Author: This is the second in my series of shorts. We get to see Danny's return through another perspective.
Disclaimer: I'm tired of coming up with witty disclaimers--Danny Phantom isn't mine. The end.
4 Years
It was nearly debilitating, losing a son.
True, it was a shock discovering that my little boy was the same as the ghost child, but, in a way, I wonder how I didn't see it before. When he was whisked away on that circus train, I thought nothing of it—it was just the ghost child escaping, and good riddance to the nuisance.
It wasn't until my boy never came home that evening that I felt something was wrong. Two days later, when I discovered that my son was the ghost boy and he was doing so many horrible things...I wanted to stop him, for his sake.
At first, I saw him as needing to be stopped before he hurt others.
Then I saw him needing to be stopped before he hurt himself.
Then it became the need to see him returned to his Self.
Time and experience changes things. I wanted my son back so badly, but no matter how hard I tried, it was as if nothing got through the suggestion of the crystal ball that held his will captive.
I looked in his eyes once and saw nothing but a void. I saw something that was nearly soulless in its lack of volition. He was unable to make his own choices, and for that reason I pitied him and wanted him to go back to being who he was.
A knock at my door makes me wonder. Very few people knock anymore—if they are coming to us, they are usually quite desperate and don't bother with such pleasantries as knocking. I check the screen near it to see if it is a ghost playing at being a person, and see the strangest readings. When a human is possessed by a ghost, the reading is comes out as entirely ghost with a human shape. This one, however...is as if I am looking at a melding of a ghost and a human. But...how is that possible? A human with ghost genetics or a ghost with human genetics were the only things I could think of that would have such a structure.
Quickly on the heels of that thought is a memory of my daughter saying that she thought she may have freed Danny from the spell he had been under.
I rip open the doorway to see him—him?—standing awkwardly before me. My hand is on my gun as I look him over. I know that I should be thinking things through, running tests to make certain he is my son, but somehow...somehow I know. Perhaps it is the guilt in his eyes, telling me that even though it appears that he has reverted to who he once was, it is only superficial. He experienced everything these past 4 years. The emptiness I saw that time was to protect me from what he knew he was doing.
The first words out of his mouth as he stepped through the door were: "I'm sorry...and I love you."