With all of these so far I've just murged Danny Phantom into the Gundam Wing timeline. Lets see how else we could do this. :)
Summary: There are some bonds nothing can break. Not even Time itself.
Story #6
Death in the Family
By Patience Memory
In this farewell,
There's no blood, there's no alibi,
I've drawn regret,
From the truth of a thousand lies…
— What I've Done
A sharp gasp of breath cut through the absolute still of the bedroom, sheets rustling as a young woman jerked into a sitting position as quickly as her swollen belly would allow, her violet eyes darting around the room as if searching for some hidden danger. The man lying beside her gave a grunt when the mattress moved and the woman stilled, straining her ears to catch the sound of his breathing. She reached out towards him and brushed her fingertips across his back, assuring herself of his presence. Her other hand came to rest firmly on her stomach, where her unborn child rested and she shut her eyes and breathed. After a time her gasps for air had stilled, slowing until her breath was unidentifiable from her husband's.
She smiled thinly, and let her hand fall from her husband, bringing it up to brushed her light brown hair out of her a young face strained into something older than her twenty-eight years.
"Silly." She whispered at herself. "It's just a silly dream, Maddie. Go back to sleep."
But she didn't. Instead she swept the blanket off her legs and swung them over the side of the bed, bringing herself to her feet and moving towards the door.
Her bare feet padded noiselessly down the hall of her home as she moved from the master bedroom to one of the two doorways giving off the soft glow of nightlights through the slightly opening between the door and the frame. She pressed gently against it, and peered into the room. She could see the slumbering form of her two year old daughter on the low bed, the red headed child's face scrunched in response to a dream of her own. Maddie smiled, something in her heart unclenching at the sight of her daughter, safe and sound.
She eased the door closed, still smiling faintly as she rested her head against the wood, her tense muscles relaxing in relief. After a moment of silence she pushed herself upright, cradling her belly again as she made her way to her son's room. Slowly she pushed at the door, mindful of waking her child, and leaned forward so that she could see clearly.
Her eyes flew wide open and her body tensed.
"What are you doing!"
The figure leaning over her son's crib spun at her shout, his dark robe twisting around his form as he regarded her with eyes that glowed with a haunting red light, a striking silhouette against the backdrop of swirling green glowing behind him.
He raised his chin in the focus of her horrified eyes and nodded, sharply yet almost sadly at her pregnant belly.
"Send your son my regrets." He said, and stepped backwards into the portal with her sleeping child held snug against his chest.
She lunged forward, just as a pair of clock hands appeared, spinning over the green energy, the rip in reality closing in their wake, the portal disappearing completely in moments and leaving Maddie grabbing at air in the sudden darkness.
The night air fractured under the intensity of her scream.
Fifteen years, two months later…
Danny Fenton huffed, slumping down into the light gray of his seat and staring blankly out the front window of the Specter Speeder through his crazy bangs. "You know, this isn't how I envisioned spending my fifteenth birthday. I was thinking… more cake," he said dryly, "And less crazy ghost escapades."
The teenager sitting in the seat behind him cast a glance at the thermos lying innocently on the seat next to her and snorted, pushing a piece of raven black hair behind her ear with darkly painted nails. "Well, you should have expected crazy ghost escapades," Sam said practically, leaning over the seat and catching her best friend's eye as he turned his head towards her. "And when has your life ever been like you envisioned?"
The ghost fighter sighed, another wisp of cold air leaving his lips as they passed an island of rock floating in the gloomy green and black of the Ghost Zone. With an irritated gesture he waved the puff of icy breath away from his face, his expression distinctly put out. "You do have a point. Still, it's my birthday! Couldn't I get a vacation? Just for one day?"
The African-American teen piloting the vehicle chucked quietly before shooting Danny an amused look. "Stop me if I'm wrong, dude," Tucker drawled, "but that wouldn't really help, would it? Most of your vacations end with you in mortal peril anyways."
"And it's too much to ask for a vacation from mortal peril?" Danny sniped.
Tucker smirked. "Yeah, probably."
Sam patted the slumping Halfa on the shoulder. "In case you haven't noticed, fate doesn't seem to like you very much. Sorry Danny."
He groaned, dropping his head into his hands and raking his pale fingers through his mess of black hair. "All this stress… I'm gonna go bald before I'm thirty." He moaned.
"Or have a heart attack." Tucker added cheerfully. Sam leaned over to his side of the Speeder and smacked him soundly on the back of the head.
Danny shot his oldest friend an exasperated glare before ignoring him. "Okay, back to business. Where are we going to dump this thing?"
Tucker shrugged. "No clue. You're the ghost in this outfit; I'm just the technical support. Haven't you come across a… a ghost pound, or something?"
