Warnings: A very dark fic. Inspired by this documentary. There's minor physical abuse, a lot of mental abuse, character death, and uncomfortable themes.

It had been an accident. A gas-leak, the RV parked across three spaces in the parking lot. Friends and family all gathered in the adjacent laboratory for the united purpose of helping Danny Phantom.

The friction of an ectoplasmic blast had steamed across wood and metal and the place had abruptly burst into flames.

A disorientated, flailing Danny had been rendered unconscious after a length of metal from the roof struck him across the jaw, and Vlad had blindly gathered the boy up in his arms to make a speedy escape.

Only two of seven the occupants of the building left it.

As he watched the smoke gather in clots of grey and black above the burning laboratory, Vlad wasn't able to bring himself to wait until he could tell Danny what had happened. He gingerly set the boy down on the sidewalk and dialed 911 as he fled the scene, returning to his castle in Wisconsin. It had been years since he'd accessed his alcohol cabinet for any reason other than loneliness, but he drowned his guilt in wine that night, and for several nights after, until the demise of the Fenton's seemed like a distant memory. Someone elses mistake.

He was still heavily intoxicated the evening a furious Danny Phantom invaded his castle, stomping in through a hole he'd blasted into the wall. He had known it was inevitable, that Daniel would seek him out eventually — perhaps for the sole purpose of claiming revenge for his loved ones. He didn't think Danny would want to talk things out, and he wasn't sure he was lucid enough for such a conversation himself.

Nevertheless, his palms found the armrests on their own accord in an attempt to push him to his feet. He didn't manage to get far. "I'm so sorry, Daniel," he blurted out, words almost unintelligible beneath the slurring. "I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I—"

"That doesn't change anything," was Danny's snarled reply. He hadn't expected forgiveness, but the intense revulsion in Danny's voice curdled the wine in his stomach. "You killed them — all of them, and then you left me there to find out on my own!" Daniel's voice rose in volume the longer he spoke, drowning out the crackling of Vlad's fire, the sound of his glass sliding from his fingertips and slopping wine onto his thigh. "I hate you! God, I hate you! I hate you!"

He screamed this over and over, and Vlad let the wine soak into his trousers as his intoxicated mind effortlessly blocked it out. He stared into the distance, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.

Until Danny threw a punch at him. His keen sense of self-preservation brought that flailing fist to a halt before it could connect with his face, though he knew he deserved worse than what the boy had intended to inflict. With visible reluctance, Danny withdrew his hand and fisted it at his side.

"I'm sorry, Daniel," he tried again, but Daniel only snarled at him, disgusted.

Without another word, Daniel left, and Vlad sunk low into his red armchair and drank the rest of his wine straight from the bottle.

Months passed with no sign of Daniel. Vlad wanted to be distressed by his absence, but it was Danny's absence that enable him to resume living his life with some degree of normalcy. He meekly attended mandatory meetings for his companies, at first, before taking on some interviews and leisure activities. There were still days where he felt compelled to return to the bottle to purge his mind of his failings, but those were few and far between now that he had something of a routine to keep his mind occupied.

For the first time in a long time, he was finally at ease.

And that's what allowed Daniel to catch him off guard. He barely felt the prick of the needle before he was stumbling three steps forward, grappling for some means of defense as he descended to the tiled floor of his kitchen. His head smacked the edge of a counter on his way down, giving him a few seconds of lucidity, enough to make out Danny Phantom's hovering form before he passed out.

When he opened his eyes, the first thing he became aware of were the handcuffs securing his wrists and ankles to a table. A few testing jerks of his limbs told him he wouldn't be moving beyond the table anytime soon. The second thing he noticed, as he turned his head to survey his surroundings, were the stairs that led down to his own mansion basement. It had been some years since he'd used it. His laboratory was located elsewhere, deep underground and only accessible to creatures of the spectral variety. He didn't recall having ever brought handcuffs and a gurney down here, so Daniel must have transferred them without his knowing.

He slowly turned his head back up to the ceiling, where a single yellow globe was suspended by a thin wire.

He watched the globe for some hours, drifting in and out of focus, trying and failing to access his abilities, before Danny finally came striding in with a small metal cart. It clattered and whined as he wheeled it to Vlad's side, and Danny leaned his elbows on it, smiling.

