Responses To Reviews, Revenge Of The Sequel!

Codiak: And now I feel bad for giving Dexter a bit part in this. DX

Midnayuki: Well, my face is now beet red. I feel honored that you would even think that, let alone say it in a review. I hope the ending doesn't disappoint!

XoX Bloody Alice T. T: I tried to get this chapter out quickly since my last upload took so long. I hope that helps! I feel terrible about the schedule slip and I hope this makes up for it.

Invader Johnny: Oh, really? In a story this dark, you think that's a given? Well, we'll see about that! ;D

Valid User Name: I laughed when I realized that. Thanks for pointing that out. God, I love my reviewers.

Dragon Dancer 123: Typos are a natural byproduct of my work. XD I'll try and go fix it later.

Well, it's the finale, folks. It clocks in at just under 4000 words, and I hope it doesn't disappoint. Lord knows I tried, but it may be a little rushed regardless. Hopefully this doesn't strike anyone as a Deus Ex Machina.


You think you're the first human to try this? To try to fake as if you don't fear me? It didn't save Kralie, it didn't save Strahm, it didn't even save your mother. In the end, the only one who ever managed to avoid being killed by me was the one who destroyed his own memories, and what life does he now live? A life of running, fear without reason, no love, no friends, not even a solid idea of what his name is.

A man, in his early twenties, huddled in the corner of an abandoned building. His hair was already completely gray despite his age. His large, expressive dark brown eyes were dead and empty. He stared blankly past his cracked glasses, drawing his black coat closer around himself. His skin was pale, the color of an undernourished third-world citizen, and his hands were calloused. He dared not light a fire, not with police so close. One thing he knew, even without his memory, was that he could never be caught. He could never be near anyone. Even if his concious mind didn't remember Slender Man, his subconscious did. The knowledge that talking to a person about Slender Man enabled Him to manifest before them meant that he would always fear people without knowing why. He couldn't risk social contact. He couldn't risk spreading the dark plague. But because he didn't remember that part of his life, he didn't know that was why he was doing this. He was afraid of the world, shy of humanity, on the run, without knowing why he was running or living in the shadow of fear. He sighed, his cold breath forming a cloud in the air. Outside, it was beginning to snow again. It was so thick it was up to his knees in many spots.

Yet he sprang to his feet and ran anyway, scared by the form of his fellow homeless white trash. He bolted like a frightened deer, running until he collapsed, nearly twenty blocks away. He fell to his hands and knees, his breathing heavy and shallow, tears tumbling down his cheeks. They formed ice droplets when they hit the ground. He sobbed and smashed his fist against the ice angrily, but all he succeeded in doing was drawing blood. Slowly, he rose and continued on his way, slumping up against the wall of an alley next to a heater vent. In the quiet night Danny could see Christmas lights and hear people laughing. They didn't notice the lanky figure curled up on the ground. Or they chose not to.

This is their victory. The human who 'beat' me. Your champion is a broken piece of trash laying discarded in the alley. You don't think he tried what you're trying? But you can't lie to your subconscious. Some part of you will always fear me, and thus give me power. I let him live because his life is now not worth taking. And your mother...

Her hair, long and down, flew behind her as she ran, muttering to herself. "He's not real, he can't get me, he's a myth, a myth, a story, like Cinderella or Moth Man. The Nokta are real, the Deqoqri are real, the Fari are real, ghosts are real, and that's it. That's it that's it that's it."

Danny was in her arms. His stomach twisted; this was his own memory. He remembered the sharp smell of her dark tan jacket. It was animal hide of some kind, a gift from Jocasta. It smelled of his cigarettes and her sweat. He had clutched her and buried his face in her chest, too scared to look anymore. He didn't want to see anymore monsters. Mommy said she wasn't going to let them get him. She knew a place where he would safe forever. They were going to go to the nice people. It was all going to be okay. Mommy promised. The ice cracked under her boots as she made a beeline through the trees, over fences, through yards. Subtlety was lost. The only thing that mattered was saving Danny. Tree branches that might have been Slender Man's tendrils tore at her sleeves and face, but it didn't even register. Andra was past caring what happened to her. The Nokta were on the rise. Not Slender Man. He was a myth, just an urban legend, a scary story, and an old forgotten one at that. Nobody really believed in him other than little children and she wasn't a child, she was up to her neck in real world problems. Bills, homelessness, single motherhood - that kind of thing. She had real problems to take care of. There was no Slender Man and if He did exist He had to take a number because she was damn busy.

