I HOPE EVERYONE HAD SUFFICIENT NIGHTMARES JUST LIKE UNKNOWN HERE! PREPARE TO HAVE YOUR MINDS BLOWN APART!
I have to give credit to my editor/beta, the amazing RECONSTRUCTWRITER! *INSERT ECHO AND CONFETTI* seriously, they're a great person for doing this and helping me get everything just right before I post. I have a chapter to rewrite based on one suggestion so here ya go!
When Danny woke it was in the middle of the morning, and surprisingly, his sister's room and arms. If it weren't Saturday and his sister, this would have been incredibly confusing. Of course, with it being Jazz - who was an early riser and hated to waste any morning by sleeping in - he found himself weirded out by the situation anyway. His groggy mind not pulling up any of the memories from last night just yet, Danny turned intangible and slipped out of his sister's grasp and rolled to his feet, stretching and yawning as he headed back to his room. The sound of his yawn, of course, woke his light sleeping sister, who sat up quickly and gave him a concerned, if sleepy, look. "Danny? Are you ok?"
"Yeah," the raven haired boy gave a sharp twist and let out a sigh as his back gave a satisfying crack. "I'm good. Do I wanna know why I wouldn't be?" Even without the telltale expression on Jazz's face, he could have easily answered no for himself. "Jazz?"
The redhead chewed her lip as she debated telling Danny now or letting it come back to him gradually. At the realization that with his luck it'd hit him in the shower and he'd slip and crack his head from shock, she decided it was better he know sooner than later. "Danny… you were having a nightmare and when I came in you were in ghost mode." The younger teen slowly relaxed his muscles before they all tensed up again. "Do you remember what it was about?"
Flashes of blurred memories and a voice that could make a demon shiver flew through the boy's mind but he forced himself to relax, one muscle at a time, and plastered on a convincing smile for his sister's sake. No need to drag her down too. "Nah, nothing but darkness. Guess it wasn't that bad." Shrugging he opened the door and flashed her a smile as he closed it. "Thank you though, for helping with whatever it was." The look on Jazz's face showed that she wasn't buying what he was selling, which made the lie all the worse.
"Danny, I can tell when you're lying. You've gotten better at it, but not that good." She crossed her arms, looking far more awake now. "You can't keep going like this Danny, all of his stress on top of school and trying to have some kind of normalcy through it all is enough to have made someone snap five times already! You need to at least talk to someone!"
"I'm fine Jazz," he ground through clenched teeth. He didn't need this kind of conversation first thing in the morning. "I don't need to talk about anything because I don't remember anything bad happening in my sleep." He leveled a glare at her that he hoped got the message across that she wasn't helping.
"Then why did every visible muscle in your body tense up when I mentioned it?"
"See, keyword being visible." Jazz narrowed her eyes at the aggressive sarcasm. "The ones you didn't see were perfectly relaxed, cause that's what a stretch is; tensing and relaxing."
"Danny," he was starting to get tired of hearing his own name, how fun was that? "You haven't relaxed in over a year! I know you haven't, I've seen you-"
"Have you been spying on me?!" Unbeknownst to the siblings, their mother had stopped right outside the door, having wanted to come and check up on Danny. She would have stepped inside to break up the fight, but that didn't sound like something Jazz would do.
"You can't keep bottling this up, Danny!" It was early, he was being difficult, and Jazz was at the end of her rope - could she be blamed for raising her voice a bit? "You've got to stop something before it all comes crashing down around and on you and you can't dig yourself out! You have to talk to someone, me, Sam, Tucker, somebody!" Danny's glare became more and more profound and his sister was flailing her arms around now. "You need to either talk to us or-"
"Or WHAT Jazz? Stop doing what I do?" He scoffed, crossing his arms as flecks of green bled into blue. "You know I can't do that! This is my fault, my responsibility, and my burden to carry! If I fall because I refuse to drag anyone further down with me then so be it!" Danny stormed out of the room and ran to his room, ignoring his mother's presence.
Slamming the door closed, Danny aggressively grabbed some clothes, rushed into the bathroom so fast no one could stop him, and slammed and locked that door too. Using intangibility he stripped and turned on the water, getting in right away. Closing his eyes, the aggravated halfa let the warming water wash away his thoughts. Fenton works fell behind his closed eyelids, statues behind it. Robed men and red covered blades held as high as the voices praising him. He squeezed his eyes closed even tighter and forced the thoughts away. Then he felt the water change, but he didn't open his eyes. Even though the soap smelled like copper and the water felt too thick, too warm, too full of draining life to be just water, he kept his eyes closed tight. He scrubbed his skin vigorously, and would later be thankful that he healed relatively quickly. His hands got the roughest of the scrub treatment.
When he walked out of the shower and into his room, he was stopped by Jazz once again, but he didn't give her time to try and convince him of anything, wrenching his arm away. "No Jazz, I told you time and time again, stop psychoanalyzing me!" He grabbed his guitar, ran down the stairs and stormed out the front door, not giving his parents a passing glance.
