Wow, I am LATE for my Halloween DP Oneshot. Well, you're going to get it in November instead.
That's coming next, so for now, please enjoy the final chapter of DevTucker10!
(Also, after the Oneshot, I'll be returning to a bi-weekly, slower schedule for the next arc. Thanks for understanding in advance!)
- Song
DANNY'S TUESDAY
After safely flushing Technus back through the ghost portal, Danny hesitated to shut it down.
The last time he had been through the portal, he had died. Died and came back to life as he was now - a half-ghost. Something that the Box Ghost had claimed was impossible. A ghost that had not, said Technus, ever set foot in the Ghost Zone.
"What exactly is the Ghost Zone?" Danny asked himself, staring at the closed doors of the portal.
The doors were huge, metal, and crisscrossed with the black and yellow colors of crime scene tape. A big red light, currently dark, sat at the top, ready to sound the alarm should anything try to get into the world of the living. Danny often wondered if the alarm was totally broken.
Everything about the Fenton portal had a clear "do not cross" vibe, yet Danny couldn't help but step closer. He thought he understood the impulse; it was like a pull tugging at his feet like he was meant to go through the portal. It was his right as a half-ghost, after all, to find out what was in there. If there was a place where ghosts returned after being evicted from the world of the living, Danny could stand to learn more about it.
Maybe he would learn something about himself - something about his powers. Or maybe, he would figure out a way to keep the ghosts from coming back.
"No more hunting," he thought. "If I can keep them where they belong, I'll never have to hunt again."
The idea of getting his weekends and evenings back, of being able to do homework without falling asleep at his desk, was so tempting. He imagined catching a movie with Tucker and Sam instead of ghosts. Going on dates. Living his half-life as best as he could.
It was a delightful dream. A desperate urge to return to a sense of normalcy - the life he hadn't had since his accident that summer. The temptation overpowered his sense of self-preservation.
He transformed. His white hair flopped over his forehead. Danny took a deep breath and opened the big yellow-black doors. The familiar glowing wall of swirling green mist greeted him. If he squinted, he could see the menacing darkness just beyond. The great unknown was beckoning him in.
Danny stepped forward and reached out his right hand. The mist was cold, but he pushed through and crossed over into the Ghost Zone.
It was unlike anything Danny had ever imagined.
The journey was quick. He had expected some kind of gooey resistance - like fighting his way through a wall of Jell-O. Instead, it was like stepping behind a heavy theater curtain. The barrier between the living and the dead enveloped him in soft, ethereal folds, and then he was on 'the other side.'
In the Ghost Zone.
Before him was a cloudy, black and green abyss of darkness and dim, shimmering light. He looked down and saw there was nothing below him - only emptiness. Above him was much the same. It was like being underwater - hovering over the endless chasm of the Marianas Trench with only a scuba suit and no fishing spear to protect you from the monsters lurking below.
And there were monsters. He could sense it.
Danny's 'Ghost Sense' might have affected him only a little in the world of the living, but in here, it was like someone forcing your head down into a bucket of ice water. Like being drowned in an ocean of cold, of fear. Haunted by the sense that something was watching you.
Like something was hunting you.
It was almost too much to bear. Every still-living cell in his body was screaming for him to turn back, telling him that he didn't fully belong here, not yet. But he had to bear it. He may never get another chance to see more.
Danny floated further in, always looking backward to keep an eye on his parents' portal, which hovered over endless, empty space. He feared that if he lost sight of the doorway in this place - this abyss - he might never find his way back out again.
Should've tied a rope around my waist, he thought.
Endless darkness threatened to swallow him up as he moved further into the Ghost Zone. It reminded him of images and videos of outer space - vast, empty, and eerily quiet. But instead of stars, strange debris floated in the distance, winking in and out of sight. Danny, puzzled, could see that most of them were dimly lit doors. Ornate doors, broken doors, ones with blackened windows, ones made of stone. Some were archways that held swirling violet-colored portals of their own, and Danny steered clear of those. The rest of the debris looked like staircases, broken buildings, and random objects like a boot or a spyglass. As far as he could tell, regardless of what his ghost senses were telling him, there didn't seem to be other ghosts around - just things.
