Me: Just as a formality, I don't own the computer I'm typing on or the chair I'm sitting in, much less Danny Phantom. First fan fiction, so please read & review!

Overlapped Lives

Chapter 1

Phantom

I sat on the edge of the cliff, the one right outside of my town. When I finally let myself relax, I felt the large lump on the side of my head that Rick, my stepfather, gave me.

My life has always been crazy. My father died when I was five. A few months later, Mom was married to Rick. I don't know why. I guess she wanted a guy in her life, and she doesn't know what waiting means. Anyway, at first, he was nice enough, in a rough sort of way. Then things took a turn for the worse. He lost his job and started drinking, then loosing his temper on us. I knew what people think when people see me, Danny, a blond 16-year-old boy with my bright green eyes, made to seem even brighter by the bruises: 'Yeah, that's what that dumb punk deserves. Getting into fights, I'll reckon.' Nope.

I watched the sun go down behind my California town. It's so peaceful here, not like how it was at home…

All of a sudden, I noticed motorcycles driving up my cliff. I turned. It was some of Rick's buddies, coming to rough me up again. One of them came up to me, grabbed my shirt. I kicked him hard. He spat out, cussing. I smelled the distinct scent of booze on their breath. Rick was there. He walked up to me, pushed me, and I kept on falling back into the air. I hit something, and then everything went black…

I watched the ambulance take my body away. It's really strange, watching what was once you get carried away to the morgue.

After that, I went to the police station. I heard one of the cops say that there was going to be an investigation for my death. From what people said, it sounded like they thought I had commited suicide. They still were going to question Mom, though.

She'll tell them. She'll finally tell somebody about the Rick nobody else sees: the Rick that drinks, pulls Mom's hair whenever I didn't get home on time, hit me...then killed me.

Or, at least, that's what I thought.

I floated through the door of the questioning room just to hear Mom say 'No. Rick never left the house last night. We were watching a late-night movie. Danny was...we thought he was out playing football with his friends.'

I flew through the door of Mom and Rick's room. Mom betrayed me for..for ... him. She loves the man who beats her more than me.

I felt an uncontrollable rage run through me. This must be how Rick feels when he beat me.

They're going to live a life together. Mom, you've made your choice, but that doesn't mean you can't start it screwed.

And I set about destroying the house. I won't bore you with all of the things I did. But I'll say this: mirrors were smashed. Rick's beer and other foul-smelling liquids and crumbling items were smeared into the carpet, splashed haphazardly on the walls, and drizzled onto the electronics. Furniture...Phones... Credit cards...everything got the same type of treatment.Even the unpaidbills that I put through the blender and slopped all overthe remains of the kitchen table.

Except for my stuff. Those I kept intact, as a strong indicator as to the culprit.The only changesI made to my stuffwas my computer.I changed the password to p.247 of Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers.The whole page. In Binary (that's all of those 1s and 0s). And you can't use the computer unless you know the password, even if you reset the settings. And to change the password, you have to know the old one. Beat that, you illiterate child/wife beater!

I had no friends to do this for me. Nobody would do this kind of thing for revenge. Except me.

I was just about to rig it so as soon as they come in the back door they'd get a bucket of beer on them from above when I heard a small voice say "Danny?"

I turned from where I was floating. There was Mom with Rick right behind her.

"Danny...why are you doing this? Don't you love us?"

God. I never thought my Mom could be such an idiot. "No," I shouted, throwing the bucket at them. But mainly at Rick.

Mom looked really hurt. I took a deep breath and tried to calmly say "You had a choice, Mom. Him or me. You chose him. I can't forgive that. So you can just GO TO HELL WITH HIM!" My voice had raised to a scream by then. I turned and flew through the roof. And I never looked back.

I stood over my casket and watched Mom cry. Rick didn't, of course, but he was making a good show of comforting Mom. I looked around, surprised not to see more people there. It was only Mom, Dad, and the minister. I hovered, listening to the man say some stuff about how I would be welcomed by the angels in Heaven. I wanted to say 'Hey man, I'm dead and I don't see any Heaven or Hell from here.', but I knew he wouldn't hear me. Or, if he could, he would deny it.

Suddenly, I saw a light in the corner of my vision. I turned and, there in front of me, was that bright tunnel all of those people brought back talked about. I stepped toward it, then hesitated. I turned and kicked my ghostly foot at Rick's butt. He only shivered from the blast of cold air hitting him, but it made me feel better. I flew through the tunnel to find out what lay beyond.

…And, about five months later, I was waiting in a line. You would have thought that you didn't have to wait to find out whether or not you're going to spend an eternity in Hell; but there I was. I saw a load of people there, all ages, sizes, and stories. There were an amazing amount of people who didn't look like they should've died: children, teenagers like myself, and some people who looked like they hadn't even hit thirty. Kind of depressing, now that I think about it.

Finally, after who knows how long, I was at the head of the line.

The guy at the Book of Names (I also heard people call it the Who-Dunnit-List) was nothing like what I expected: he was short, fat, and bald, and had a dirty, scraggly beard, like some sort of bum. But, by then, I was used to things not being what I expected.

I told him my name, and he took his darn time turning all of those pages and looking at the tiny print I could see from looking at it upside down. His eyebrows turned up. Bad sign. He ran down the list again, this time using his finger to keep track of his place. He looked at me straight in the eye and said it. "I'm sorry kid, but you don't seem to be on the list to die. Go back to your body."

I tried to explain to him that I was dead, I'd been dead for five months, and that I couldn't go back to my body because it probably had maggots eating it by then from being six feet under so long. He was pretty insistent on that I was alive. He even showed me the list of people who died the day I did and pointed to where I should have been. I wasn't there. We had this argument all day and night until some other angel grabbed me by the ghostly remains of my shirt and bodily lobbed me down from heaven back onto earth.

Since it was pretty obvious I wouldn't be very welcome if I went up there again (and I didn't know where hell was), I flew toward the large city that I saw on the horizon. I went a lot faster than I would have gone if I was alive: I seemed to be going more than a mile a minute. I stopped in front of the sign that said WELCOME TO AMITY PARK and everything about how nice it would be to have me here. Looked like as good a place to haunt as any.

I floated down the streets, looking at all of the houses like a would-be homeowner would, looking for a place. I didn't see a lot of ghosts floating around, which bothered me some. 'Why wouldn't a ghost want to haunt here?' I thought, 'Seems like an ordinary town.'

But I soon forgot about that when I floated past the elementary school. In the corner of the playground, where the teachers couldn't see, this big blond boy (big for a five-year-old, that is) was picking on a smaller black-haired kid.

Now that just ticked me off. I flew through the chain-linked fence and was about to rough that little bullying punk up when I saw the look in the smaller kid's eyes: he looked like he wanted to roll over and die. Before I died, that probably would have stung me into hitting other kid even harder than i was going to, but now it made me stop. The kid didn't need someone to beat up everyone who picked on him; he looked like he needed a friend more than anything. And that was exactly what I was going to give to him.