Walking into an alley a block away from his house, Danny transformed into his ghostly alter ego and took off for the park, still trying to tell himself that it wasn't his fault that Sadie died.
When Rick woke up to his brother juggling his pillow, wadded up blanket, and pillow case in the air with his brain while working on their laptop, he decided that today was a good day to take a break from his brother. After breakfast, where the bespectacled twin put every bit of concentration into subtly telling his brother not to tell or show their parents his power yet - a process that involved lots of kicking and attempted twin telepathy - the teen pulled on his boots and jacket, grabbed a random book from the attic and headed out the door with a shout of "Going to the park, remind George to eat!"
"I don't have time for eating, I have to get back all of my stuff!" George shouted around a mouthful of eggs at him.
They lived rather close to the park, which leaded straight into the forest that the twins loved to explore so much, so Rick could bury his nose in the book he pulled without having to worry about getting lost. What he found was more surprising than yesterday. It seemed to be a handwritten documentation of one Hokolesqua Pate's experiences with his own supernatural abilities. I never thought that the spirits would choose me to bestow their power upon, but when I was a boy I discovered that if I concentrated hard enough whenever I was in trouble, my mother would suddenly stop scolding me, and I would get away with the little things. I learned to stop doing that and take my punishments as I deserved them of course, but as I grew older, more things began to happen to and around me.
One day when I woke, everything I owned was floating through the air! They stopped after a moment, but that day I decided to see if I could make these things happen again. "This is amazing… looks like Georgy's not the first in the family to get into the weirdness." Looking up to see that he had made it to the trees, Rick tucked his book under his arm and started jogging. "No matter the mystery, I gotta be good enough to run from it if I have to."
After a defeat, Aragon normally would have gone back to his tower and moped about it before having his guards find the fool who dared to best him and have them beheaded. However, he didn't have his guards any longer, only his archer and executioner and they were both injured. With no shelter of his own specifically to retreat to for recuperation, the exiled prince had to find somewhere that no one would find them. So, he chose the most deserted area of the Spirit World he could think of; Pariah's Keep. To be fair, he didn't know much about the rest of the Spirit World outside of his former kingdom, he kept to his own, so he didn't know any other places to go. Of course the one spirit waiting for him there didn't seem to care about any of that, and Aragon was reminded that knights were famous for slaying dragons.
"Who dares to trespass on this sacred and forbidden land, and wherefore shouldst I allow thou to live?" Violet flames erupted around the three trespassers who found themselves quickly cornered by the knight. A glowing green blade was pressed against Aragon's neck and dark green eyes glared into his own. "Speak or be transported to thy worst nightmare for the rest of thy days."
"I come seeking refuge great knight," The fool prince began, thinking that he might be able to get out of this with his afterlife at the very least. "For I hast been exiled by mine people, overthrown by mine treacherous sister, and defeated by that half breed freak Phantom and wilt rest before I challenge him again." The knight's blade lowered and the exile thought that he may have gained an ally for an entire ten seconds. Then, The knight's blade moved swifter than any fire, his only remaining subjects gone in a trice. Wholly alone, Aragon swallowed faintly as the blade's sharp tip hovered above his throat.
"As a loyal knight and servant of our Prince Phantom, I have a special place for you to reside until his majesty decides what he wishes to do with you." A rope of ectoplasm was made and the former prince bound and forced to mount Nightmare in front of Fright. "If you try to escape, the Prince may not get the chance to dictate your Fate."
When Danny stopped flying, he had found himself over a small lake in the forest, a bit deeper in than most would be for a jog through the park. Pulling his guitar off of his back, he saw that it had gone from its black paint finish to a birch white, the strings now resembling threads of ice more than steel. Taking off his gloves and stuffing them in a pocket that he had found in his jumpsuit, Danny strummed his fingers against the strings gently and found that he quite liked the fact that the ghostly energy didn't alter the sound that the instrument made much, other than giving it a slight echo that really wasn't all that noticeable to him in ghost form. Crossing his legs in the air and positioning his fingers over the strings, Danny closed his eyes and allowed the memories of his nightmare wash over him, letting the emotion come out through his fingers rather than his eyes or mouth.
The strings felt stronger now, the wood almost as if it were still alive, and the music that came echoed his fears and anxieties and regrets perfectly. The more he playing, the more emotional the music became, and the better he felt as he listened to the wordless feeling bouncing back from the crystal clear water and sturdy trees. His burning disgust and anger toward the cultists rang out as a sound that an acoustic guitar shouldn't have been able to make. The air around the lake chilled as harsh riffs and angry chords echoed across the water.
Guilt cut through the air as he remembered Sadie's face and harsh cords melded into unforgiving riffs, low pitch slowly rising. The water shook beneath him and rippled with the voice of his instrument, crying out for forgiveness, and rejecting it at the same time.
Flowing from high to low, fast and harsh to slow and somber, his music sung out the torture of his soul and everything that heard it beyond himself could truly feel all of it as he played.
