Free Spirit

8 years after a tragedy that forced him out to deal with life on his own terms, 24-year-old Danny thinks he's ready to liberate himself from his chains of guilt and self-doubt. But a long-forgotten enemy has been liberated as well—and Danny won't be a free spirit for long... DxS

A/N: Be happy for me! I got Chapter Ten written in record time! Unfortunately, I don't know about Chapter 11...it may take a while. Oh, and from last chapter, I guess I'll tell you: John Cryer is that name of the voice actor who did Freakshow's voice... I was being unoriginal.

Disclaimer: One day, Butch, you and your lawyers will let your guard down, and I will steal the rights to all things Danny right out from under your collective nose. And then I will laugh.

Chapter 10: Hero's Welcome

"It's tough to do a good deed. Let's look at your professional good deed-doers, your Lone Rangers, your Supermen, your Batmen, your Spidermen. They're all wearing disguises, masks over their faces, secret identities. They don't want people to know who they are. Too much aggravation." –Jerry Seinfeld

XxXxX

The house was quiet that night, which was ironic, because the Fentons were housing more people than they had in a decade. Valerie and Tucker were asleep on the couch with Diana snuggling peacefully between them. Jack and Maddie were actually sleeping in their bed for once. Their other houseguest, whatever his real name was—Danny didn't know or care anymore—had retired to Jazz's room.

The only light in the house was a faint glow around the cracks of Danny's door that leaked into the upstairs hallway. He was up reading over the journals that Jazz left in his care. One lay open on the bed; the rest stayed neatly stacked in a black plastic bin with the label, "Touch and Die."

Danny turned a page. Jazz was such an organizational freak that she'd typed up her whole diary—every single entry ever written—and printed out the pages and sorted them into neatly labeled binders. The one Danny was reading was labeled, "Entries Pertaining to Danny." Most of the early pages contained the usual gosh-what-a-pain-in-the-butt-little-brothers-are material, but Danny'd quickly gotten to her entries concerning his adventures in ghost fighting.

Thursday, the entry read, April 15. The dome that this so-called Ghost King set over our town is still up. No word on whether we can get it down or not. Danny looks exhausted. The flood of ghosts that came through even before the skeleton warriors must have kept him busy all night. Either that, or the fact that Vlad Masters is sleeping in the room next to his. Danny never seemed to get on well with him... Danny continued flipping around at random, reading entries that caught his eye.

Saturday, June 2. Well, it finally happened. Danny found out I knew about his ghost powers. According to him, there was this huge confrontation outside the Nasty Burger that nearly resulted in the deaths of Mom, Dad, me, Sam, and Tucker, but no one remembered because the time stream was altered so that never happened. I think it's a bad sign that I am totally unsurprised by that explanation.

At that last sentence, Danny chuckled sadly. He missed Jazz so much that it sometimes hurt his heart. He glanced over at his bedside clock—three in the morning. He hadn't meant to stay up so late.

Danny yawned—which turned into a groan as a wisp of blue escaped his mouth. "Why now?" he moaned. He walked over to his window, opened it, and placed his hands on the windowsill. Praying that no one in any other houses was looking, Danny vaulted out of the window and, once he was clear of the Fentons' ghost shield, summoned his alter ego in a brilliant flash of white. He hovered for a few moments to get his bearings, and then veered off in the general direction that his ghost sense was indicating.

Danny loved flying. Out of all his ghostly abilities, flying was the one that came most naturally to him, and the one he felt most comfortable with. Once, he had tried to describe the feel of it to Sam: It's like there are all these little conversations going on at the back of your mind at once, but you don't even know they're there unless you think about them, he'd told her, and if you want to stay in the air, you go back and tune out the conversation about gravity, you know? And that works for a lot of stuff—like you tune out the voice that says, "that wall is solid," or "people can see you," and you...you just do it.

Danny flew over that wall around the park and came to a halt in midair. A young man of maybe seventeen or eighteen was surrounded by five or six ghosts. The specters had the shapes of young girls—none under nine or over sixteen—dressed in pale white dresses that blew around where their legs would be. They'd backed the kid up against a tree. Each one was taking it in turn to grab his wrists sharply and whirl him around in what seemed to be a mockery of a dance. The boy screamed in pain each time this happened, while the girls laughed in sadistic glee as they glowed brighter. Danny realized that they were draining his life.