She reached the Fenton's doorstep. What followed was a blur of shouting and then sobbing, hysterical broken sobbing. Andra collasped into Jack, begging, pleading for him to take 'Dandan', and Danny was crying, reaching for her, but she turned away, her face hidden by her long hair. It covered her like a curtain, and brushed against his cheeks as she knelt to kiss him gently on the top of the head before turning to leave. Jack was offering her money, shelter, help, and she was off again, fleeing into the darkness, crying so hard she could barely see where she was going. She ran until the terrible sounds of her son crying were behind her, and too weak to keep up any mental barrier against Him, she fell limp as a rag doll into His arms.

"What did you do to my mother?" Danny whispered, barely able to speak.

I used her as a Hollow Proxy. You have seen them. They are excellent tools to further me in my goals. I used her to exacerbate the Nokta situation rather than stop it. It kept the meddlers in Afterworld busy while I made my preparations. Time flows differently for me. I am in many worlds at once. I am in none permanently. Doors can be opened, never closed, but Kralie did manage to shut the door to me temporarily by murdering my Proxies - his friends, his family, his own wife. This would not have been enough to stop me, but his mind wiped itself of knowledge of my existance. He may see me in a tree or cloud or branch, but it's a ghost of an image. It's not enough to let me back in yet. One day he'll recover his memories and I will be back, forever. A lack of Proxies is not even a temporary solution without a total lack of remembrance of me. So you see, your only plausible defeat of me involves killing the girl, her man, and yourself. And you do not have the courage to do those things. A man like Kralie is one in a million worlds.

Kill himself? To save the world? And kill Rashmi, poor bullied and downtrodden Rashmi, a foreigner in a strange land, the best thing to ever happen to Dash? She was the only one who ever looked at Dash as a person. Even Danny, for all his bitching about stereotypes, hadn't down that. He hadn't reached out to the blond. When someone finally bothered, Dash revealed himself not to be a monster. He was pressured to succeed from every direction, used for his popularity, ignored at home until he brought home trophies. He was completely alone until he found his fellow lone wolf in the crowd. Now that he was finally even the tiniest bit happy, Danny had to... if he wanted to save the world, he had to kill him. He had to kill a middle school girl whose life was just beginning, a girl unmoved by the social caste of American society. He had to end his own life. Dying scared him, he realized with a start. It scared him more than murder did, because murder wasn't an uncertain thing. Where would he go when he died? The Ghost Zone? Afterworld? Heaven? Hell? He didn't know anymore what would happen, if he'd ever known. The idea repulsed him.

But... everyone was depending on him...

Do you know what I have done, Phantom? Do you know how many lives I have taken? It was easy as snuffing out a candle. You cannot defeat me.

So much blood. Children ripped in half, adults split open from head to abdomen, whole families slaughtered together. But there was no purpose, no eating of the flesh or revenge. This was just malice, anger, hate, sadism - all that was dark coming together in one being. He tortured them, following, gathering their fear as raw power, and then He lashed out, destroying them. Sometimes He just appeared in front of their cars to make them crash, or used a tendril to cut their brakes. Sometimes He burned their houses around them. Sometimes He made one a Proxy and had them kill their own children, parents, siblings, waking up with blood on their hands and horror in their hearts as the police pounded on the door. He made them kill themselves, He wiped their memories, He possessed them and sent them after strangers and friends alike. He stole people away and left the families forever wondering. He had never been caught, because police couldn't fathom what they were dealing with.

The rumors spread, and with it came an increase in His power, until they were cowering in fear of Him. He ruled a land of blood and darkness, Proxies, loss, pain, sacrifices and broken people. When He conquered one world He simply moved on. Danny didn't have a prayer. But...

But Alex Kralie had beaten Him. It had cost him everything, taken everything he had, and he'd had to do unspeakable things, but the point was it could be done. He was not an undefeatable monster. He wasn't some eldritch ebomination. He was physical, mortal, and had a weakness. His weakness was an inability to understand humankind. Humans could never be beaten, not entirely. Even totalatarian regimes had their resistance, because there was no way to buy off everyone, to break every single human being. There would always be resistance. Danny was filled with the revelatory knowledge that, somewhere out there in those conquered worlds, there were humans fighting back. There were people standing up and saying enough was enough, that they would not be intimidated. If Kralie could win, human, mortal, unarmed, with only his wits, then damn it, Danny could too! It had already been done, and if he couldn't win the fight alone he would strike a blow so hard and deep Slender Man would take decades to recover from it.

