This is a continuation of sorts (..More like a sequel? Epilogue? Whatever.) of Cordria's "Shards" - which is No. 24 from her collection Star Shots.
I'll put her one-shot first, and then the rest is my continuation of it.
Shards
x - x - x
Danny struggled against the stiff leather straps holding him to the table. He stared up at the man standing over him. As he yanked at his bound wrists again, Danny's eyes flared green in anger. "Let me go!" he snapped.
"You will not tell me what to do!" the man snarled. The green light in Danny's eyes cast sickening shadows across the man's pale, sunken face. "Ghosts obey me. I have the power, I have the control." The man suddenly turned away and started rustling through the disorganized stack of boxes that filled the other half of the room.
For the sixth time, Danny tried to phase himself through the table. Just like each previous attempt, he was zapped for his trouble. Shaking his head to try and clear the zing out of his brain, Danny settled his gaze on the pale man and glared.
"You have taken everything from me," the man ranted. "You took my family... my life... my family's heirlooms..." Silence filled the room for a few minutes as the man's ranting degenerated into unintelligible mumbling. "Look what I have resorted to," he muttered darkly. "A small little room in a rundown apartment complex. The idiot girl next door is always screaming and blowing things up..."
He gave a quick yelp of happiness. Hordes of boxes shifted and groaned as the man pushed them out of the way. Finally, he twirled around. One small box was clenched tightly in his fingers. He fixed his eyes on Danny and grinned. "You see, ghost, you may have thought you destroyed this little heirloom of mine, but I managed to collect the pieces."
Danny jerked his arms one last time before answering. When he spoke, his voice was dripping with sarcasm. "I'm so happy you found them."
"You should be." The ma slowly held the box up for Danny to see. His amber eyes sparkled, with an odd reddish hue cast in by the dim apartment light. "For today is the dawning of a new era. I will be master."
"Like it worked so well last time," Danny sneered, "or, come to think of it, the time before that."
But the man didn't seem to notice. He was holding the plain cardboard box carefully, acting like he was holding the Holy Grail. "No one will be able to tell me what to do," he whispered to himself. "I will stand in no one's shadow." A maniacal grin crossed his face. "Especially ghosts. They will not come before me anymore."
Danny licked his lips. "So, what's in the box?"
The man glanced up. "Your future." He set the box carefully down on a table and opened up the flaps. Inside, hundreds of small, red bits glittered in the low light.
"Do you remember this?" the man continued. He reached down into the box and carefully pulled out one of the pieces of glittering red. Away from its companions, the fragment was very small, narrow, and translucent. It caught the light, sending tiny rainbows of red light dancing crazily around the room.
"That's it?" Danny asked sourly. "A bit of glass?"
The man's eyes hardened. "A bit of glass?" he snarled. "A bit of glass? Do younot know what this is?"
"No."
"Do you remember my beautiful staff? It was a family heirloom - the red crystal had been passed down from generation to generation. I was the eighth son to receive it from my father. And you broke it."
Danny blinked. "That's not really fair. I had to catch Sam after you had her pushed off of a train. I dropped it."
"Off a hundred foot cliff!" The man shivered in rage for a second. Suddenly, he calmed himself. "But, I suppose, it's all for the better. If it hadn't broke, I never would have discovered this magical little ability." He smiled.
The man held the shard of his crystal up over Danny's head. "Now," the man soothed, "from what I've heard from the other ghosts, this will only hurt for a second."
"What are you doing?" Danny hissed, renewing his vigorous yanking against the leather straps.
"Why, ghost, I am making you my minion." The man's smile grew. "Permanently."
With a soft chuckle, the man dropped the red shard into Danny's right eye. Danny jerked, his eye screaming with pain as the razor-sharp fragment sliced into him.
Then he went perfectly still.
When he opened his eyes again, they were the same bloody red as the crystal had been.
Glass
x - x - x
The first thing that wafted through the shifting blanket of darkness was the smell of coffee.