Not willing to squander any more precious time evaluating the situation, Danny swooped down and blasted one of the girls off the teen to get their attention. "Got Saturday night fever? They have medication for that, you know," Danny deadpanned, standing protectively over the boy's prone form while he lay huddled and shivering on the ground.

When the ghosts realized what was happening, they freaked out. One shrieked her displeasure; one snarled ferally; several cried in outrage, "He's back!" or "Phantom's here!" The oldest one—the one that Danny had blasted—got up and held up a hand for silence.

"Phantom, we have no quarrel with you," she said in an oddly accented voice. "Leave us to our prey, and we will forgive your trespass upon our territory."

Danny snorted derisively. "Your territory?"

"Any man who sets foot in the park after dark is danced to death. We have said this. They know," the leader declared, staring hungrily at the unconscious teen. "Now leave us."

Danny's only response to his was to charge up an ectoblast and let her have it in the face, and the fight was on. Three girls jumped on him, snarling and spitting like animals, and the other two stayed back, content to look for an opening and to aid their injured leader.

Danny ducked some of their blows but couldn't avoid the majority. He spun and threw one ghost off his arm as if in a sick parody of crack-the-whip; she hit a tree hard before even thinking of intangibility, and her form shook and wavered with the impact. She howled in pain and faded out. One down.

He still had two to go—five if the other three joined the fray. Their victim still lay huddled against the tree, seeming all but comatose. Danny got one hand free, grabbed a girl by the face as she tried to bite at his shoulder, and blasted her from literally point-blank range. She screamed in agony as most of her features partially melted. Danny dropped her to the ground and let her writhe as she faded out as well. Two down.

The third was smarter than her two companions. When Danny tried to whip her off him as he had the first, she grabbed a tree branch with one hand and used her momentum plus her other hand to jerk Danny off his feet and away from the kid. Sprawled on the ground, Danny saw the other three rush forward to snatch their prey. To his opponent's surprise, he suddenly phased out of her grip and into the ground.

The leader was inches away from her intended victim when Danny hurtled from the ground directly beneath her and snatched her on his way up. All thoughts of their prey vanished as the three remaining ghosts—Danny's final attacker and the leader's two attendants—screeched in consternation.

Danny had the leader's arms pinned behind her back in midair while she squirmed and kicked violently. He flipped around in a graceful arc and hurtled back towards the ground with her held in front of him like a shield. The leader's eyes widened in fear (or whatever passed for fear among ghosts). "Hey, hey, what are you—?" she tried to demand, but not before—

SLAM.

The three remaining ghosts, who'd been keening and wailing in distress this whole time, now grew very, very silent. Danny stood spattered in the Ectoplasmic glop that remained of their leader and simply stared at them, his green eyes intense and threatening. Finally, he leaned forward and said one word.

"Boo."

They nearly trampled each other in their simultaneous attempts to get as far away as possible.

Danny doubted he'd seen the last of them, or their defeated comrades. He knew from experience that when a ghost, for lack of a better word, "dies" on the human plane, it fades out and reappears, weaker than before, in the Ghost Zone. He'd found that out on one desperate occasion when he was fifteen, and had neglected to hold back against an opponent, but after that and even now, he still preferred the Fenton Thermos. It was far more humane.

Danny turned and bent down next to the teen that the ghosts had been attacking. His breathing was irregular and extremely shallow. Danny charged up both hands until they sparked with power, pressed them to the boy's chest, and forced a moderate force of energy through him. The boy jerked and involuntarily began to breathe more deeply. Danny lay his fingers on his neck and found a pulse.

The teen's eyes fluttered open to see Danny. He blinked, blinked again, then muttered, "Oh, my God. I'm dead."

Danny grabbed the front of the boy's shirt, stood up, and gave him a hearty shake. "You most certainly are not dead," he told him sharply. "What you are is, you're going to answer my questions honestly. Got it?"

The boy nodded fearfully. Danny demanded, "Now, what on earth possessed you to take a stroll in the park at three in the morning?"

"I...I...couldn't sleep," the youth stammered lamely. Danny raised an eyebrow.

"Oh. You couldn't sleep," he repeated derisively, making the entire concept sound idiotic.

