Blood Blossoms

First, thank you to all of the people who read, reviewed, favorite and followed. I wasn't expecting this to actually be noticed so, thank you all. OK, so I'm gonna try a torture fic. Gonna be pretty gory and a bit depressing, I guess, so I suggest you don't read this one if you can't handle that kind of thing. Also working under the headcanon that every time Danny is electrocuted, he has flashbacks to the accident. (Or ghosts relive their deaths when confronted with the way they died, like flashbacks.) Also, referring to Danny as 'it' when it is mostly Maddie or Jack thinking/acting because I am a sick human being.

They tied it down with thick, glowing metal cuffs around its wrists and ankles. They unzipped its jump suit to the beltline, and pinned it back onto the table. He pulled out a tray carrying all of the instruments necessary for a dissection. "Let's wait a bit, Hun. We should ask it some questions before we get to testing." She suggested. He nodded and set the tray down on a rolling cart. They sat in their chairs and waited.

Danny woke up to the worst headache imaginable. He groaned loudly and heard someone beside him grunt. He tried to pull his hands up to cradle his pounding head, but he found that he couldn't. He jerked his hands a few times before giving up when he started bruising. He opened his eyes and was greeted by a harsh spotlight glaring down at him. he blinked a few times before he was shadowed by two figures standing over him.

"Wh-what's-" he was cut off by a familiar feminine voice

"No questions from you, ghost."

Oh. That's why the voice was so familiar. It was Mom, which made the other-

" Now, ghost kid, we've got some questions for you about ghosts. And you're gonna answer them."

Danny stared at him, "What makes you think so?" he boldly asked

"This." his Father said simply as he pushed a small red button.

A thousand volts of raw, hot electricity tore through him. His body seized up and his mind went black. You've gotta check it out. Pain. You're right. He was being ripped apart. Who knows what cool things could exist on the other side of that portal. Screaming. The feel of a button giving way underneath his fingers.

His Father released the button and sat down beside the table Danny was strapped to.

A single, unnoticed tear leaked out of his eye.

"So, Phantom, how did you die?" his Mother asked with a hard, clinical edge to her voice.

Once his breathing had come back down to normal, he started

"I was electrocuted. It was an accident."

He heard the scratching of a pen on paper before his mother asked another question

"When did you die?"

" About a year ago." This made Maddie and jack stop. This ghost was only a year old. He was already one of the most powerful ghosts out there and his core was still immature, he was still growing. The thought of Phantom being more powerful than he already was made them shiver. Faintly, in the back of their minds, they felt sorry for the ghost, who had died so young and so recently.

The questions continued for the better part of an hour, with Phantom being shocked five more times. They moved on to the dissection.

They had removed a sample of the "liver" they'd found. The rest was just made of ectoplasm, anyway, and they could always go back and get some more now that they had the source. They'd had to muzzle Phantom not even five minutes into the procedure because it was screaming so much and they didn't want to wake up Jazz. Phantom was staring blankly at the ceiling from behind the mask that covered the lower half of his face and wrapped stiffly around the back of his head, with-what was that? Sweat? Tears? No, ghosts can't cry- dripping from his face.

"Hey-Mads, I've got an idea."

"Yes, Jack?"

"Well, one of my ancestors, John Fenton-Nightingale discovered a way to keep ghosts trapped. I've heard stories about it all my life, but now we have a chance to test it."

"What is it?"

"Blood Blossoms."They heard Phantom grunt and struggle.

They're these flowers that look a lot like roses. Ghosts can't even stand being near them."

"Where are we going to get some blood blossoms right now, Jack? It's almost midnight."

"I saw some in the flower shop. They were outside. We could go in, grab 'em, leave some cash, then go."

"I don't know, Jack. I don't want to break any laws."

"C'mon Mads! We'd leave money and everything.I've wanted to test this since I was little."

Maddie smiled at her childish husband with a small smile on her face.

"Alright, Jack. You go get them. I'll stay here and clean up a little bit."

"Okay Mads. Be back in a few." He bounded happily up the steps from the lab as Maddie turned and started wiping Phantom's ectoplasm into the drain. Phantom tried yelling something to her, but she ignored it, if she'd heard it at all.

When Jack had returned and Maddie had finished cleaning, they sat down and took some final notes on their experiment before Jack ran upstairs to grab the huge, darkly colored bush, covered in dark red, almost purple flowers. Maddie was poised to take notes on Phantom's reaction.

They immediately got one. Phantom started grunting and twisting, trying to get away from the discomfort. The closer Jack came with the bush, the more Phantom struggled. Jack was one foot away from Phantom, and it was screaming, red smoke was slowly rising from its body.

Maddie clipped a flower off and dropped it onto Phantom's exposed skin. Its skin bubbled and burned. The sickly sweet smell of burnt ectoplasm wafted through the air. Maddie removed the blossom and clipped others, laying them around the edge of the room. Luckily, Phantom hadn't noticed.

Maddie and Jack walked over to the control desk in a corner of the lab and released Phantom. The muzzle clattered to the floor with a loud clang and Phantom tumbled off of the table. It balanced itself weakly against the table, and looked at Maddie and Jack.

"Y-you're letting me go?"

They said nothing, and made their way upstairs. Glancing at the clock on her way up, Maddie sighed. It was 7 am. Her children were already up. Or, at least, Jazz was.

Jazz was sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and reading a book by the time they got up there.

"Is your brother up?" Maddie asked. Jazz swallowed her toast nervously and replied "Yeah. He already left for school. He wanted to ask a teacher something"

Maddie nodded and started making some coffee. She poured herself a cup and sat down.

A loud, horrific scream shook through the house. Jazz dropped her coffee and, before Maddie could stop her, sprinted into the basement.

Jazz locked the lab door, turned around and saw her brother with a poorly stitched gaping hole in his chest leaking ectoplasm, red tendrils of smoke curling from his shaking body. His screams were scratchy and hoarse.

She ran forward and pulled him into the center of the lab, away from another source of red smoke, the blossoms.

"Danny-Danny y-you have to tell me what to do. What hurts?"

"Y-you have to destroy them. The f-flowers." he said in a pathetic, barely audible, cracking voice.

Jazz looked around for an invention that could get rid of the flowers. She spotted some gasoline in a heap of junk that Jack had used to power some inventions that couldn't run on ectoplasm. She rooted around in some drawers before finding a matchbox. She ran around the room and poured the gasoline on the flowers and quickly lit a match and threw it down. The fire raged on, luckily not lighting the metal walls of the lab. Danny had recovered from the flowers, but was still tortured by the Y-shaped scar that was slowly closing over his chest.

"Are you alright, Danny?"

"Y-yeah, Jazz. I'm fine. Let's get out of here." Danny stood up and limped over to his sister, put a hand on her shoulder, and phased her out of the house.

Maddie and Jack saw the smoke coming from under the doorway to the lab and called the fire department. Fentonworks was saved, but the relationship between the children and their parents burned. Danny stopped speaking around them, preferring to keep his head down. Jazz was short and cold with them.

They never knew what they did wrong.