Little things. Broken things. Forgotten things.
And then there was Danny. Impossibly small and taking it all in at once. Alone.
When he ventured too close to a floating staircase, he decided there would be no harm in touching it. He flew closer, reaching forward with his right booted foot. When he touched the staircase with his toe, it felt solid. He had expected to phase right through it.
Danny stood on the bottom step and stared up. The staircase led nowhere. There was no door at the top, only stone steps leading to nothingness. He felt a strange queasiness come over him - as though he wasn't meant to walk up those stairs. That if he did, something wrong would happen.
In the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of something else floating in the darkness - someone else.
Were they watching him?
"I shouldn't stay here," he said quietly to himself. His voice echoed off the stone steps as though he were in a cave. An endless cave, carrying his voice along its invisible walls and bouncing off the floating doorways.
By speaking aloud, it was almost like he had broken the silence, the peace… the safety. So Danny turned around quickly to head back to his parent's portal.
But where was it?
The ectoplasmic pulse in his veins quicked with panic. Like before, there was no loud heartbeat in his ears, no pounding in his chest. Only an animal-like instinct that something was wrong, that he was in danger, and that he needed to take action.
Danny kicked off of the stairs and flew back the way he'd come. His eyes scanned the darkness for the telltale sign of the brightly-lit ghost portal. He pushed small bits of debris out of his way. His hands clenched into fists as the panic took over his body. His fingernails left crescent moons in his palms, biting even through the gloves.
He was suddenly remembering what it was like the last time he was here. What it was like to die.
Hard-forgotten memories clawed their way back to the forefront of his mind. How his entire body convulsed and rattled as soon as he stupidly flipped the portal switch. The feeling of electric shocks pulsing through his bones, his muscles, his brain. He remembered the instant of death, the great deafening, blinding coldness of it all.
He also remembered the way that, out of nowhere, his heart kicked up again, beating so hard that he struggled to breathe. It was that thumping feeling you get when you're standing in front of a massive stereo, and the bass rattles you down to the bones.
And after all of that, nothing. Nothing until waking in the hospital bed a week later.
Danny didn't want to be stuck here in the Ghost Zone.
It frightened him. It angered him.
He didn't want to be half-ghost. He hated that the panic was there but his heart didn't pound in his chest. He hated that he felt so cold. So lifeless, and yet so alive. Like a marionette puppet, pulled by the ectoplasmic strings in his veins. Forcing him to live, when he had already died.
These thoughts swirled darkly in this mind. They pulled against the light of his living self; putting him into a suspension of despair.
And just when he feared he was about to float through the Ghost Zone for all eternity, a bright green light shimmered to his right. In the distance, the Fenton portal swirled, the doors still wide open. Danny turned and started flying for it madly.
When he reached the portal he didn't hesitate to fly straight through it. He careened through and collapsed down onto the cement floor of the basement, rolling to a stop. Maybe he should have returned in his invisible form, but luckily no one was around. Danny turned human again and then shut down the portal. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief, a cloud of mist escaping him as he did.
He shivered violently, and no doubt he would not feel warm for some time.
…
It was hard for Sam and Tucker to grapple with the great dark nothingness that was the afterlife. What Danny had seen, what Danny was, could only be irrefutable proof. But because it was all too much at once, Sam chose anger over existential reckoning.
"You went to the 'other side'?" Sam cried. She jumped to her feet on the bleachers, her hands pressed to her mouth in shock. "How could you do something so stupid alone? You could have been lost there forever!"
Tucker sat dumbstruck. Unlike Sam, he didn't know what to say.
"Danny we're supposed to be a team," Sam said, "but you keep making these decisions on your own. Don't you remember the whole shadow ghost experience?"
Danny had expected the lecture, but what he hadn't expected was just how very little he had really told them. Yes, he told them that he went into the Ghost Zone, and yes, he described what he had seen. The floating debris, the endless darkness.
He hadn't told them about the thing that was watching him on the stairs. He hadn't described the dread that he had felt straight down to the marrow of his bones - the echoing memories of his death. The idea that the Ghost Zone's endlessness might one day come to claim him for real.
