A/N: Since I have my time to write chapters starting Monday will be minimal to borderline existent, I will use whatever time I have left to sneak in one more chapter to for you all. I hope you guys don't mind the long wait that will come after this chapter.

As a warning, some of the stuff in this chapter may seem a bit repetitive. But keep in mind, the stuff here is what motivated Vlad to turn away from villainy, and he's not gonna convince anyone (least of all Danny) that he's turned a new leaf unless he can provide a very good explanation.

Chapter 36 – Plasmius' Confession

"What…what happened to you?" Danny breathed.

"Many things, little badger," Vladimir sighed heavily. "Many truths revealed, and secrets exposed. All of which I would have been so much happier not knowing, and yet I cannot help but appreciate their importance." He gazed intently at Danny. "Why did you not tell me about Dan Phantom, and the future that came into being because of his existence?"

Danny sighed. "I guess I've only got two reasons, Vlad," he gestured with his fingers. "One, since I dealt with the issue, it didn't technically happen. And two…" his eyes hardened slightly, "you never really gave me a good reason to tell you. Heck, back then, there was a pretty good chance that you would have tried to use that against me."

Vlad looked utterly appalled. "Did you truly think so low of me, Daniel?" he asked. "I never sought destruction on such a massive scale. All of my schemes and plans merely revolved around conquest, and nothing more. The horror that Dan unleashed upon the worlds of the living and the dead…even at my most depraved, I would never have gone that far!"

"Not that that means anything!" a much younger voice growled. All eyes turned to Youngblood, who was glaring at Plasmius with an unholy fury that nobody, not even Ember, had ever seen before. "You're a real piece of garbage, you know that?" he snarled. "I know what you did to Dani, how you treated her like trash! All because she wasn't the perfect clone you wanted," he mockingly gestured with air quotes around the phrase. "You don't deserve to be anyone's dad, and you sure as hell don't deserve either him," he pointed at Danny, "or her! How do you even live with yourself?" he shouted the last words hatefully.

Plasmius sighed deeply. "Of all the mistakes I have made in the past, not giving the young Phantom girl the love and respect she deserved is among my greatest."

"So what did you learn then?" Danny asked. His tone wasn't completely hostile, but it demanded answers and would accept no argument.

Vlad groaned. "For starters, that my dream of winning the love of Madeline was doomed from the very start. The destinies of your parents were intertwined long before I ever became acquainted with either of them. For the last two years, my efforts have been nothing but a waste of time." A look of bitterness crossed his face, though Danny couldn't tell at whom it was being detected. "Not that I can blame her, not now."

"You honestly didn't know?" the younger halfa asked skeptically.

"Of course I didn't, Daniel!" Vlad snapped. "I didn't know that they'd fallen in love in high school, long before I ever had a chance to meet them in college! Do you really think I would have bothered if I had known from the start?"

Ember snorted. "Yeah right. Knowing you, you would've tried to break them up or something."

"Without wealth, influence, or ghost power, I would have nothing to win Maddie's affections with, nothing to compete with Jack Fenton," he snapped, then sighed. "It's not the first thing that I've been wrong about."

"No, indeed," Clockwork agreed. Danny jumped; he had forgotten about the Primordial of Time's presence. "Tell them what I have showed you. For not even they have seen the knowledge of the past that you now possess."

Vlad nodded glumly, and the regret in his face was now even more apparent than it had been in the past. "Jack had been the one responsible for the accident that had disfigured my face with the Ecto-Acne and given me my ghost powers. That, no one can deny," he began, and the three young ghosts immediately noticed his lack of acrimony. "I lay unconscious in a hospital bed for days on end, and never saw hide nor hair of Jack Fenton ever again. The accident had forced me to leave college and deal with my problems the way I did. Ever since I woke up in that bed, I had believed that Jack had simply tossed me aside like a failed experiment. That he had ruined my life and left me to my misery, forgotten and alone."

