Shits Dark

A Danny Phantom Fanfiction by Cordria

When Danny went from human to half-human, he fully expected some changes to his normal routine. Green eyes, floating, falling through desks – those sorts of things he could take in stride. Sam and Tucker were able to laugh with him about those sorts of things. They were funny problems, in a morbid, break-the-laws-of-known-physics sort of way.

Then there were the things he wasn't expecting. The things he wouldn't tell Tucker, much less Sam. Things nobody mentioned in the super-embarrassing puberty classes they had been forced to sit through several times. Like the fact that this one ghost looked exceptionally cute, despite being dead, and he shouldn't be attracted to dead girls. Like the fact that his sweat set off a Geiger counter in his parents' lab yesterday. Like finding out his spit glows in the dark when the movie theater straw glowed after he had sucked on it.

And like the fact that trips to the bathroom were interesting, to say the least.

He noticed it with his urine first – it glowed. He even snuck the aforementioned Geiger counter up to the bathroom at one point to check it. The radioactivity made the machine's sensors spike. Not horribly dangerous levels, but definitely enough that he spent several days worrying about the fact that he was irradiating the city's water supply every time he went to the bathroom.

It took several days before he noticed the other, perhaps more disturbing change in his body. Not being the type to spend time examining the contents of a toilet – but having enough life experience to know what it should look like – Danny understandably did a double-take after buttoning his jeans and reaching for the flushing lever.

The poop was black. Not like dark brown. Not like 'ate too much purple juice mix on a dare' dark. But pitch black – and a lot less… massive… than usual.

Danny stood over the toilet, looking around, trying to decide if this were something he needed to worry about. He fished the Geiger counter out from under the sink (because where else would be a good place to store it?), and sat down, scanning the white porcelain. The radiation levels were normal.

Well, that was positive. At least his shit wasn't radioactive.

After spending several minutes contemplating his own fecal matter – and Jazz pounding on the door, wanting to wash her hair – Danny decided to worry about it later and just flushed the toilet.

A quick internet search later that evening told him a variety of horrifying reasons why his poop might have gone black. Of course, none of those problems mentioned 'half-ghost' as a trigger. After reading over the options, dismissing most of them with a refreshingly normal teenage attitude, Danny decided to just keep an eye on things.

Dark black seemed to be the new color his intestines wanted to churn out, along with a whole lot less material than he was used to. Even though trips to the bathroom (going ghost!) were becoming more frequent, real trips to the bathroom were becoming fewer and farther between.

By the one-month anniversary of the accident, he was peeing only once a day, at that. That wasn't to say he wasn't thirsty – he was constantly drinking. But his body was simply using all the water he could take in. He figured it had to do with the ectoplasm, but he wasn't going to ask Sam or Tucker. His body also seemed to be getting better at processing the food he ate. It wasn't unusual for him to go several days without feeling the need to defecate.

In the grand scheme of his wacky life, he figured it wasn't all the important and went about his days not worrying too much about it. As time went on and Danny discovered new, rather embarrassing things his half-human body wanted to do, the fact that his pee glowed and his poop was black journeyed further down the list.

Until one day, just about a year after the accident, when Danny finally found someone that might know some answers, and a reason to ask the questions. Vlad had captured him (again) for some crazy experiment (again) and Danny was sitting in a cage (again), bored and waiting for a chance to escape. "Hey, Vlad."

The man grunted, studying something under a microscope.

"Why's my poop black?"

He watched Vlad tense and slowly turn around. "What?" the man said.

Danny – forever looking for a reason to torment the old man – saw an opening. The stiff, highbrow man would despise talking to a teenage boy about bodily functions. Danny just barely kept the smile from his face when he asked, "My poop's been black since the accident. Is yours?"

Vlad's eyes narrowed. Sparks of red swirled through them. "I'm not talking to you about that."

"Who else am I going to ask?" Danny said, trying to sound innocent and naïve. "What if there's something wrong with me? Internal bleeding, or iron poisoning, or something. Can't go to a doctor-"

"Just sit quietly," Vlad snapped, turning back around to his microscope. Little bits of red had appeared in his cheeks.

"My spit glows," Danny said, going for conversational and struggling to keep the snickers out of his voice. "And so does my pee. And my sweat – I figured that one out. It's radioactive and it glows. You want to know what else glows? When I-"

"I do not ever want to know," Vlad snapped. "I'm well aware of which particular bodily functions glow and which don't."