"Did you know sensory deprivation is a great teaching tool?" he asked, and it didn't sound like it was Daniel Fenton speaking. There was distinct, malicious edge to it.

Vlad's breathing, previously calm, began to accelerate. "Daniel, please, whatever it is you're going to do—"

Daniel cut him off by leaning over and slapping a hand over his still-moving mouth. "Whatever it is I'm going to do, you'll just have to live with." His fingers spidered, clawing into the soft flesh of his cheek and lips. A sharp ache was quick to develop. "If I have to be miserable every day of my life, you should be too."

"Daniel." His voice was heavily muffled by the teenagers palm.

Danny didn't draw his palm away until he had secured a thick, black gag in its place. He then wiped some saliva off his hand, as if he had touched something particularly putrid. "Gross, Vlad," he groaned, shaking his head. "First you kill my family and friends, then you drool all over my hand. You're disgusting."

Vlad's teeth ground against the fabric as he tried to produce a protest. He didn't manage much. A few grunts, maybe a 'please'. Daniel paid him no mind, sliding the sheet off the cart to unveil a variety of tools of different shapes and sizes.

All related to shaving.

"I don't want a new dad," he explained as he sprayed a generous amount of shaving foam onto his fingers. "But something I can play with? That can comfort me? I could do with that, and 'that' won't have a beard." He turned Vlad's face towards him, keeping it still as he spread the cream over the fuzz covering his chin and jaw-line. "I need you now, Vlad," Danny continued, smiling in a way that was deceptively kind as he leaned close to murmur in Vlad's ear, "Isn't that what you always wanted?"

The blade of the straight razor was freezing when finally applied to his skin. Instinctively, Vlad tried to twist his head away, but Danny fisted a hand in his hair to keep him still.

"Shh," Danny soothed. He pulled Vlad's chin up, sliding the blade over his adams apple. "We're gonna have an accident if you keep that up." Very gently, he began to scrape away at the light fuzz under his chin, keeping closer to his neck than necessary. "Stay nice and still, Vlad."

Frightened beyond belief, Vlad could do nothing but oblige.

Of all the possibilities his mind had conjured up in fear of what Danny had in store for him, he had never anticipated this. There was little to no physical abuse, and rarely verbal. He didn't spend his days being beaten to a bloody pulp and left to recover in the corner of his own basement, like he had expected. He wasn't even treated horribly, half the time.

He was treated like an invalid.

A more permanent, ball-shaped gag had been secured around his head to prevent speech, and his eyes blindfolded by something thick and leathery that made his face ache. He didn't drink, eat, go to the bathroom, or move without Danny's assistance, and it was more horrifying, more emotionally debilitating than anything he could have anticipated. A mere week into being left spread-eagle on that table, with nothing to stimulate his mind but his own paranoid delusions, and he had realized he would take anything — anything over this. Beating, maiming, having his nails removed one by one. A slow, agonizing death in a fire, even. He had a high tolerance for pain, but having to rely on another human being for absolutely everything was a foreign experience for him.

He hated how his fear skyrocketed when Danny was gone, and how relief washed over him with the boy returned, and how afraid he was of repercussions when he couldn't quite hold his bladder, and how hard it was becoming to refrain from begging Danny to stay. He never thought there would be a time where he would become used to a fifteen year old holding his dick while he pissed in a bucket. The first time it happened, he'd struggled, cursed, and very nearly shed tears of humiliation when Danny had so easily subdued him and punched him in the gut until he'd answered natures call. His throat had ached with the urge to weep for hours after that. Now he was apathetic. Now it was a part of daily life.

He was a little surprised, two weeks into his ordeal, when Danny injected him with a sedative and removed his bindings, and more or less carried him into the bathroom. For several minutes, he blacked out. Long enough for Danny to remove his clothing, set him down in the bathtub, secure his arms above him with the handcuffs. He was still on the verge of falling unconscious again when he awoke to the sound of running water, feeling it pooling warmly around his thighs. It was a pleasant sensation, almost lulling. He might have fallen into something of a doze had Danny not startled him back into awareness by spreading icy cold soap over him with a wash cloth. The gag and blindfold were still in place, so he could say nothing to convince Danny he could wash himself.