Danny and Ember nearly gasped, and even Youngblood's eyes widened. "Wait, what are you saying?" the child ghost asked, his former anger being replaced by shock.

"When I woke up from my hospital bed, Jack…Jack…" he buried his head into his arms, folded onto the table. "Jack was the one who paid for my hospital bill. A bill that would have plunged me into crippling debt, and he took care of it for me like it was nothing." He raised his head, and everyone could see that he was only barely managing to hold back tears. "All this time I thought he had abandoned me, and it turns out it was the exact opposite. If there's one thing I can still fault Jack for now…"

"Dad should have just told you about that," Danny finished. "We wouldn't have ever had to deal with this mess if he had."

"He never was the most intelligent when it came to interpersonal relationships," Vlad agreed, some of his original dryness returning. "You of all people should know this better than anyone."

Youngblood glared at him. "And what about Dani?" he snapped. "You thought Danny's old man screwed you over. Fine. But you don't have an excuse with her!"

Again, Vlad sighed heavily. "You are absolutely correct," he agreed. "I might have had legitimate, albeit misguided, motivation for my vendetta against my former friend. But Dani…there is no excuse for how I treated her. I cannot even blame my ghostly obsession to absolve myself, although I genuinely do believe it played a role in my failings."

"Ghostly obsession?" Danny repeated, Clockwork's lesson echoing in his head. He grimaced. "Please, please don't tell me it's my mom." Ember and Youngblood made similarly disgusted faces.

Vlad couldn't help but chuckle wryly at that. "No, little badger, it is not that simple," he answered dryly. "You see…my ghostly obsession is my own idea of a perfect life. A life with Maddie as my beloved wife, and you as the son I never had. This…my…obsession, allowed for no compromise or deviation from this ideal."

"No kidding," Danny grumbled under his breath.

"In many ways, Daniel, you have been more fortunate than I. Your ghostly obsession is more…wholesome, shall we say, and because of your tutelage under the Primordial of Time you have learned how to control that obsession rather than allow it to control you. I have had no such fortune myself, as you well know, and I could not differentiate between my ghostly obsession and my own ambitions. Thus, I pursued them both…to the bitter end."

Youngblood's eyes narrowed. "Still sounds like an excuse," he snapped.

Clockwork chose this moment to speak, to everyone's surprise. "Understanding the truth about yourself is not something to be condemned," he countered. "How else can Vladimir improve himself without this revelation?"

Youngblood clearly didn't look convinced, but he wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. Even he knew that messing with the Primordial of Time was a spectacularly bad idea.

To everyone's surprise, Vlad chuckled bitterly, his subdued laughter filled with self-loathing. "Would you believe that one simple truth could have made my life so much better?" he asked with another heavy sigh. "I could have been so much happier, and my life could have been so much better, if only I had been willing to settle for less."

Danny mimed ticking off a checkbox with his fingers. "Wealth, check. Power, check. Decent looking for an old guy when you don't have the Ecto-Acne, check. Yep, that would do it for a lot of people," he rolled his eyes.

His former arch-enemy had to laugh at that. "Always the witty banter, Daniel. I suppose some things never change."

"All right, so your shot at baby pop's mom was dead in the water to begin with," Ember interrupted. "So how do you explain the second half of that whole perfection thing?"

Vlad's smile disappeared. "My failure with you, Daniel, feels so much worse compared to my failures regarding Maddie. At least with her, I never had a chance to begin with, so that was out of my hands. But you…" another pained expression crossed his face. "You are a different matter."

"You're seriously going on about that again?" Danny interrupted, his eyes narrowed. "It doesn't matter if you're turning a new leaf now, there's no way I'd ever join you and be your son."

Vlad shook his head. "Your statement is less true than you think…though the price for that is too great for you to bear. And I am not merely talking about the timeline devastated by that…abomination."

"The future of Dan Phantom is just as relevant to him as it is to you, my student," Clockwork explained coolly. "It is also proof that Vladimir is capable of becoming a better man, something that you saw for yourself. But that was not the only thing I revealed."

