Demon!Phantom/Danny Fenton plot bunny? Sure, let's do this.
It was 2 am on a Sunday.
...No, that wasn't quite right. Technically, it was now 2 am on a Monday; Sunday had long since fled westward and over the horizon, behind dying light and with only the vague promise of its future return.
Not much moved at this late hour. Or perhaps "late" too had abandoned him, and now it was an "early" hour. Danny Fenton wasn't entirely sure, lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling. He fully intended to keep thinking about it until he reached a conclusion. When the conclusion was reached, maybe he would think it over again, just to be sure.
Anything to avoid thinking about that.
That was sitting in his desk chair, twiddling its thumbs and spinning lazily in slow, squeaking circles.
As it had been doing more or less continuously, for the last five hours, after Danny made it perfectly clear that he was going to ignore it until it disappeared.
"You're really going to keep this up all night, huh?" It asked.
It had first made an appearance, albeit a very brief one, some twelve hours prior.
No, it must have been thirteen. He had gone to Nasty Burger with Sam and Tucker at noon to catch the summer lunch special. When they got inside, they found the place was absolutely packed, so they got their food to go rather than eating in as they had originally intended to.
It sighed. "You are, aren't you? I'm not going anywhere, you know."
Danny did not know that. What he did know was that that had appeared to him in a haze of green energy thirteen hours prior. Sam had the bright idea to "check out" the Fenton Ghost Portal. Danny, as ever on board with her plans no matter how crazy, reluctantly agreed. "Check out" became "turn on" when he tripped over a cord and slammed into the power button from inside the device. He thought he had seen it then, a vague blob of green with glowing red eyes, examining him from head to toe. He caught the barest hint of a twisted smile and white hair before it disappeared.
When Danny got out of the fog, he quite reasonably assumed he had imagined everything. He was lucky he hadn't been electrocuted. It was probably very stressful for his system. Who knows what kind of crazy chemicals he might have been exposed to. And so on.
He didn't even mention the hallucination to Sam or Tucker.
"Are you just trying to put off talking about this until morning? I could put you to sleep if it would help." It offered.
Cold terror gripped him. His heart, already racing, hammered in his chest, and he found himself shaking slightly as clammy hands gripped even tighter to the pale blue bedspread. It wasn't real. But that didn't mean it couldn't hurt him. And even if that conclusion didn't stand up to any reasonable amount of logical scrutiny, Danny wasn't going to take any chances. He locked eyes on a paint chip on the ceiling and resolved to not so much as blink until dawn.
"Hello?"
He screamed, and in one swift motion backed up away from the face that was suddenly taking up most of his field of view, until he ran out of bed; landing with a thump, he clutched his sheets and kept scurrying backward until he bumped into the corner of the room.
"Um, are you OK?" It asked, knowing full well that he was anything but.
It was a completely reasonable thing to not be OK, when you go about your daily business, assuming you were temporarily hallucinating, only to go to your room several hours later to find that hallucination sitting in your chair, smiling cheerily at you.
It was even more reasonable to not be OK when it introduced itself as a demon and offered you its services.
At some point, and quite in spite of himself, he must have fallen asleep. It might've all been a dream if he wasn't still crouched in the corner of the room, wrapped up in his blankets from head to toe.
Or indeed, if it wasn't still in the room.
Sitting on the floor next to his bed.
Reading a book.
As though this was all the most normal thing in the world.
When Danny let out a small squeaking sound, it looked above the cover at him, before lowering the book slightly and grinning. In the light, Danny caught a glint of fangs. "Oh good, you're up! I've been wanting to ask, where exactly are these 'Misty Mountains'? I've never even heard of them before..."
"You're... You're real!"
It raised a questioning eyebrow, grin diminishing, before looking itself up and down.
It was a peculiar sort of creature. On a basic level, it looked just like Danny, albeit with white hair, green eyes, and skin just slightly more tanned than his own. In lieu of normal clothing, it was covered from neck-to-toe in a black, vaguely glowing material that left very little to the imagination; the only exceptions were boots, gloves, and a belt, all of which were the same starkly contrasting white as its hair. To all appearances, it could have been a human. At least, were it not for the stubs of horns that poked through the hairline above its forehead, or the large feathery white wings that he had seen extend at least as far as it was tall.
"Hmm, yes. I do seem to be real. And this is surprising to you?"
"I thought I had imagined you!"
