exactly what it is, so we've nicknamed it "GNA." When a ghost loses a limb, it can use that energy and the GNA to grow their limb back. But the cores can fluctuate often, so sometimes a ghost can willfully change its appearance as well. "
Danny looked rather lost. "So, ghosts can grow their limbs back?"
"Exactly. Much like lizards and their tails, but on a grander scale." Maddie finished.
"And you think a ghost like Phantom could grow his glove back?" Danny's voice went rather shrill.
"Yes. He's definitely powerful enough to." Maddie replied calmly.
This wasn't the first time Danny used his ghost powers to sneak out (He was after all, a teenage superhero), but it definitely was the first time he snuck out to regrow a glove on his own hand. Actually, he may be the first teenager to sneak out by walking through the walls to regrow a glove. Danny wouldn't be surprised.
His mom didn't actually mention that regrowing would be painful, but Danny had a sinking feeling that it will be very painful. Like growing your skin back all at once painful.
(Given his luck it will feel like his arm is getting chopped off)
He didn't tell Sam or Tucker about the regrowing. He didn't even tell them that he was looking into it. If he told them, they'll want to come with him for moral support and Danny didn't want them to see him in pain.
There was an abandoned barn just on the edge of Amity Park. In one corner the roof had completed caved in and left the hay and wood around it completely exposed to the elements. (As a result, mold. Danny stayed well away from that end)
He plopped himself down on a haystack and adjusted himself so the dry grass wasn't poking him in unmentionable places.
"Here goes nothing," he said aloud. He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the pain of a thousand deaths and concentrated on ectoplasm covering his hand and weaving into the familiar shape of his glove-
No pain. Not really. Instead Danny felt like his hand was getting covered in icy water. He refused to open his eyes to see the horror in the palm of his hand, but he was tempted to when he smelled a whiff of burning flesh and metallic ectoplasm.
Then the icy sensation stopped. Danny let out a gasp of breath he didn't realize he was holding, and looked down at his hand.
A perfectly duplicated glove sat comfortably in Danny's hand like it had never melted away.
(And it didn't even hurt a bit)
This wasn't the first time Skulker had attacked Danny at school with guns blazing. It happened so often that most of the students knew Skulker by name (and if they didn't, they knew him by his bulk).
Danny didn't remember much about the fight. He remembered ducking behind a book cabinet in the library before drawing Skulker outside on the football field to reduce injuries. He taunted him in his usual manner, something about how his guns always miss-
And Skulker shot a missile, aimed directly at his heart. Danny quickly dodged it, but let out a scream when a faint pop like chalk breaking sounded in his very bones-
He remembers looking down at his wrist and the arm just ending. He remembers the thick green ectoplasm pooling onto his suit and sliding off in thick droplets. He remembers taking a instinctive step forward and hearing a thick crunching sound beneath his boot-
He remembers see his own hand melting into ectoplasm under his boot.
Danny Phantom ran away from the fight. He flew away at his top speed far, far away from the football field. He never wanted to set foot there again.
(He laughed humorlessly at the pun before clutching his arm to his chest)
How ironic that he'll find himself in the alleyway where it all began. Danny could see a faint stain just behind a dumpster that could have passed off as a grease stain but he knew, with a sick and cold feeling in his heart, that it was his own ghostly fluids from his melted glove.
And now the ectoplasm dripping from his arm hit the same spot in an acidic splatter, before evaporating and curling into vapor. All while Danny concentrated on his hand because his life depended on it.
White, smooth bones came first. The skeleton formed, with long fingers and a lean palm looking like a venomous spider. Danny almost threw up then and there.
It didn't hurt. It wasn't even that icy.
Muscles wrapped his bones up like a present next. Green tinted with ectoplasm and quivering like they were made of jello.
Skin, pale and smooth, spread across the width of his finders before expanding to his wrist. A second layer, his glove, followed after.
He flexed his fingers. He shot an ectoplasm blast at the rotten corner of the barn.
Good as new.
Happy New Year everyone! Please review and tell me what you liked and didn't like about this.