"I witnessed alternate timelines. Timelines in which your parents rejected you upon revelation of your identity and hunted you down," the elder halfa's words were straight to the point and hit Danny harder than he would have expected. "The reason why you maintained our truce for so long. You are quite fortunate, little badger, as your uncertainties were unfounded in this particular timeline. But in others…let's just say, my boy, that you had every reason to fear."

Danny shuddered. Clockwork had never shown him many of these alternate timelines; he'd been through enough time screw-ups already, and wasn't really eager to add more to that list.

"In the timelines where your parents betrayed you, Vladimir was the one to deliver you from their hatred and destruction," the Master of Time intoned. "Either one or the other would be your parental figure. The only timeline in which both acted as such…you are already well familiar with that one." his voice trailed off ominously.

Silence fell. "So lemme get this straight," Ember of all people was the one to break the silence. "So either Vlad is the villain and Danny's old folks do what they're friggin' supposed to, or his parents screw him over and Vlad has to come and save the day, making the dipstick's life a living hell in the process, or we get the COMPLETELY messed up timeline with Dan and literally everything gets fucked up royally with no chance of going back. Jesus, what a clusterfuck!" she exclaimed. "Okay, I'm REALLY happy that the timeline we have is the timeline we're in."

"You still haven't explained how this all ties in with Dani," Danny suddenly realized. "Care to explain that one? Cause we all know you treated her like crap."

Vlad sighed. "It all revolves around my inability to accept anything less than my ideal of perfection, the perfect life with you as my son and Madeline as my wife. A fundamental failing that, in the end, required the wisdom of a Primordial and the mocking laughter of a corrupted Phantom for me to see. But if I had been willing to compromise, if I had been willing to settle for less and overcome my greed, we all would have been the better for it. Clockwork showed me alternate timelines in which I had given up my hatred and ambition in exchange for a desire to connect and teach the only other halfa in the world. In these, we were not enemies, little badger. You were my student, and as your mentor I did the best I could to prepare you for the threats, both small and great, that you would eventually face over time."

Ember's eyes widened. "I think I see where this is going…"

"If my eyes were open to what I already had and not to what I craved, I would have seen that there was never much of a difference between the little badger and the child I had created," the elder halfa groaned and covered the top of his head with his hand. "You both possess the same spirit and character. If I had been able to control my desires, I could have achieved my dream of having a halfa child to take under my wing and be a loving father to, without the need to antagonize your family in the process. But I threw it away!" he suddenly shouted, clearly furious with himself for his own idiocy. "For what? A few years' age difference and an X instead of a Y chromosome? Instead of valuing her on her own merits, I discarded her like trash over something so pathetically inconsequential!"

All of them stayed silent as Vlad buried his face in his hands. He didn't cry or shed a tear…even in the timeline of Dan Phantom, where tragedy had been there in far more quantities than any man should have any right to experience, Vlad had never openly expressed any type of sadness. But the grief, self-hatred, and regret was clearly there for all to see. Danny in particular noted that not once had he made any mention of his status as an outcast from the world, or being "cheated" out of his dreams…for the first time, the iconic selfishness of Vladimir Plasmius was nowhere to be seen.

Clockwork finally spoke. "Vladimir has been entrenched in darkness for a very long time, Daniel. Your mistakes were easier to fix – you are an innately heroic person in nature, and all it took was witnessing the future of Dan Phantom for you to turn away from your nightmarish path. The older half-ghost is an entirely different matter, and it took several revelations from the past and from multiple timelines to catalyze his redemption. Though I presume that the method I utilized would be far more preferable than ten years under the reign of the Ghostslayer?"

All of them shuddered at the idea, even Youngblood, who had been (and arguably still was) the least sympathetic towards Vlad. Both he and Ember looked at Danny, who realized that they were looking at him to make the next move.