No, he couldn't tell them any of that. They were already upset enough. The quiet, broken look on Tucker's face in particular was hurting him, but Danny didn't feel guilty. Going into the Ghost Zone had been something he needed to do, and he wasn't going to regret leaving his friends safe at home.
"I need you both to understand something," he said quite seriously then. "I've thought about it a lot over the last couple of days. About everything."
"And?" Tucker asked though he didn't want to hear the answer.
"I'm going to go back. I'll be more prepared next time, and if you want you can even be in the basement when I do. Hell, I'll even tie a rope around my waist. But I think that the answers to the secrets about my ghost powers, and the way to prevent more ghosts from coming to Amity Park, are in the Ghost Zone."
Sam bit down on her retort. She had never seen him look so determined, so serious. So resolute. There was no room for discussion, his eyes said, so there was nothing really more to say.
After all, this was Danny's half-life they were talking about. If he had to do this, then the only thing they could give him was their support.
"Thank you," he said when they didn't fight back. "You guys are my best friends, and I never want to scare you like that again. That's why I'm going to be honest with you from now on. But sometimes I just need to find things out for myself, especially about myself... about my new life."
Sam shivered on the bleachers. They were staring down the beginning of a path that Danny was going to travel on his own. And as much as they would support him and do what they could to be part of his life, his half-life, Sam finally understood that there were places he would go that she could not follow. Places where she could not be with him.
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes and she turned away from them. It was unfair to be so emotional about something so important to him, but she was afraid.
So very afraid.
"I saw that," Danny said, stepping up the bleachers to get a look at her. "Don't do that, Sam. It's gonna be okay."
Sam turned back to him and a tear fell. It stung on her windburned cheeks and trickled down toward her chin. Without thinking, Danny used his thumb to gently wipe it free.
"You're gonna start making me feel bad. I keep making you cry."
Tucker chuckled and put an arm around her, but Sam sniffed and wiped her nose.
"It's not you. It's the wind. I'm freezing out here."
"Me too," Tucker agreed, standing. "Come on, I think we should head back inside."
He held out a hand and Sam took it. Danny took her other one. The boy lifted her up from the cold metal seat and helped her down the bleachers. She hated that they babied her when she cried, but she didn't stop them.
They cared about each other so much. More than most friends ever did. Maybe Danny was going down a path that she couldn't track, but she wasn't going to let him get himself hurt either. She would do whatever it took to keep her best friends safe, for the rest of her life if she could. Especially now, when things were becoming so dangerous. So frightening.
Sam sighed and forced a smile. "Well, you know what this means."
Dan and Tucker looked at each other and shrugged.
"It means it's time to update the Gothica again!"
Danny laughed and Tucker groaned.
"My place?" Danny asked. "We could have another weekend campout in the living room."
"My parents don't want me sleeping at your house," Sam said. "But I can probably make up a lie."
"Just tell them that we're all at my place again," Tucker said. "Your parents don't like me that much, but at least they like me more than the Fentons."
Danny cringed. "That's never going to change, is it?"
Sam didn't say what she was thinking in her head. About how she hoped very much that her parents' opinions of Danny would change.
"Probably not," she said instead.
Danny sighed and Tucker patted his back reassuringly.
Gray clouds rolled overhead, following them back to Casper High. They were late to class, but none of them cared today. Even Mr. Lancer didn't seem to care when Danny sat down in English twenty minutes late.
Halloween loomed like those gray clouds, and although Danny had had enough spooks for one lifetime, he was looking forward to even a shred of normal.
"Okay," Lancer said with a long sigh, turning back to the smartboard. "To further our Halloween reading, let's analyze Shakespeare's use of ghosts in his plays…"
I hope you enjoyed this arc! I loved writing Technus (he's one of my favorites) and exploring the spookiness of the Ghost Zone - this universe's literal afterlife.
As the story progresses, I really want to get into the infinite doors theory, the Ghost King, and Clockwork. Everything!
But for now, I'm going to keep slowly introducing the other characters, and see if I can have less angsty, cuter, more fun arcs thrown in (hello Ember's arch, coming soon but not soon enough!)
As always, please review and tell me what you think! Thank you to everyone who reads Gothica. You keep me writing!
- Song