Danny sprawled on his back, floating in the air with his arms behind his head. This was more fun that he was expecting, watching Vlad react. "How am I supposed to know that? You never tell me anything."

Vlad set something down harder than usual. He spoke through his teeth. "I figured it out, I'm sure you will too. Use your brain for once."

"Or you could just tell me and I'd let the topic drop." Danny grinned at the man's tensed-up shoulders. "It's not like I can just look it up, trapped in this cage like this." He sighed, going for dramatic, and stared up at the ceiling through the bars on his cage. "I'll just have to keep talking about it until I get to a computer-"

"Fine."

Danny blinked at Vlad. "No, it's okay if you don't want to. You don't have to tell me anything-"

"Shut it," Vlad hissed. "I will say this once and it will never be repeated." There was quite a bit more red in the man's cheeks than usual. "This is not a topic of conversation that I ever wish to have with you again."

Wishing he had his phone so he could record this for blackmail, Danny sat up and nodded.

Vlad straightened, smoothing the front of his shirt in a bad attempt to pull himself together for the chat. His voice took on the broad, instructing tone teachers often took while lecturing. "Your body contains a larger amount of ectoplasm than a normal human. As you undoubtedly know, ectoplasm and blood do not mix well." Vlad arched an eyebrow, apparently wanting some sort of confirmation.

Danny shrugged, the nodded. He did know something like that – his father had droned on about it – but he didn't know much.

"It's the iron in your blood. Ectoplasm is copper-based, blood is iron-based. Essentially, the ectoplasm is constantly eating your blood cells, releasing a lot of extra iron into your blood."

Danny's eyes narrowed slightly.

Vlad sighed, his shoulders drooping as he lost his teacher-tone and settled for the more-normal rich-guy-sarcasm. "The reason your fecal matter is so dark is because a large portion of it is dead blood cells and extra iron your body is trying to get rid of. The ectoplasm in you makes you constantly on the borderline of being anemic."

"Oh," Danny said. "Isn't that a bad thing?"

"It's not horribly dangerous," Vlad said, waving a hand, "as long as you don't plan to get eviscerated any time soon. And then, blood loss is probably not high on your list of worries."

After a beat of silence, Danny asked, "So why does my sweat and stuff glow?"

"Sweat, urine, spit – they're all things your body uses to remove toxins. Some of that toxin is residual ectoplasmic energy." Vlad's eyebrow twitched. "Your snot, ear wax, and tears glow too, if you hadn't figure that out."

Danny knew his snot glowed – the bout of flu over the winter had been interesting. The little trashcan his mother had put next to his bed had glowed like a nightlight as he filled it with snot-soaked tissues. "Cool," he said, suddenly envisioning making a glowing earwax candle some day.

Vlad huffed. "Quite," he drawled. "Anything else you desperately need to ask, or can I get back to work so you can go home?"

He let Vlad get back over to the microscope. "I don't poop very much."

"Normal," Vlad muttered. "The microbiome of your intestinal tract has slowly modified itself with semi-ectoplasmic bacteria that are more efficient at pulling nutrients from your food. You could swallow nails, child, and still digest them."

Danny blinked, startled, and peered down at his stomach. "The bacteria in my stomach are half-ghost too?"

"I'm going to hire a health teacher for your school and mandate you sit through the class," Vlad muttered. "You do realize you have more bacteria in you then human cells, right? And those bacteria need to go someplace when you change?"

Danny thought that through for a long beat. "So, don't ever get head lice."

Vlad froze. Slowly turned around to stare at him. "You have head lice?"

"No." Danny scowled. "Just, if I ever did. Then they'd be half-ghost head lice, or something?"

"Or something," Vlad muttered, shaking his head. "Try to not get any sort of parasite – for the betterment of all man kind."

Danny couldn't help but agree with him on that topic. A half-ghost parasitic organism was probably high on the list of 'must avoid'. "How much longer before you're going to let me go?" he asked.

Vlad hummed. "When you stop asking idiotic questions and let me get through this."

Danny rolled that around in his head a few times, ran a tongue over his teeth, and let Vlad get a few more minutes of work done. Then, just because he was in a cage and… Well, he didn't need any more reason than that. He was in a cage. Regardless of being experimented on or not, he was in a cage. "There's this girl."

Vlad sighed and closed his eyes. He seemed to be whispering something, but Danny couldn't catch what it was.

Danny fought back the evil grin that wanted to cross his face. "See, I don't know if my reaction to her is normal. When I see her, there's this feeling down here-"

Vlad couldn't get the cage door open fast enough.