Then there were hushed whispers; words flitting past him incomprehensibly like spiders skimming the water's surface. Gradually, he began to recall that he had hands, and through the murky dark he felt the fingers on his left hand twitch.
Dark. He had been in the dark for so very long. Forever, maybe. But this dark.. this darkness was different. It wasn't imposing, suffocating, like before. It was comforting. He succumbed to the current of it.
He breathed in and out. That felt very good. It felt like he was inflating a ten gallon balloon inside his chest with helium. In fact, he couldn't feel much else. A dim buzzing through his body where his nerves should have been. The oxygen met the walls of his lungs, and for a while that was all he knew.
Sometime later, the windy whispers had quieted.
There was a beeping noise, somewhere outside the blackness. It was far away, and beyond his notice. His awareness came and went; sometimes he felt the breathing and sometimes he just floated unknowing, maybe sleeping, through the haze. After infinite hours of breathing in the dark, the buzz under his skin began to lessen by minuscule degrees.
Once, when the wave of awareness hit its crest he felt a hand on his shoulder. A voice spoke by his ear. He didn't understand what it said, but it was familiar. His hand moved up to reach for it before he slipped back into the dark.
An indiscernible amount of time passed. When the awareness peaked again, his mouth felt dry, his lips parched and cracked. His legs shifted and a thin blanket shifted with them.
He listened but there were no voices around this time.
The heavy haze in his mind was now a dissipating mist, and he was surprised at how easily he opened his eye.
Eye.
Like a jolt of electricity a flash of memory shot through him. The last clear picture before the dark had swallowed him, the last vivid sensation before his senses had been numbed. A maniacal toothy grin coming toward him, white hot searing pain in his right eye as the world faded from blood red to grey to black.
The breath caught in his chest. Somewhere, the beeping noise sped up.
Then, a familiar sound: footsteps.
The world was still coming into focus in his open eye when he heard someone say "Danny?" A mechanical fizzling noise. "Jack, Danny's awake. Get down here."
His brain slowly supplied the word for the woman walking toward his bedside. Mom. It felt as if his memories had been put away in storage and he was manually dragging them out. Silver reflective walls behind her. A table littered with bizarre metal shapes. A dozen or so coffee mugs. Puddle of green sludge. Must be... the lab.
"Hi Danny," Mom cooed softly, resting her hand on his arm. "How are you feeling?"
Confused. He trained his eye on her. How was he supposed to answer that? He didn't feel pain, though he was beginning to suspect that he should be feeling pain. A thin IV trailed from his arm to a clear pouch on a rail by the bed, dripping continuously. He wondered idly what they were drugging him up with. He settled on just saying what he meant. "Confused." His throat was dry; he could almost feel the dust scattering in his vocal chords. How long had he been out?
She frowned, squeezing his left hand. "It's okay, sweetie. You probably don't remember much."
"I.. I don't remember anything. Not since-" Flash. A hot iron inside his eye.
Instinctively Danny reached up and felt for his right eye, which was still closed. Instead he found a thick bandage, circling his head and covering his right eye down to his cheekbone. He touched it gingerly, and felt the smallest surge of heat underneath. Grateful for whatever pain meds he was on, he didn't touch it again.
More footsteps on the stairs. Dad appeared, relief washing over his face. Jazz was behind him, looking flustered as she rushed toward Danny.
They all talked and worried and bustled over him, and between assuring them that he wasn't in pain, he got it out of them that his last real memory – flash, leering smile, searing pain – was over a month ago. And Danny had been down here in the lab for almost two weeks.
His one open eye closed. The voices receded again. He struggled to recall what had happened during that month in the red-tinged darkness. He thought he felt thin wisps of memories – half remembered sentences and half remembered pictures. But they were gone before he could catch them.
"What happened?" he croaked, staring at them, stunning the chattering voices into silence. "What did I do?"
Their uneasy faces were enough of an answer. The urge to vomit crept into his stomach.
"It doesn't matter," Dad muttered, gripping Danny's shoulder and squeezing it firmly. "It's over now. Freakshow's in custody. That's the important thing."