"You were starting to smell like a sewage," Danny commented, sliding the warm cloth over Vlad's fingers, scrubbing the fingernails clean. "It's probably the clothes. I'll have to get rid of them or something."

And so, Danny finished washing every nook and cranny he could reach, as well as some he reasonably shouldn't have been able to reach, and gently toweled Vlad down. Once he was reasonably dry, Vlad was returned to the basement and secured to the gurney without his clothes.

He was certain he had never been so cold in his entire life.

He'd never researched the effects of sensory deprivation on the mind. Danny had, clearly, because he seemed to know exactly when to remove the blindfold so their eyes could meet, or when to allow Vlad to use his voice. Primarily for begging, but Danny didn't seem to pay it any mind. Sometimes, when Daniel was feeling particularly merciful, he would remove the blindfold and leave him alone in the dark, and that was when he would see things and hear things. Sometimes ghosts, sometimes ectoplasm of all colours of the rainbow. Food quite frequently appeared just out of reach, and he'd seen a pile of empty wine bottles at one point.

Once, he had hallucinated the handcuffs rusting until they fell from his wrists and ankles. He'd seen himself sit up without having moved. Prior to that, he hadn't been aware nor terribly worried about the deterioration of his facilities. Now he would slam the back of his head into the gurney because there were sounds and images that weren't really there, and he was afraid.

There was no telling when exactly he succumbed to weight of his misery. It could have been months later, it could have been weeks; he'd completely lost track of time. But when his resolve finally disintegrated, he wept quietly, whimpering and shuddering as a soft, steady stream of tears pooled beneath the blindfold. He couldn't will himself to stop even when Daniel made an appearance, dabbing the moisture away with the sleeve of his jumper.

"Hey, it's okay." Those small, boyish hands ran over his forehead and carded through his hair, a loving caress. "I'm here now."

Despite himself, Vlad leaned towards him.

There came a day where he finally played the role Danny had intended for him: a source of comfort. The boy — the child felt so young and fragile when he wound his lithe body around Vlad's significantly larger one, draping himself over him like a wet blanked. When he didn't immediately try to buck Danny off, he received murmured words of approval. Vlad knew he should have protested, as he had done in the past, but it'd been so long since he'd been praised instead of abused and it was nice not to be hurt.

On the anniversary of the fire, he was a receptacle for Danny's anguish. He'd always thought it strange that Danny had never gone so far as to beat him. He had, after all, taken no issue with assaulting him in the past, when they had been on an equal standing. And perhaps that was the issue. Perhaps Danny was still too good a person to resort to pummeling a man who couldn't fight back.

He couldn't fight back now, of course, but these were extenuating circumstances.

There was enough blood coating the cement by the time Danny had finished that one would have thought a massacre had taken place. Fortunately for Danny, and unfortunately for Vlad, it would take more than beating him around with a bat to kill a halfa.

When Danny finished, he slid himself into the arms of his beaten, bloodied prisoner, and forcefully wrapped Vlad's large encompassing arms around his slighter body.

Belatedly, Vlad realized a year had passed.

It started to become possible to track time through the changes of Danny's body. Being able to notice the slight discrepancies in muscle mass was hardly something Vlad took pride in, but Danny had taken to using him as a cushion when he came down to visit and it was hard not to take note. It was the summer holidays, so that was two, maybe three times a day. He seemed to be inheriting his fathers bulk, very gradually. He wondered how long it would be before Danny surpassed him in body size and weight. With his diet being as chaotic as it was, and appropriate for a prisoner, he didn't expect it would be long.

Now sixteen, going on seventeen, Danny would be starting college soon. Somewhere not minutes away, but hours. The thought of Danny being away for such a significant length of time each day was terrifying to Vlad, who still had to rely upon him for food and drink and toileting.

When he expressed this through muffled whimpers, Danny straddled him and pet his hair. "Don't worry about it, Vlad. I commuted to my new school from here every day, didn't I? And there was still time for me to look after you." He nuzzled a boyishly soft cheek against Vlad's chiseled jaw. "I won't let anything bad happen to you, okay?"