The teen lowered his eyes and mumbled something involving his friends, a party, and a dare. "I stand corrected," Danny snapped. "Your friends were the ones who put you up to it?" The boy nodded emphatically. "Get some new friends, then. The city is a dangerous place at night," Danny informed him in no uncertain terms.

Unbeknownst to Danny, the youth was slowly reaching behind his back to grasp at something hidden in his back pocket. Suddenly, a brilliant camera flash went off in Danny's face, causing him to drop the boy and slap at his own face in an effort to clear his vision. When the purple spots had dimmed enough to allow him to see, the teen had already jumped the fence and escaped.

For a moment, Danny considered pursuit, then dismissed the thought. He had more pressing issues—like how to find out where the ghosts were coming from. Obviously, they had to be coming from somewhere, and since the Fenton Portal had been permanently shut down, it was up to Danny to figure out where else the ghosts might have access to the Ghost Zone.

He scanned the immediate area: nothing. Of course. He might be searching until dawn and not find anything. Abruptly, his ghost sense went off again. Danny turned and saw Klemper chasing after another ghost, wailing about his lack of companionship.

Danny grinned. Perfect.

XxXxX

Klemper was gliding after a ghost he'd never met before, pleading, "Will you be my fri-end?" No one'd ever said "yes" to his question in over twenty years, but he felt like tonight was going to be his night. This potential friend had not yet flipped him the bird, so maybe—No, wait, there it was. Ah, well. There still might be hope.

Klemper's musings continued in this vein until a hand reached out of an alley as he whizzed past, and suddenly the world spun and flipped around. He shook his head to reorganize his thoughts and observed that he was being held up against a wall by the same hand holding his shirt, and that hand was attached to an arm that was attached to...

Hooray! Another potential friend! Specifically, it was the halfa, who hasn't been seen for almost a decade. Klemper reflected that surprises happen every day... Then he noticed that the ghost boy was not greeting him, or smiling, or displaying any inclination at all to be friendly; on the contrary, he looked rather threatening...

"Klemper," Phantom said—was it just him, or had Phantom's voice dropped an octave or two?—"you have seven seconds to tell me where the portal to the Ghost Zone is. Spill. Now."

Klemper smiled. Phantom probably wanted to make more friends. "Sure, it's behind the Nasty Burger. Want to be my friend?"

Phantom blinked, like he hadn't expected it to be that simple. "Maybe some other day," he said, and vanished before Klemper could say another word.

Klemper was disappointed. No luck there. Then he spotted another ghost and was off. There always was another friend to make.

XxXxX

Danny was at the Nasty Burger in ten minutes or less. Truth be told, he really hadn't expected getting information out of Klemper to be that easy. Like taking candy from a baby... He snuck around to the back alley and saw it on the other side of the Dumpster: a strange incongruity in the air, through which swirls of green cloud could be seen.

Danny inspected the rip. It was slightly wider than his outstretched arms, and about half again as tall as he was. He poked his head through very cautiously, and saw no one in the immediate vicinity in the other side.

Danny had to admit it. He had no clue what to do to close it. He touched cautiously at the "edges" of the rip, and thought he could feel...something. He felt again, and definitely knew that there was a weird sensation at his fingertips, like the way you can feel the heat coming off another person's skin without actually touching them.

Danny tried to close his fingers around where he thought the edge was, and felt a strange tingling. Hoping he could just pull the rip closed like he'd seen other ghosts like Wulf do, he stretched over and grabbed the other edge with his free hand.

It was as if Danny'd grabbed hold of a pair of live wires. Energy coursed through him like he'd completed an electrical circuit, but it wasn't painful. It was...exhilarating. For a second, he felt joined—he was the shadow of the oldest tree in the park; he was one with the misty fog that blanketed the Ghost Zone; he was the racing heartbeat of a teenager who'd narrowly avoided a car crash three counties over; he was the last breath of every single million person who dies every second of every day—and he must have let go in shock, for he found himself on the ground with no explanation.

"Whoa," he said, blinking. "That...was...weird."

"No, I'll tell you what's weird," came an angry and all-too-depressingly-familiar voice from the other side of the alley. Danny whipped around in shock to see Valerie standing on her new glider prototype and leveling a bazooka at his face. "What's weird is that I'm giving you a head start, ghost kid. Or you could waste it trying to explain to me what you were doing opening a portal to the Ghost Zone. I look forward to hearing it."