Danny wished he could take solace in that.
When his family left the room to allow him to rest, he found himself wondering why he was in such intensive care. He poked around tentatively on his body and found no mortal injuries. Besides, he was a quick healer. The fastest healing human in the world. So why all the medical treatment? His hand rested on his only bandage, wondering just how much damage that shard of glass had done to his right eye.
When he woke again, someone's fingers were intertwined loosely with his. He knew whose they were.
Danny looked up and saw Sam asleep in one of the lab chairs, which she had pulled up beside the bed. His heart fluttered at the sight of her. He glanced over (ouch, he was beginning to feel again and there was a deep throbbing on the right side of his head) at Tucker, who sat in a chair against the wall, and his best friend immediately perked up from his handheld DS.
"Hey Sam, wake up!" Tucker half-shouted. "Danny's awake!" Sam jolted upright. She must not have been sleeping too deeply.
"Hey," Danny said softly, giving her a small grin. "What's up?"
He expected her to reply sarcastically but she looked like she was about to cry. "Hey," she whispered back. "Long time, no see."
Danny felt a painful twinge of guilt. He'd spent a month in coma-like darkness. His friends' and family's month had probably been a lot more horrifying.
Tucker was at his side instantly. "Finally, dude. You've been muttering in your sleep for hours. You talk in your sleep a lot, you know that?" He chuckled to himself.
Danny rolled his one working eye. He knew Tuck was just trying to lighten the mood with jokes, like he always did. Didn't really bother him.
But Danny wasn't quite ready to laugh it all off yet. "Guys," he began slowly. He hated to dive right into it like this, felt guilty asking it of them, but he needed to know. "What exactly did I do during that month? My family kept dodging the question. It wasn't.. it wasn't anything really awful was it?"
His two best friends looked queasy.
Tucker opened his mouth first. "Look, we'll talk about what happened. It's bad… but it's not anything world-shattering okay? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"I'm awake, Tuck. I think we've come to it."
Tucker and Sam exchanged glances.
Sam squeezed Danny's fingers again. "Actually, Danny, there's another bridge you need to cross first."
Danny looked at her blankly. "What do you mean?"
"Well…" she looked down at her lap, biting her lip. "There's something you need to know. We convinced your parents to let us tell you. I thought you would take it better this way."
Danny felt a surge of unease shoot through him. "Take what?"
"What's the last thing you remember, Danny?"
Flash. Molten pain.
Danny shuddered. "Freakshow. Shoving a shard of glass from that stupid broken staff into my eye."
Tucker let out a breath he'd been holding. "Good. No well that's not good it's just – I'm glad you remember that. Makes this easier, I guess."
"It took us long enough to figure it out," Sam growled under her breath.
Danny was beginning to connect the right puzzle pieces. "So how did you get it out of me?" he breathed.
Tuck and Sam both looked at him, and his stomach dropped. He saw pity and regret. That couldn't possibly be good.
"Danny…" Sam started.
"How did you get it out?"
When no one answered he started trying to sit up. The urge to look at his eye in a mirror was suddenly overwhelming.
"Danny," Tucker said more urgently, placing his hand firmly on Danny's shoulder. But Danny's strength was returning and he easily swung his legs over the side of the bed and pushed past his friend, turning his arm intangible long enough to let the IV flop to the bed and the finger heart rate monitor clatter to the floor. He stumbled across the lab to the one small mirror mounted over the desk.
"Danny stop," Sam urged, latching onto his arm as he reached up and clutched the thick bandages. "Let us explain first, please."
"Explain what?" he replied incredulously. He didn't want whatever explanation there was. He would see for himself. With a simple surge of intangibility he separated the bandages from his head and they gathered limply by his bare feet. A rush of pain flooded the right side of his head as his skin met the stale laboratory air, but he ignored it and turned to the mirror's surface.
And he froze.
He hadn't been as shocked by his own reflection since the day he first stared Phantom in the glowing eye, just after the accident.