"You know…ever since we had our first fight in Wisconsin," Danny finally began, "…you didn't really give me any reason to think that you were anything other than a creepy, manipulative, power-hungry asshole. But then, there was one time I saw you with a personality that was a complete 180 of what I'd known. I know I'm like the last person that should ever be saying this, but Dan Phantom wrecking the world was the best thing that ever happened to you, in terms of personality if nothing else. You actually cared about other people, you cared about my parents, about me…that was the first time I was actually glad to see you."

"Wonderful," Vlad muttered. "All it takes is the ruination of my life, and in an alternate timeline, the ruination of the entire world to make me a better person. That is absolutely fantastic!" But his temperament had changed. The elder halfa still had too much lingering pride to ever openly express a vulnerability of any kind, but Danny could see it. A willingness to finally change for the better, and the hope that he could possibly turn his life around, and drag himself out of the pit he had dug himself into.

"Well…believe it or not, you're not even the worst ghost in the Ghost Zone," Danny commented dryly. "Sure, you've tried to take over WAY too many times than I count, but I've seen a lot worse, cheese head." He counted them off of his hand. "Pariah Dark, Freakshow, who's not even a ghost, my evil future self," everyone shuddered at the last one. "I don't think anything you could ever do would come close to that last one."

"I do not, and have never, taken pleasure in the destruction of others' lives simply for its own sake," Vlad declared. "My plans, unethical as they were, were always means to achieve a greater end."

Danny raised an eyebrow but decided to keep his mouth shut. Ever since he'd first wrecked Vlad's cloning plans and freed Dani from his influence, he'd kinda gone off the deep end. This wasn't the time to bring it up, though. "Here's the thing," he explained instead. "I honestly do think that you're trying to change for the better. I really do. But that doesn't change the fact that you caused a lot, and I mean A LOT, of problems for a lot of people."

Vlad groaned again. "You do not need to remind me about this fact, Daniel. I'm well, well aware by now."

"The fate of Vladimir Masters is something that cannot be settled immediately. Until his fate can be more definitively resolved, a temporary solution will be required," Clockwork suggested. "I can create a small and temporary ghost realm close to my domain; doing so will shield him from reprisal from potential enemies that he may have made, as well as allow my…associates…to keep a very close eye on him."

Vlad's core ran cold as he heard the second part. The Observants had been the ones that had demanded Clockwork to take action against him. Fair enough, even though those irritating eyeball ghosts, at least the normal ones, didn't intimidate him in the slightest. But he knew exactly who Clockwork was talking about…someone who could cripple him with terror just with his very presence, someone who would be more than happy to rip him to pieces if ever given the permission to do so.

"You're not a popular guy in the Ghost Zone," Ember warned him with a dark look. "A lot of people know you're the dumbass who let Pariah Dark out of that sarcophagus."

"Works for me," Danny agreed. "I've got enough on my plate right now, and I can't deal with Vlad on top of it."

Youngblood glared contemptuously at Vlad. "Danny's a nice guy. He'll forgive anybody who's not named Dan Phantom," he growled. "But guess what? I'm not. You think it's that easy, that we'll all just let you back in like that, all happy and whatever?"

Vlad sighed. "I am fully aware that the majority of the Ghost Zone is less virtuous than the Champion," he admitted. "Just as I am fully aware of the many wrongs I committed…not the least of which include what I have done against Dani."

"You want me to stop hating you?" the child ghost snapped. "Then make things right with her. Until then, stay the hell away from me!" He stormed out of the bar, leaving Danny and Ember with Vlad and the Primordial of Time.

"Youngblood's got a point," the ghost rocker finally commented. "I might not be as close to the little dipper as the kid is, but I do like the kid well enough, and you've done some serious shit to her."

Danny suddenly groaned. "Oh, great…I just realized something…"

"What, baby pop?" Ember asked.

"My parents are not gonna be happy to hear about this…"

/

With what little time I have left, I managed to write out one of the longest chapters in a while. With medical school kicking in now, I will probably not be able to write a chapter for probably a while. Hope you enjoyed, though!