"NO!" he screamed angrily, clenching his fists. "You will not hurt my world! You cannot hurt us! You cannot touch us! I refuse to let you! Go ahead and try to brainwash me if it makes you feel better! It won't help! My dimension is stronger than the others, filled with good people, honest people. Sure they may have their fears, but in the end they put it all aside when lives are on the line! Striking me down will only make people rise up against you harder than ever before! Go ahead and spread your name here so that the ghost hunters, Nokta and ghostly spirits can all rise up against you and beat you senseless! My mother didn't die in vain, she died keeping you away, didn't she? Because you took control of her, but you couldn't make her spread rumors of you. Otherwise you'd have come through to this world long ago. It took you nearly ten years after she kicked your sorry ass to even get another breakthrough. Now I'm going to double her record!"

His fist burned with white flames so bright they made the night day. Slender Man shrunk back, collapsing on the ground. That is not possible. You would have to be Nokta to-

"I am. You miscalculated - but that's a pretty regular occurrence for ego maniacs like you, isn't it?" Danny smirked. "Hey, my one liners are back! Life's looking up, isn't it?"

You cannot hope to beat me with this new power. The Nokta would have done it long before you if that were all it took.

"Save the psychobabble for someone who cares," Danny replied, white fire burning higher. "This? This isn't me faking myself out or giving myself a mental pep talk. This is me killing you. You'd better hope God's not real, or He'll be pissed when you get there."

And with that he shoved his hands forward, white hot power flowing through him as naturally as breathing. The world lit up, the house catching fire all around him, as the Slender Man teleported over to the nearest door. He turned His blank face towards Danny briefly, then chuckled lowly. This is not over, Phantom.

Danny threw a bolt of fire at Him, but He vanished into the night. Danny flew over, yanked open the door to reveal a thick forest, and let loose a torrential wave of flame that flooded the whole area. Then he slammed the door shut, held it against someone pulling it on the other side, and, when the pulling stopped and the heat increased to unbearable proportions, he collapsed in the burning house, detransforming on the spot. The black haired boy smiled contentedly in his sleep as the fire formed a perfect circle around him, keeping him safe. The fire department found Danny Fenton there alongside a slew of other people who didn't remember a thing. The oddest thing was how few burns he had on him, but the Fentons were happy to have their son back and the investigators were happy to leave it at that.


He told the police he couldn't remember anything, which Tomor didn't buy but didn't press him on. Vlad seemed relieved to see Danny, though the teen couldn't fathom why. Mayor Masters also announced he would be beefing up the police department and expanding it in size, which Danny took to be a token act to gain the public's approval. Sam and Tucker tackled Danny the second he was out of the hospital and demanded an explanation. He told them later that morning, sitting on Sam's bed, talking in hushed tones. He meant to just tell them about Slender Man and the Nokta, but everything came out. Andra, her angelic smile, her leaving him with the Fentons, her laying down her life to keep them safe. Alex Kralie's horrible act of protection against the forces of evil. Jocasta. The little ghost boy. Baxael. Everything spilled out. Sam held one of his hands and Tucker placed a hand on his shoulder while he rambled. In the end they agreed not to talk about it again unless he wanted to, and that was that.

Danny introduced his parents to Naran Pashki and said she'd helped him remember things. It was true, to a fault, but he didn't tell them about being part Nokta. Not that he didn't trust them to believe him or love him, but he didn't want to relive the horrors of the past anymore. He didn't want to talk about his mother because once he started he couldn't stop. He just wanted to leave the past in the past, and let the dead rest in peace. Naran was happy to comply with this; she had her own problems to attend to. Rashmi was so severly injured she was in the intensive care unit for a week and in the ICU for two weeks. Eventually, after skin grafts, blood transfusions, and over a hundred stitches, they moved her to the regular wing of the hospital to recover. How they'd ended up in Alabama was a lot harder to explain, but Dash cobbled together a story about his girlfriend being kidnapped and him following. It took some extensive lying to get the police off their case. As far as Danny knew they were still investigating it. The only Dash cared about was that Rashmi was going to live.

"I love you," he told her when she woke up, clutching her sole unbandaged hand. "I love you so much. I'm so sorry, Ras..."

"Don't be," she murmured. "You saved me... Dash, you could have been killed."

"I live in Amity Park. That's just a typical Monday," he said, smiling weakly through emotional tears he didn't want to have. "Just worry about yourself. You've got to get better in time for the school dance, you know."