Where his right eye should have been there was a gaping hole. Inside of which there was a swirling vortex of glowing green. If Tucker or Sam spoke, he didn't hear them. He leaned toward the mirror, hypnotized. An inch from the smooth surface he realized the swirling green was under a surface of rounded glass. Knowing it would hurt, he reached up to touch it anyway. Smooth glass under his finger. Like an ectoplasmic crystal ball where his eye should have been. The skin around it was swollen and bruised, a deep purple circle under his eye.
His black flyaway hair was more unruly than he had ever seen it, from being two weeks bedridden. That, plus the dark circles under his eyes, his pale gaunt face, and his surrogate eye, made for a frightening reflection. He was staring at his human half but he looked very much like a ghost.
Belatedly, he noticed Sam's desolate face next to his in the mirror.
"Danny, I'm so sorry."
My eye.
"We ran out of options, dude." Danny jumped when he realized Tucker was right next to him. "We tried everything we could think of."
Danny stared into the swirling green in the mirror. I'll never see out of my right eye again.
"The shard wouldn't come out of your eye," Sam said softly. "It wasn't in your eye, it was like it had melted in there and become a part of it. Your whole eye was just red."
"So you removed it," Danny said without emotion, without looking at them.
"Yeah," Tucked answered. "It was better than leaving you a slave for all eternity, we thought."
Danny nodded absently. "So why…" He didn't know what to say, so he gestured at the mirror, where the glowing green of his eye cast flickering green lights all around the lab.
Sam bit her lip again, looking away. "It didn't work at first."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you know how quickly you heal," Tucker answered grimly. "Your eye kept uh.. re-growing."
"…Huh." And you didn't let it?
Tucker seemed to follow Danny's line of reasoning. He quickly added, "But it would grow back just the way it was. Glowing red. We didn't know what else to do, Danny."
"We interrogated like every ghost trying to find some kind of solution," Sam said, annoyance biting her words. "Frostbite gave us one. It wasn't the one we wanted but it was better than slavery."
"He gave you this?" Danny asked, still staring into his new eye.
Sam nodded next to him in the mirror. "It.. it keeps your real eye from growing back."
The surprise of that cut through Danny's frozen horror. He blinked at her. "Really?" The unnatural eye seemed to stare at him in the mirror. "So if I took it out, then my eye would grow back?"
Tucker jabbed a finger into Danny's chest. "Your red eye," he said pointedly.
"Right," Danny sighed, resting his hand on the cold surface of the mirror. Point taken.
"Does it hurt?" Sam wondered softly, snaking her fingers back into his other hand.
Yes. There was a steady pounding around his right eye, thrumming though his whole head, resonating down to his knees. "Not really."
"You should sit down, Danny," Tucker said, nudging him back toward the bed. "This is kind of shocking, I know. Just relax okay? It'll be fine."
Danny nodded numbly and sat at the edge of his makeshift hospital bed. Sam sat next to him, not letting go of his hand. He was glad for that. He felt like a balloon and her fingers felt like an anchor.
A sudden thought occurred to him. "How in the hell am I going to explain this at school?" he wondered aloud.
"With a sick eye patch, of course!" Tucker supplied instantly, he tone of voice flipped suddenly from solemn to ecstatic as he whipped a black patch out of the side pocket of his cargo pants.
Oh yeah, that's just what he needed. Another reason to make him stick out like a sore thumb. At least he'd missed a month of school. Only ..four? Four months left till graduation now. Wow.
But later that week when Danny finally caved and allowed Tucker to put the dumb thing on his head, he had to admit that it was better wearing an eye patch than going to school with one glowing green eye. Besides, Sam took one look at it gave a low whistle and said he looked hot. So yeah... there was that. Maybe she was just saying that to get him to stop complaining about it. Well it worked, at any rate. It was a cheap shot of hers, playing the girlfriend card.
When he went back to school everyone steered clear of him, wary of the 'kid who went missing for a month.' Teachers gave him loads of extra credit and pitying looks. It was great, actually. The extra credit part. At least he wouldn't become a super-senior, which had become a real fear of his.