Daniel's visits were consistent, if slightly less frequent than they had once been. He became accustomed to the routine of breakfast, toilet, alone, dinner, toilet, and back to sleep. Breakfast, toilet, alone, dinner, toilet, sleep. Breakfast, toilet, alone, dinner, toilet, sleep, until they reached the weekend. Danny took more time to indulge in his company on weekends. He had begun bringing a radio into the basement, playing music from some of his favorite childhood bands for Vlad. None that would have previously interested him, but now he was just grateful for the distraction from the auditory hallucinations.

It became increasingly apparent every time Danny cuddled into him that the boy was too large to be tucking himself under his chin as he had done in the past. His limbs were too long, shoulders too broad. It was awkward for both of them whenever he tried to mold their bodies together in that position, and he seemed determined to try despite the discomfort. He fell asleep there quite frequently, exhausted from study. Vlad wasn't looking forward to exam time, where he would be stretched so thin that there would be little to no time to tend to Vlad's needs.

Having been without clothes for so long, Vlad savored the feel of Danny's warm slumbering body settled over his own. The radiating heat lulled him into a doze almost every time. In that regard, he was glad Danny had grown; the boy had been too small and wiry to provide heat as an adolescent.

There were days where he still begged for salvation. At times, he wasn't sure why. He was comfortable, he was well looked after. Danny was keeping the radio on throughout his absences, so he didn't have to worry about the auditory hallucinations anymore. He even received more affection than he had at any other point in his life. All things considered, he actually had it pretty good.

That didn't stop the goosebumps from rising on his skin as fear of something unknown and unidentifiable clamped tight around his lungs, squeezing a steady stream of horrified moans through to his larynx, past his lips.

When frightened enough, he stained his gag with cries for Daniel. Please, Daniel, I can't do this— please come back, please—

He always did, eventually, and Vlad was grateful.

"Hey Vlad," Danny whispered against the shell of his ear, one quiet afternoon. He liked to sit with his legs either side of Vlad now, his body much too bulky to play the little spoon. "You're forty six today, five years older than you were when we became a family. Mid-forties. That's a significant number."

Heavy arms encircled his body, hands sliding up to his face and wiggling their way beneath the gag. It popped out with a slick sound, and was quickly set aside so Danny could stuff tissues into Vlad's hands. While Vlad worked on putting a stop to the heavy flow of saliva, Danny unbuckled the blindfold and tugged it away.

Vlad eagerly opened his eyes, before grimacing as the glow of a nearby light bulb he'd completely forgotten was there assaulted his retinas. It hurt, it made him tear up. He blinked rapidly, emitting a low groan.

"D—Dan…" He hadn't uttered a word in years. How own voice sounded foreign to him. "Too light," he managed, just barely. Speaking was like riding a bike, however; once you had learned, you would never forget. He would just have to give his vocal cords some time to adjust.

"It'll get better," Danny assured him, squeezing him close. "Happy Birthday, Vlad."

Vlad opened his eyes again, and the gurney, the walls, the little silver table Danny used to bring in his food — it was all beautiful. He inhaled slowly, in a wet sort of manner, and smiled.

"Th— thank you, Daniel."

He was allowed to wander the castle, now, but he made no attempts to leave. From an outside perspective, he and Danny were a normal family who exchanged normal conversation and normal affection. Danny had even taken him to his college graduation ceremony, allowing him to mingle with the other guests. He hadn't been at all tempted to tell them of the basement and the abuse and nights he'd spent stretched out on that gurney, shivering and terrified of the vast darkness. He didn't want to get Danny in trouble.

Nowadays, he was timid, and he didn't like it outside. When he did leave the castle, it was always at Daniel's suggestion. A long time ago, he might have been claustrophobic, but it was hard to recall things that had taken place beyond the basement. He often couldn't focus long enough to do something as simple as memorize the ingredients for a recipe, nor the recipe itself, so he expected some of the things he 'remembered' were just the fabrications of a damaged mind.

He relished the days Danny fancied placing him in the blindfold and gag almost as much as he feared them. Neither was winning out, at the moment, and he couldn't quite settle on how to respond to the ordeal while in the midst of it. Danny seemed to prefer it when he enjoyed himself, though, so he made a valiant effort to act as if liked being without his vision and speech.

He was often confused as to what he should be feeling, but he ignored it, because he knew this was how things were meant to be.