"Are you especially prone to madness? Do you frequently see things that aren't real?"
"No! I mean, maybe! You can't be real!"
"Listen, are you sure you're the one who activated that portal...? Normally when a human frees a demon, they at least expected to do so."
At the mention of the 'D' word, Danny buried himself slightly deeper in his security blanket, until only his eyes were visible.
The demon frowned and scooted closer, setting down the book. "Please remain calm, that was a rhetorical question. I know you are the one who freed me. What I don't know is why you are so afraid of me. Is it something I said...?"
Any hope of deciphering Danny's response was lost through layers of muffling cotton.
With a sigh, it leaned forward and pinched at the fabric over a quaking Danny, pulling the blanket down to reveal the teen's face in full. "Once more, please?"
"Ar-are you going to-to steal my s-s-soul?!"
"Why would I want your soul?"
"D-demons always steal souls!"
"Ah, no we don't? At least so far as I know, anyway," it added as an afterthought. "I have met few others of my kind, in particular after I became trapped in the Ghost Zone. But I assure you, I at least have no need for human souls. I'm not entirely sure how one would go about taking a soul, thinking about it..."
"Then why... Why are you here?"
"It really is as simple as I told you last night. You freed me from an embarrassing situation. Now I am honour-bound to repay you in kind."
The demon swept his arms out in a grandly open gesture of good faith. Danny receded slightly further into his cotton-rayon cocoon.
"Could... Could you just go away?"
It frowned. "For the love of... No. I'm going to repay you somehow, come stygian fires or blessèd floods." Danny groaned before covering himself completely. "Come now, don't be ridiculous. Just carry along with your day, and I will assist when possible."
A moment passed in which Danny made absolutely no motion to get up. Finally, the bedding was flung off of him with a flourish. "Starting now, thanks. I may not know your routine, but I'm sure you have places to be on a lovely morning like this."
"You have very odd taste in pastimes."
Danny sighed, trying his best to keep a few paces ahead of the demon. "I've already told you, I have to go to school."
"You don't have to do anything, you know. That's the whole point of being mortal, isn't it?"
"...what are you even talking about?"
"Well really, you could just as well spend the day fishing by the river, lounging under the shade of a tree, dancing and merry-making, or—"
"You're insane."
The footsteps caught up to him, and quite suddenly it was at his side, now almost jogging sideways to keep up. "No, what's 'insane' is any civilisation that would shut its youth away in darkened buildings rather than letting them enjoy the halcyon days of summer."
"It's September. That means I have to go to school so I don't have to spend July there instead. And- You know what, why am I even explaining this to you?"
"Presumably, because I am curious."
"I bet you could find out all about it somewhere else. Preferably away from me, so I won't look like a lunatic talking to thin air."
"Hmph. First, you want me to not appear to people, now you don't want me to do that either. Quite a changeable little tempest, aren't we?"
Danny stopped, and to his slight amusement his unwanted follower nearly stumbled over at the sudden change. "What I want is for people to not see me talking to a weird kid with wings! Seriously, I've been to school like a million times, nothing is going to come up you can even help with."
It had clearly stopped listening. Even worse, it had the sort of clever gleam in its smile that Danny had already learned to dread. "So the problem is my appearance, hmm? Well, we can easily fix that."
A bright light enveloped its form, temporarily blinding Danny. When he blinked away the spots in his eyes, his fears were confirmed. Gone were the horns and wings, as was the absurd black-and-white bodysuit. The demon was instead wearing jeans, sneakers, and a dark green t-shirt with a long-sleeved top under it. It could have passed for a skater, if skaters had white hair, and smiled like a cat about to pounce on its prey.
...Danny didn't like his role in that analogy.
"You see, there should be no problem now. I'll just follow along in case you have need of me, and to all appearances, I will be a completely normal teenager until this schooling is over." It patted him on the back. "How long will that be, incidentally? An hour or two?"
With a defeated sigh, Danny resumed walking. This was going to be a weird day.
I'll say right off the bat, this probably isn't going to get super regular updates. It's mostly going to depend on how busy I am with other stuff because this was basically just a plot bunny that demanded I provide it with a Chapter 1 and an overall plot outline before I could get on with my day. *Shrugs*
Still, this should be a fun ride. Don't take it too seriously, and if you're creeped out by this 'ship I'd say stop now because it's only going to get worse. Or feel free to call me a weirdo instead. I'm not a cop.