"I don't think I'll make the Snow Ball," Rashmi replied softly. "But if you'll have me, I'd be honored to go to Spring Fling with you."

"I already got us tickets." He leaned over and kissed her bandaged head. "And I've been walking Snowy, so it's all okay. Just rest. It's all okay, I promise. And I don't lie. Not to you."

She chuckled quietly. "I like that you qualified that statement with 'not to you'."

"Jailbait."

"Jock."

"Bilingual vocabulary nerd."

"Love you."

"Love you too.


Valerie required nearly two hundred stitches.

She woke up to find her ex-boyfriend had left a bundle of aster flowers on her bedside table. Danny had somehow remembered that after all this time, along with her favorite color. Her father had slept by her side night and day, hovering over her. She would take monthes of physical therapy to get the full use of her leg back, but she and her father had never been closer. He cried as he held her close, and the normally proud girl let herself be held as if she were a child. She wasn't sure how long they stayed like that, only that the world seemed better now, more hopeful. Beams of warm sunlight fell on them, bathing the world in a golden glow.

"Your mother would be proud," he whispered, looking into her eyes. "You two are the strongest women I've ever met."

And she couldn't respond to that because she was too busy trying not to cry. Then she gave up the fight, wrapped her arms around him and smiled through her tears. "Next time I won't use the fine cutlery."

He rolled his eyes in response, chuckling despite the gravity of the situation. "Oh, teenagers and their witty one liners..."


"Baxael?"

"Yes, eldritch? I have places to get to, you know. Punishments are about to be assigned."

"That was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. Why are you being punished?"

"I intervened much more in your world than I was meant to. It was, however, because the situation was much graver than we thought. I will not be punished too harshly, but under normal circumstances acting as I did would have reprecussions. You see, my people earn their powers by serving the ultimate good loyally and without mistakes. Our powers increase as we do good the right way, but striking off on our own can be a grave mistake sometimes. A little power corrupts; not all mistakes work out as well as this. That's why they train us to despise mortals, so we don't get attached and skew everything to help our favorites while ignoring the rest. I didn't stick to the plan. They will not be pleased, my supervisors, but I only began to err wildly when Slender Man was present. They will not be harsh on me."

"That's good. You... you really saved me back there. And because of you I know what happened to my mother. I just wanted to thank you for that before you go, though I do have one other question. The white fire: what was that and why didn't I see any other Nokta use it?"

"That's two questions, but I'll answer anyway. It can only be used under certain emotional stress. Your father used it more often than any other Nokta I knew. I'm not surprised you inherited his talent for it, though your ghostly powers boosted it tremendously." Baxael shifted, looking unsure of himself and choosing his words carefully. "Not all Nokta are monsters. Those that eat people are. Your father was not among their ranks. You should not live your life mourning your heritage. Your parents loved each other, and they loved you. They would not want this pain for you."

"...thanks, Bax."

He shuddered. "Don't call me that. It sounds too human. Now, is there anything else...?"

"Nope. Go earn your angel wings or whatever," Danny smiled warmly. "If you ever need me, you know where I live."

"That I do. Good luck, you eldritch abomination," Baxael said affectionately.

"Right back at you, you winged rat."


Well, that was a spectacular failure.

Slender wasn't supposed to engage Phantom like this. He was meant only to keep Phantom at bay, not to attempt a murder. And it seems after years of near total silence he decided to become a blabbermouth in the presence of a fellow eldritch. I've had him punished severely for his errors. So now we are left with an unfortunate dilemna. I'm sorry to say we'll be moving forward in the plans a bit. Plan A was never a sure shot. It was, however, successful in getting many eldritch things through while Danny was busy with Slender. The door is open to me now, and I can begin taking action against him. But it's not merely the portal between our realms that I refer to...

You see, I was watching him quite closely. The horrors of the nightmare realm weren't what nearly drove him over the edge. It was Slender's cheesy little mind games. They were poorly executed, over dramatic, and thus ultimately failures. But it has opened my eyes to the possibility of driving Phantom insane in order to win over him. I don't need any particular kind of insanity from him, just enough to break him. Although the details of this plan yet elude me, I'm sure this is the way to win against him. With him immobilized the time keeper is as good as mine. Your help will be necessary for this. Step one is overloading him with every evil and wicked thing we have, then we will ruin his mundane life while he's out and about. Where physical warfare and torture failed all out psychological attack will be his downfall. I see the path, and out action must be swift and decisive.

If you're free, please come right away. If not, please come all the same, since I technically still own you.

Love,

Mandy