No one asked him directly but Danny heard whispers. Rumors flying around about what happened to his eye.
"I heard he got his eye clawed out by a bear."
"Nah it was a ghost that did it – the one that kidnapped him."
Danny's family and friends had let the rumor about him being kidnapped by a ghost solidify, to explain Danny's lack of memory for the month he'd been gone.
"I bet he had to dig a key out of his eye to escape like that one Saw movie –"
"Ew! That is so messed up, Dash!"
Danny just let the rumors roam. He honestly couldn't care less what people thought, as long as no one tried to take a look underneath the stupid thing. Sometimes he worried you could see the green glow creeping around the edges of the patch, and he caught himself checking his reflection over and over to make certain that wasn't happening.
"Catch!" Danny drawled lazily, unleashing a torrent of ectoplasm at the eight-legged ghost currently wreaking havoc in the school library.
The thing squealed and scurried away, flipping over tables and scattering books in the process, smashing into a shelf and sending it toppling.
"Can we wrap this up?" Danny shouted in annoyance. He'd already missed enough school as it was. Greenburg would murder him if he didn't get back to Calc in less than five minutes. The bathroom break excuse only went so far.
But the massive spider just shrieked in response, sending a generous spray of sticky white web at him, again, which he easily dodged, again.
"Good thing that didn't actually catch me," he mumbled to himself. "I'd have walked right into that one with that stupid "wrap" comment."
It had actually been surprisingly easy to adjust to having one eye. His depth perception felt virtually unaltered. He wondered if that was normal or if it had something to do with his heightened ghost senses.
The spider took a deep breath and inflated its abdomen like a puffer fish, sending thick spikes soaring toward Danny. As he dodged them easily he caught sight of his reflection out of the corner of his eye in the tall window. He tilted his face toward it reflexively, the way you run your tongue over a sore tooth over and over even though it hurts to do so.
When he was in ghost form his eye patch disappeared along with the rest of his clothes, unsurprisingly. He sorely hoped nobody wondered why Phantom lost an eye the same week Fenton did. If anyone ever looked under Fenton's eye patch they'd know the answer.
Phantom had always had glowing green eyes but this... this was something else. It was the main feature on his face now, that was for sure. It glowed like radioactive waste, swirling indefinitely like the ghost portal itself. The green glow in the iris of his good eye was like the glow of a candle next to a bonfire.
Danny paid dearly for his moment of distraction.
Another round of spikes soared past him. Most missed. But one buried itself deep in his shoulder, sending him careening backwards before he could think, and another lodged itself in his thigh as one soared flat across his tilting face. It would've gone straight through his head if the first one hadn't punched into him so hard and pushed him over. As it was, the spike sliced through his cheek to his brow line with a sickening crack where his right eye used to be.
Pain seared through every part of his body. He saw a thin trail of green mist escaping into the air. No no no…
He yanked off one white glove and gingerly assessed his glass eye; his heart dropped when he felt a hairline fracture on its surface. He went intangible and let the spikes clatter to the floor. Whatever patience he had left evaporated. Turning a murderous gaze on the advancing ghost he dove for the thermos under a fallen bookshelf, which he'd dropped there only minutes ago.
As the ghost lunged for him he turned the thermos' vacuum on the creature and listened to its vanishing shriek with satisfaction. But the feeling was short-lived, as his attention turned to the tiny stream of glowing mist escaping so menacingly from his glass eye.
It's a small crack, he assured himself, as he phased through the wall and raced homeward, forgetting about Calculus utterly. Surely he'd make it to the lab in time.
Danny wasn't too terribly worried that he wouldn't make it. He could sense that there was still plenty of that special ectoplasmic compound left swirling in there. It was such a small leak, really.
The thing that really worried him was the red-tinged darkness he could feel creeping into the space left behind.
It was such thin, thin ice he walked on now.
He made a mental note to ask Frostbite for sturdier glass.