Danny frowned thoughtfully. "I could hoist it off on Walker-" Sam swiftly turned toward him and gave Danny a slap on the back of the head to match Tucker's. "Ow!" He scowled, reaching up to cradle his abused cranium before turning to the tech geek. "Why did we let her sit in the back again?" he asked.
"So she can't punch arms." Tucker quipped back.
"We are not giving him to Walker." Sam interrupted, frowning severely at the two boys in front of her. "There has to be a way to keep him in the Ghost Zone and out of Amity Park without locking him in a cage. He can't help causing massive explosions!"
"He?" Danny twisted in his seat to see Sam better. "It's a he now? It's an exploding blob of flame, Sam."
"And if you were him, would you like being called an it just because you were an exploding blob of flame?" Sam challenged.
"I wouldn't care," the Halfa said frankly. "Seeing I could still blow everyone up whether they called me an 'it' or not."
"You should care!" Sam exclaimed, throwing her hands up. "You can't just… look at someone and decide they don't deserve an identity because they don't fit your standards!"
"Sam…" Danny said tentatively. "It's-" the Goth glared. "He's a ghost. He doesn't need an identity; he just needs his obsession. And his obsession is blowing things up. That makes him dangerous. So we use anything we have to make sure he isn't anymore; even locking him in a cage." The fifteen year olds stern expression softened. "But we'll try to find another way first." He promised.
Sam looked like she wanted to say more, but subsided, leaning back and nodding her consent.
The Halfa cleared his throat. "So, any other ideas?" He shot Sam a smile. "Other than naming the exploding blob?"
Her frown melted into a devilish smile. "Oh, I don't know, that sounds like a good idea to me… How about Fluffy? What do you think, Tucker?"
Danny's light blue eyes widened, horrified. "No!" he ordered. "You are not naming a ghost! And not Fluffy!"
Tucker laughed at the disturbed look on Danny's face. "I agree. Fluffy is too common." He smirked. "How about Fatman?" He ducked Sam's good natured swipe for his hat expertly, grinning.
Danny opened his mouth to retaliate but decided against it, turning forward and slumping against his seat again. "Fine, I give up." He sighed. "Any more ideas about where to put Fatman the Explosive?"
Sam and Tucker traded victorious grins before Sam shrugged. "Not really."
"We could strap him to a rocket and ship him off to space." Tucker suggested.
Danny snorted. "Right, and leave him out there for someone's spaceship to crash into. That would be fun."
Tucker shrugged. "It's not like there's a lot of spaceships to crash into him up there."
"There could be, someday." Danny insisted. "What if they build space colonies? And Fatman ended up in the way of some… transport route or something. "
Tucker gave him a tolerant look, a smile tickling at his mouth. "Space colonies? You gotta admit Danny, out of all your space imaginings that one's a bit unlikely."
Danny crossed his arms, shrugging. "You're talking to a half-ghost, half- human superhero. Anything's possible." He said.
Tucker hummed noncommittally. "So if space is out because you feel the need to protect your science fiction dreams, what's left?"
Danny's reply was cut off when Sam grabbed both boy's shoulders with an iron grip, her eyes sharp with adrenaline and fixed on something in front of them. "TUCKER! DIVE!"
Tucker gasped half in shock half in pain from the fingers digging into his shoulder as an island, shadowed in a way that had hid it until it was dangerously close, appeared as if from nowhere before him eyes. For a fraction a second he was relieved, ready to remind his friend that humans could pass right through ghostly objects… until he remembered the highly explosive ectoplasmic entity held in a thermos in the back seat. Fatman was a ghost. The Fenton Thermos was made to contain and repel ghostly energy; if it was occupied by a ghost, neither would phase through the obstruction. Though the Speeder would pass through the rock, the thermos would not, and if the impact broke it open while they were still in range, the chances of them surviving Fatman's detonation was very slim.
Tucker wretched the controller downwards with a frightened grunt and slammed his feet down flat on the pedals, throwing the rockets into full throttle. He could feel the engine shuddering under his hands as he pushed the Speeder against its previous momentum. For one horrible moment they were still, held in a pretense of motionlessness as two laws of physics fought for control of the craft. And then they were free, shooting down, the top of the speeder passing a few inches through the rock as they dropped under it.
And straight towards a chunk of stone which had been floating underneath.