When he finished letting out his feelings, a serene Danny flew over to the closest edge of the lake and transformed back into his human form. A private concert with no audience, and a dip in the lake would be the best things to relax him after the stressful week he'd been having. Danny pulled off his shirt and jeans to reveal the scars that came with the business but it wasn't like anyone else was there, right?
When Rick settled in his tree branch to read up on his ancestor, he expected it to be quiet, or for the only thing to bother him to be a squirrel or a dryad - yes, he believed they were real, and there was enough magic in the town to stir one into existence at some point - or even a bird flying by. What he did not expect to notice as he read about Hokolesqua finding an honest to gods, spell and ritual using, witch named Cassandra Rava, was the sound of an acoustic guitar echoing across the lake next to him. It started out harsh, angry and raw, and flowed through several emotional tones that Rick could almost feel in each note, going from sad to angry to scared to exhausted so seamlessly the sound was otherworldly.
When the freshman looked out to the water he was shocked to see the town hero, whom he had caused quite the mess for. Listening to the angst put to music, Rick heard his brother's words repeating in his head, along with those of Sam and the newspaper article, and something that he rarely felt itched at the back of his mind. As the song shifted to something guilty it hit him full force, and he had to close the book as he let the emotion wash over him and wrench hot tears out of his closed eyes as the images from the page came rushing back to him. Sadie's cold, lifeless face looking up at him accusingly, a voice that his mind provided saying that it was his fault and if it weren't for him and his damned joke about demons none of this would be happening.
It was when the music turned to something fearful, and Rick started to feel afraid of absolutely nothing that he realized that these emotions weren't his, they were Phantom's. That was another power to chalk onto the list of things they knew Phantom could do. Secured by the knowledge that he wasn't actually feeling what he was feeling, Rick let the music wash over him like the tide at the beach, ignoring the voices in his head that said he was in the wrong. He wasn't at fault, and though Phantom wasn't either, it was the hero who was feeling guilty not him.
This wasn't the kind of music that could be written or replicated, and it wasn't the kind that you recorded. This was music that was purely for expression, to get something off of his chest, and it made Rick wonder what could have brought all of this angst upon their hero. Had Phantom never seen someone die before? If it had been him, Rick wouldn't have been feeling all that good or know how to cope with it right away. That must have been what happened, he realized, and he felt his stomach twist into knots, even as he denied to himself being the reason for it. The cultist bastards did this, not Rick. He had only supplied the knowledge, it wasn't his fault if the rest of the world abused it.
When Phantom finished up his song and flew over to a spot near the trees that forced Rick to switch branches in order to keep him in sight, the freshman was granted a sight to see. The guitar was set down against a tree and white rings of light wrapped around the spirit's torso, spreading up and down and where they passed over changed. In a bright flash of light, Danny Phantom turned into Danny Fenton and Rick was left without the words to describe that mind breaking sight. Georgy wouldn't believe this.
Jim89: Sam was kind of... less caring about the opinions of most as long as her own views were seen and heard in the show, even if that's not how she saw it. I wanted to change that. She's growing up, she should grow up in that department too. Elle is important as hell so yeah, she will get summoned at some point. Oh! and with the Fentons, I have plaannnnsssssss. Danny's nightmares are his brain assering all the bad things he doesn't like about himself... also, if you read Guardian by 1337Kitsune then you'll see my inspiration for a lot of stuff in here. It's... somethin.
Count Raptor: Separation from Danny of course. It was ridiculous to call her Dani in the first place, the show writers were pretty eh on that
Fanfic920: But of course, he's essential later on. The future is always coming after all.
Toast711: THAT'S GOOD, YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO SEE IT, EVEN IF YOUR EYES ARE OPEN WHEN YOU SLEEP! He's right of course, but ignoring him thank you!
TheHowlingBehemoth: Who doesn't love gravity falls? Who is Slade? lol. Oh, oh you just gave me ideas, that's good, dangerous, but good, keep doing that!
Fanatic: THANK YOU I PLAN TO!
Strangled Creativity: Angst kills me, so everyone must die with me. And yeah, canon Danny doesn't do... anything in relation to Dan. He just goes on his merry way. Like, no.
Phantom J Ryder: Fright is doing many things! thank you, I'm both sad and happy that my angst did it's job. muahahaha
Savorix: Yes poor Danny, but yay Angst! No, the Fenton's aren't letting him go, but they have to doubt themselves a little don't they? I won't say which summoning attempt will be successful, but I will say it'll be a big day for everyone! and no one is my flavor of crazy, but nice try! :)
Busybee: Merry Christmas! there will be much here by then!
Thank you all, so very much, for reading this, and reviewing it, and ignore the guy who commented as Alkaid on chapter 1, he's advertising my original content on fiction press, but I told him not to. So, here's the new chapter, I hope to see you in the next one as well, and prepare for the Fright Knight this harvest moon! HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEEEN