A/N: Written for Ectober 2021, Day 17: Found Footage. Standard disclaimers apply. Contains canon-typical bullying.
The video, upon review, did not show what Kwan was expecting. At all.
Kwan released the last cable tie holding his camcorder in place and untangled it from the chain link fence behind the Nasty Burger. He'd had it near the ground, hidden behind some boxes that had yet to be claimed by the Box Ghost and angled up towards the dumpster for the best show. It had been recording while Kwan had been inside distracting Fenton's friends with questions about school assignments—met with suspicion but honest enough answers—before the other A-listers had arrived. More importantly, it had been recording while Dash had cornered Fenton before he'd had a chance to walk through the front door and while Dash had subsequently ushered him around back for a different sort of meal than he'd been expecting.
Considering the rotting stench wafting from the dumpster filled Kwan's nostrils from fifteen feet away, he was glad he hadn't been in Fenton's shoes.
Those shoes would've squished very uncomfortably by the time Fenton had managed to climb out of the dumpster, which meant Kwan's footage was going to be gold.
Kwan stopped recording and hit rewind as he straightened up and headed back to the street. He'd gotten caught up inside, so it had been a few hours since the incident. He wanted to get this home and onto his computer as soon as possible, preferably before his parents got home and noticed he wasn't working on homework. Besides, once he had a copy on tape and on the computer, he could worry slightly less about both copies being caught up and destroyed in a ghost attack. His luck might not be great, but at least it was better than some people's.
It was better than Fenton's, clearly, or Fenton wouldn't have fallen for Dash's ploy. Seriously. Even if he had believed that Dash had seen a ghost dog behind the Nasty Burger, why would he assume that Dash would come to him with the news? Phoning the Ghost Alert Line was the best bet; you could kill two birds with one stone since the news station always alerted the Fentons.
Whatever. Fenton's misfortune was their entertainment. That had been the entire point of recording the incident in the first place. It was something that would never be shown to a teacher—or any adult, for that matter—but the A-list and the other upper echelons of the student body would enjoy this for weeks.
Ten minutes later, Kwan had shucked off his football jacket and hung it on the back of the rolling chair in the family office. The camcorder was plugged into the computer, and he leaned forward as he watched the video being copied over. The lighting was good, coming from behind the camera and bright enough that everything could be seen clearly but not bright enough to distort anything on the video. That made it even easier to see the look on Fenton's face as Dash picked him up to toss him face first into the dumpster. It was priceless, the perfect mix of surprise and disgust and resignation. Dash was cackling as he closed the plastic lid on the dumpster, flashing a thumbs up in the direction of the camera before turning away and heading inside to meet Kwan.
Needless to say, neither of them had been surprised when the losers waiting for Fenton had checked their phones and sworn before grabbing their food and clearing out.
Now, Kwan was finally going to see Fenton's side of things as he dragged himself out of the smelly dumpster and hit the pavement covered in muck.
The lid of the dumpster cracked open, and Kwan could make out Fenton's hand holding it up before he noticed the boy looking around. He didn't want anyone else to see his embarrassment. Oh, that made this even better. He was going to—
Kwan blinked.
That wasn't right. He hadn't seen anything go fuzzy, but the tape must have skipped or something. Fenton hadn't even struggled to climb out of the dumpster. There was no way he could be standing up from a crouching position now like he'd only just rolled out. The lid on the dumpster was still closed, but that didn't mean anything; Kwan doubted Fenton was strong enough to throw it open from that angle without more leverage than he'd have.
On the footage, Fenton pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, presumably to text his friends. No sludge came with it to splatter onto the ground like Kwan would've expected, and Fenton made no move to clean off his phone.
No matter how much Kwan squinted at the screen, Fenton didn't even look dirty. The white of his shirt was as pristine as ever, and there were no mystery stains on his jeans. As far as Kwan could tell, Fenton wasn't even wet. There wasn't anything in his hair, nothing was gunked onto his skin, and the pavement around the edge of the dumpster didn't even have any new deposits from whatever had fallen out with Fenton.
"That's impossible."
The dumpster hadn't been empty, and its contents hadn't all been nicely contained in garbage bags, either. It had been a rank mess of rotting food mixed in with used napkins and dirty tray liners and everything else. Kwan had seen that when Dash had first opened it. He knew he had. Besides, they'd figured out the pick up schedule; the dumpsters behind the Nasty Burger wouldn't get emptied until tomorrow.
So how could Fenton look like he'd never seen the inside of it?
Fenton walked out of the shot.
His shoes, which should have still been wet, left no footprints.
Dumbly, Kwan stopped the recording and saved the copy to his computer. He left the camcorder plugged in, just in case something had gone wrong when he'd played it on the computer, and opened up the video file he'd saved, skipping ahead to the moment before Fenton had ended up outside of the dumpster.
Kwan replayed the same five seconds over a dozen times.
One second, he could see Fenton's hand holding up the dumpster's lid and his head turn as he scanned the area.
The next, the lid was thumping closed and Fenton was rolling onto the ground, and then he was in a crouch and rising to his feet.
It was all one smooth motion.
It was also all at angle that was impossible. It just didn't make sense. It was like Fenton had come through the side of the dumpster and not over the edge.
Not that Kwan could see him coming over the edge.
What he saw was even more impossible, like Fenton had been coming out the solid metal side, so that's where the tape must have glitched. Kwan could pause it at the exact point that he could see Fenton from the knees down and nothing else, like they were just sticking out the side. It might just be the angle, but….
Kwan toggled the pause off and on in quick succession and caught most of Fenton's body in the next frame, pretty much everything except his right arm showing clearly against the faded red metal of the dumpster. Another toggle, and Fenton was on the ground with all his limbs intact; as Kwan let it play, Fenton finished rolling to his feet. His shadow stretched behind him.
Kwan grabbed the camcorder, flipped open the screen on the side, and rewound until he got to the right part.
It was exactly the same as the copy on the computer.
He shouldn't be surprised. It was supposed to be that way. It wasn't like he'd gotten any errors, after all, but things would've made more sense if the copies hadn't matched, if something had gone wrong in the transfer.
He wasn't using an old tape. He'd dug out a brand new one specifically for this, not wanting to risk somehow missing something or messing up the footage or winding up with a bit of whatever had been on the tape before as part of his final copy. Sure, there was always a chance of it having a defect straight out of the package, but the rest of the tapes had been fine, and what were the chances that it would mess up at that exact moment?
Something being wrong with the tape wouldn't explain Fenton's spotless appearance, anyway, so what the heck was Kwan looking at?
Kwan unplugged his camcorder and packed everything away—except the tape, which he slipped into a case and into his pocket—before he returned to the computer. When he paused the video this time, Fenton was definitely half-emerged from the dumpster, his legs and the left side of his torso free, his neck and the rest of him still swallowed by metal. Much as he might want to, Kwan was pretty sure he couldn't blame it on the angle of the shot when it wasn't dead on.
This was Amity Park. Things weren't exactly normal in Amity Park. Kwan knew that.
He remembered the time practically everyone in Casper High had started exhibiting ghostly abilities like this. He remembered the headache he'd gotten when he'd merge again after splitting. There had always been that moment of wooziness and disorientation, where he hadn't been sure which direction he'd been facing, where he could have toppled over without support even if he'd been trying to stand up straight, where his eyes just hadn't focused. Then there had been the way his muscles had suddenly ached or burned or stiffened, depending on what he'd been doing, and his heart had raced for what had felt like hours but must have been a minute at most, and he'd felt more exhausted than he'd ever had after football practice.
As taxing as all that had been, the students of Casper High hadn't shied away from swapping stories about the ghost flu incident, and Kwan was certain about one thing: Fenton's sister had been sick, but he hadn't been.
At least, that's what everyone had thought.
Knowing Fenton's parents, 'everyone' included them.
But Fenton wasn't sick now even if he had been then. He couldn't be. That quarantine wouldn't have been for nothing—the rate at which it had spread through the school must have meant that they weren't kidding when they'd considered it highly contagious—and no one else was coming down with anything now. If anyone would, it would be Foley and Manson, if not the entire Fenton household, and everyone knew when they set up their own quarantine to deal with a disease they suspected had ghostly origins. So maybe, Fenton had been sick but not treated like everyone else, and he'd somehow just kept the powers? Without being contagious any longer? Even to someone like Foley, who'd never gotten it in the first place?
It was a better thought than the idea that a ghost might help the son of ghost hunters.
Besides, if Fenton hadn't known he could do whatever he'd done, Kwan would've seen it. Fenton would've been freaking out. It would've been on his face even if he hadn't tried to stick his hand through solid metal again to make sure he hadn't been imagining things. That's what Kwan would've tried to do.
No. Wait. Maybe Fenton's lack of reaction to all of this was Kwan's clue as to what was really going on here. Foley was good with technology; everyone in school knew that. If Fenton had crawled out of the dumpster covered in muck and spotted the camcorder, maybe he'd decided to have some fun instead of just destroying the evidence. They'd had a few hours. They could've recreated the situation and reshot Fenton's grand exit once he'd cleaned up. If nothing else, Foley could have been able to mock up something convincing.
Couldn't he?
The truth was, Kwan didn't know if it was even possible to edit something like that on the tape itself so seamlessly—the light didn't even seem to be different!—but he couldn't think of a reasonable alternative. This had to be Foley's work. The three losers were probably checking the area every once in a while themselves to see if he'd come to retrieve the camcorder yet and would be killing themselves laughing over the idea that Fenton could pass through solid objects as easily as a ghost. If Kwan had gone to Dash with this, to anyone on the A-list with this, and tried to convince them that Danny Fenton could phase through things like a ghost….
But what if he really could? What if this wasn't Foley's work? What if it was real? What if that was the reason Dash could shove Fenton in a locker and Fenton could still turn up to class on time? They'd always assumed Manson or Foley let him out, but….
Kwan swallowed before pulling out his phone and flipping it open. It took his shaking fingers five tries to type out a comprehensible message to Dash saying that the video hadn't turned out.
He didn't correct Dash's assumption that it had been too bright to see anything.
He didn't say anything when Dash said they could try again sometime.
Instead, he clicked back to watch the video on the computer again, trying to figure out if it was real and—if so—what that meant.