There was no time. Danny reacted, the white rings of light passing over his body in a half-second flash at the same moment he grabbed the Thermos through the seat, turning his body to shield the container as they reached the formation. He choked on a scream as he hit the rock his friends passed harmlessly through. He curled around his enemy's prison as unneeded reflexes sent him into a coughing fit, his mind insisting the hit should have knocked the breath from him. He rolled onto his side when he was done, blinking the stars from his eyes. The spinning green of a natural portal met his dazed gaze. If he had been a little bit more to his left he would have gone straight through it. He stared for a moment before forcing his mind back onto the situation at hand.
Danny looked down through white hair at the thermos clutched to his chest. With hands still shaking from the force of the impact with the rock he loosened his grasp and tuned the device over, revealing a paper thin crack leaking a haunting green light. A crack that birthed more cracks as the thermos's prisoner pushed against the weakness.
"…Oh no." He whispered.
"Danny!" Sam's voice rang through the Speeder's Comm. System. Danny's head shot to his right, his panicked green eyes catching the Specter Speeder turning towards him.
"NO!" he yelled.
The metal fractured under his fingers. Danny gasped in pain as bits of twisted metal bit into his arms and face. He threw himself away, coming to float between the dissipating smoke that had been the thermos and the Speeder, which had heard his yell, and was now trying to get out of the danger zone. He barred his teeth, one white gloved hand pressed against a cut on his upper forearm as his mind raced. Fatman was hard enough to capture the first time. With all this ecto-energy to feed off of…
The smoke cleared. A mass of green energy, twisting and buckling like fire roared before him. Blood red eyes lifted, a gaze of pure rage locking on the form of the wounded protected before moving to the vehicle fleeing behind the Half-Ghost. Malicious triumph sprang from the being's core as it pulled its fire in, compacting it, building it, until-
A fierce blur of black and white plunged into its center with the force of a freight train, sending both ghosts backwards, right through the natural portal.
Danny threw Fatman away from him as he emerged on the other side of the rift rolling quickly onto his back and throwing burned hands in front of him, palms up, in the single moment Fatman needed to reorient itself.
Raging eyes locked on him just as his green ecto-shield appeared between him and the threat, and then the world exploded in blinding light, deafening sound, and searing pain.
The force smashed into Danny's barrier, throwing him into the ground below and crushing him against it as the blast continued to escalate. The heat bit at his injured hands and forearms through the shield they held, and he squeezed his eyes shut and endured the pain until he couldn't anymore. He loosed a scream as a pair of white rings appeared around his waist. He fought as they separated, fighting for every inch, yet they continued until both shield and ghost form disappeared, leaving his prone body human and vulnerable to be ravaged by the torrent of heat.
And then it was over. The trees around him were burning, adding the smoke of green wood to the sick odor of burnt skin and hair which rose in a mushroom shaped cloud of black smoke into the sky.
A young boy lay in a torched crater, his arms torso and half his face charred black and one leg twisted unnaturally under him, breathing in short painful gasps. Blood leaked from one corner of his mouth.
He cracked one eye open to squint at a clear blue sky; no sign of the portal. The blast had to have destroyed it.
Sam and Tucker were safe.
His eye closed and his head lulled to the side as he gave in to unconsciousness, a small almost peaceful smile on his burned face.
Violet eyes shot open in a quiet room on the Space Colony L2. A roughly calloused hand took the edge of the blanket the young man was lying under and ripped it off, freeing his legs. He twisted off the twin bed and into a crouch, his messy braid of brown hair flopping down after him. There was no one else in the room.
Stealthy as a cat the ex-Gundam Pilot stood, swiping his gun from under his pillow and gliding to the door. After a moment listening he eased it open and ghosted down the hall, his weapon held at ready before him. He glided through the entire house before he stopped beside the door across from his. It stood slightly ajar, letting out the faint light of the old computer that seemed to almost always get left on. He pushed against the door gently with his shoulder, his gun held point down before him.
A young woman lay curled up under her sheets, a thin hand pressed into her mussed dark hair. With a faint smile Duo eased the door shut, leaning his forehead against the wood as his muscles relaxed.
"Silly." He whispered at himself.
There was no threat. Hilde was safe and no one had entered the house. Duo didn't even remember having a dream that could have caused his sudden paranoia.
So why did he still have the unnerving sensation that he wasn't alone?
So one day while Pat was watching Gundam Wing she realized that Duo Maxwell looked a whole lot like Maddie Fenton. So she clapped her hands in fan-girl glee and said "Oh! What a coincidence!" A comment which a passing plot bunny heard, and decided he needed to correct. So he promptly grabbed ahold of her ankle, saying "Silly girl! There is no such thing as coincidence in Fanfiction!" And after working out how in the world he could be telling the truth, she wrote this. The end.
I REALLY like this one; and it's almost completely plotted out! It's also the first I thought of... Please tell me what you think! Review! I love them so much!