Two things passed through Danny's mind in quick succession—one, evidently, she'd walked in on him trying to close that portal and made a logical (to her) assumption, and two, he had to get her away from the Nasty Burger and its volatile condiments if she was going to fire that big scary gun, which she definitely would.

He made a dash for the street behind him, and heard the high-pitched whine of her engines following. Dammit, last night he should have paid more attention to those blueprints... He pitched forward as a near miss pelted his feet with chunks of road, then nearly smacked himself in disgust at his stupidity, and launched himself into the air. Fine time to forget his ghost powers—though, to be fair, he had only recently begun using them again...

"You're going down, Phantom!" Valerie yelled from behind him. "I've been waiting for this for a long time!"

"Do you even sleep?" Danny shot over his shoulder, both verbally and literally, trying to strike the gun from her hand. She avoided the bolt and contemptuously snarled, "How can I, with freaks like you on the loose?"

"Walked right into that one, didn't I?" Danny muttered under his breath. He had to stop this before it got out of hand. Ducking another shot, he went intangible and dove down under the street. Maybe if he came out a few streets over and changed back, he could get home before she gave up. He zigzagged through the sewers until he was far enough away, then phased up—

—Directly into the path of a very painful ectolaser. He reeled, clutching his smoking shoulder and staring in confusion at Valerie, who'd come from nowhere. How the hell did she follow me? he thought blankly.

"Surprised?" she asked, lazily aiming her gun. Danny meanwhile, was frantically trying to remember something, anything that might help him in his predicament.

The sensor array—Valerie said something about an improved on-board tracking system last night. Tucker mentioned a flaw in the design—what was it? Danny's thoughts were frantically racing as he tossed up a shield angled so Valerie's shot wouldn't hit her upon reflection. "The ecto-signature recognition system needs more configuration," Tucker had said, protesting Valerie's declaration that it was ready. "If it senses two sources reading as the same signature, the tracking program loops into a snarl. It needs more work."

Two sources...The beginnings of a plan formed in his head. Danny ducked under an SUV and split himself in half, suffering only a few seconds of disorientation. That trick had never really been his forte in his younger years, but maybe that had to do with his teenage short attention span. One of him flew out from under the car, distracting Valerie while the other turned invisible and slipped in close to the glider.

Now, if he could remember those blueprints, he could pull out the sensors and get away without her following... He grabbed at a wire concealed underneath a wing-like projection. There was a sharp popping sound as smoke began to trail from one engine. Oops.

Valerie wheeled around in fury, livid at being suckered, and fired blindly at where she thought he was. In spite of his invisibility, she managed to score a lucky hit on his left foot. Pain shot up his leg like fire, and he bit back a scream. Danny decided that with one side of the glider completely off-kilter, he'd done enough damage for one day—plus, Tucker would kill him off completely if he damaged the sensors.

He soared out from under the glider and let his duplicate fade out. Valerie lost control of her vehicle, which was listing to one side dangerously, and plowed into the sidewalk. "You're dead," she pronounced after she leapt off. When Valerie got dangerous, she stopped yelling and got very, very calm and cold—like she was now.

"Took you ten years to notice?" Danny asked, unable to resist the jibe. He threw her his usual mocking salute and flew off.

XxXxX

Valerie, clutching the smoking shell of her once shiny and new glider, was forced to endure the utmost humiliation—walking home. There was nothing more demeaning than getting beaten underhandedly, and then being forced to take a half hour or more getting home and brooding the whole way. She had known that the sensors needed more work, yet she had insisted on going out after Phantom. Now she'd have to explain to Tucker how she managed to grievously damage their only prototype.

At the thought of Tucker, Val felt very guilty. Sure, they had their spats, but that what kept their spice going. Otherwise, they'd probably bore each other to tears. Now she was letting her grudge put their relationship on the rocks. Tuck didn't deserve that. She vowed to apologize to him when she got back.

Speaking of getting back, she was almost at Fentonworks now. Hopefully, she could get in without waking anyone at 5:30 in the morning...

She stopped. There was somebody walking towards the house on the other side of the street. Val couldn't make him out at this distance, but he was clutching his right shoulder and limping on his left leg. "Hey!" she yelled, shifting her hold on the glider skeleton and whipping out an ectoblaster. She couldn't afford to take chances.

The man got closer and she could see his leather jacket and shock of black hair—it was Danny! What was he doing up this early? Val rushed over to see what was wrong with his shoulder, but he waved her off. "What happened?" she whispered urgently.

"It was stupid," he panted through gritted teeth. "I heard a commotion earlier and came out to investigate—saw a ghost trying to hurt a kid who was out late. Shot at it—" he gestured to his pocket where the butt of an ectopistol was peeking out, "—and, it went intangible. The shot—the shot deflected off a trashcan, off a Dumpster—hit me in the shoulder. Don't touch it!" Danny gasped as she brushed his shoulder, trying to inspect the wound.

"I'm just going to look," she said soothingly, and carefully peeled back his jacket and T-shirt to see—"Oh, God, that looks awful," she breathed. Danny said nothing, but squeezed his eyes shut and nodded curtly. His shoulder sported a massive burn mark—charred black and oozing in the middle, then blotchy white at the edges of the actual wound, and finally his skin had turned bright red for up to five inches from the edges.

"Danny, you need that looked at—badly," Val told him, but he shook his head.

"No, I'll dress it myself; we have first aid kits for these sorts of injuries in the lab—"

"—Danny, these weapons are designed to output enough energy to kill a ghost! You know what I mean. You're lucky you weren't more seriously injured, if not fatally injured!" Val hissed vehemently. "By the way, what happened to your foot?"

"Twisted,' Danny said. However, Valerie didn't think that he was limping the way someone with a twisted ankle would limp; he was putting his weight on the whole foot and then lifting up quickly, whereas most would use the toes or the balls of the feet, depending on the way it was twisted. She didn't pry, though, but just put her arm around his waist and let him lean on her for support. "Thanks," he grunted, and the two of them managed to get up the steps.

Before either could knock, however, the door was opened. "Hey Val, hey Dann—what happened?" Jack began to say, but caught sight of Danny cradling his shoulder and Valerie clutching her smoking glider.

"The usual array of ghost issues," Val informed him. "Danny's hurt. He took an ectoblast to the shoulder."

"He did? That's not good!" Jack said, concerned.

Danny tried to say something on the order of, "It's not that bad," but all he got was, "It's not th—nngh!" The rest of his sentence was lost in his moan of pain. He hissed through clenched teeth, his face twisted in agony, then conceded, "Okay, maybe...it is."

"You're coming with me," Jack told him, his tone brooking no argument. "You can go back to sleep, Valerie. Sorry you had to get up at all," he added.

"That's okay, I'm up now. At least I got Danny in safe," she said. "I don't sleep much anyway."

"How can she, with rebels like me on the loose?" Danny tried to joke. Valerie laughed, but somehow the way he said it gave her an eerie sense of déjà vu...

XxXxX

Jack led Danny down to the lab. "You were out there for nearly three hours—what were you doing?" he scolded. Danny flinched, and Jack saw his face blanch even paler, though that may have been in pain.

"How did you—?"

"I heard your footsteps outside our bedroom door around three," Jack told him. "Now, maybe you're used to keeping those kinds of hours—of course, I can't give you a curfew, you're twenty-four—but for God's sake, don't go outside that late! These days in Amity, nighttime is the ghost's tie, and if you aren't suited up properly for hunting, stay in bed. Now, let's see where I put that first aid kit..." he muttered, groping through a cabinet with his back to Danny.

"Uh...you guys shut down the portal, right?" Danny, behind him, tried to change the subject. Jack just talked to him over his shoulder, still rummaging.

"Yeah, the ghosts were getting to be too much... Some can open their own portals, though, and that became a problem until we equipped the Specter Speeder with a system to locate portals and shut them down."

"The Specter Speeder's still intact?"

"Well, yeah, it should be right in the far corner, near the old portal...you didn't see it? I wasn't looking..."

"Dad." Danny's voice was suddenly urgent. "There's nothing there."

"What do you mean, there's—" Jack turned and stopped dead in his tracks.

The Specter Speeder was gone.

A/N: Bwahaha! No, Danny didn't walk past his parent's room, as I'm sure most of you were thinking, which means that now you all should be asking, "Well, if they weren't Danny's footsteps...whose were they?