Hey, it's me ZAGRH8R, whom most of you know as the authoress of the strange and humorous fic, "Mistakes are a Part of Learning". I've had some writer's block for the past week or so, but I finally had an idea. But I've had this idea tugging at my mind for the longest time, and now I finally get to sumit it. This is basically a one-shot unless anyone wishes otherwise or I change my mind. It's a bit different from my usual humor stories, so I hope its good. So, here's the story, told from Danny's point of view.

Disclaimer: I don't own Danny Phantom. I do own Jerry Foley and I MIGHT own Older Danny, since it is a different version of Danny after all. I'm not quite sure.


The Musings of a Replacement

30 years is a lot of time to think. Actually, it's only twenty since that incident happened, but I still can't help but think about what happened 30 years ago, when another incident happened. Before I start, I should explain myself. My name is Daniel Fenton, but you might not recognize me. Unless you're Vlad Masters, who is hopefully rotting in Hell right now. After all, I've gone by a lot of names: Danny, Danny Phantom, Fenton, Fentonmeister, Fentina (Even I don't know how this happened), The Halfa, Loser, Freak, the list goes on and on. Speaking of things that should rot in Hell, I'd better get back to what I was saying.

I guess you could say this started thirty years ago, when that first incident happened. You see, my parents, Maddie and Jack Fenton, were both inventors and ghost hunters. For dad, the ghost hunting was more like a ghost obsession. Every other day he was making something to capture ghosts. By the time I listed all of his inventions, you'd probably end up as a ghost yourself. Mom wasn't as obsessed about ghosts as Jack was, but she hunted them on a daily basis, like dad. I never understood why she hunted ghosts if she wasn't as obsessive as dad was, until twenty years ago, when that incident happened.

Back to the point, my parents made an invention called The Fenton Ghost Portal, a bridge between the Ghosts' world and ours. They were both so sure that it would work, since they did do this before, so they were pretty bummed when they plugged it in and only a few sparks shot out of the machine. Defeated, they both left to work on something else, and I decided to take a closer look. I donned a white spandex jumpsuit with a black belt, collar, gloves, and boots. I felt around the sides of the machine until I accidentally pressed the on button to the machine. Who puts an on button on the inside of the machine anyway? I saw a blinding flash in the machine and felt like I was being electrocuted before I passed out.

I wasn't exactly sure what time it was when I woke up, but I do remember feeling very groggy and dizzy after waking up. I stumbled about until I caught onto a nearby sink. I turned the sink on and splashed some water on my face until I noticed two green dots reflecting from the sink's metal surface. I looked around for whatever it was when I noticed that my jumpsuit looked different. No, not different, REVERSED. Everything that was black was now white and everything that was white was black. I found a nearby mirror and I realized that this applied to my hair too. My eyes, however, were a different story. Instead of seeing baby blue irises in the mirrors, I found out were the green dots were coming from-my freaky, lime green, glowing eyes.

I was shell-shocked! What was happening to me? Why was my hair so weird? Was I dead? Why the heck was I sinking into the floor? I pulled myself up from the ground-and I mean that literally. I was floating a few inching above where the floor was, of course I couldn't tell then because my body suddenly decided to turn invisible too. Suddenly, I saw two rings of white light, coming from my waist that were heading in different directions, one up and one down. The rings reminded me of this one TV show were those kids go into that computer world, Code Lyoko I think it's called. As the rings passed my body, the colors had reversed again, and I was wearing my white jumpsuit with the black accessories. My hair and eyes had returned to their normal colors too.


A month after the incident, I had somehow discovered that I was half ghost and half human. My friends, Tucker Foley and Samantha Manson, didn't believe me first, but after an accidental demonstration of my powers, they figured I wasn't lying. I didn't really become Danny Phantom until that day when my mom finished the Fenton Finder, and when Sam changed the school lunch menu to Ultra-Recyclo Vegetarian. I still don't understand how she can stand to eat grass sandwiches. Apparently, neither did the old Lunch Lady that used to work here, before she died in a freak celery accident. She's probably still haunting the schools to this day, making sure that meat is always a top priority in the school cafeteria.

I was going to tell my parents about my ghost powers, until she attacked. Her meat-induced fury had caused a lot of melee that day, much to the dismay of Tucker Foley, who didn't want to see meat play the bad guy. That day, I decided to use my powers for the ever chliched job of being a superhero. Eventually, fighting ghosts became as regular as doing my homework or facing Dash's beatings. I would've preferred the ghosts. Now that you know about the incident that happened 30 years ago, I'll tell you about the incident that happened 20 years ago.
I was going to a local community college around that time, and I was madly in love with Samantha. How could I not, she was beautiful, funny, independent, daring, and one of the nicest people I've ever met. Everybody kept teasing about us being a couple, simply because we were best friends and we both kept insisting we weren't a couple. At first, I just figured we were really good friends, but later I realized that we were meant to be something much more. It was after school sometime in September when I finally go the courage to tell her how I feel. She was leaning against a nearby tree wearing a long sleeved black shirt with jeans. I walked toward her and I fought back the butterflies desperately trying to get out of my stomach.

"Sam," I said while fidgeting nervously "I need to tell you something."

"What?" she asked nonchalantly.

"Sam, I...love you..."

I barely got the words out of my mouth, and waiting for her response seemed like an eternal nightmare, even if I only waited for a few seconds. I wasn't really sure of what would happen next. Would she laugh in my face? Would she tell me to get a life and stop chasing after her? Would she return my love? Would this just end up as a dream, forcing me to wake up and face this dreaded ordeal all over again? She just frowned at me and sighed sadly.

"Danny, I'm sorry" she began, possibly dreading this moment as much as I did "But I can't return your love."

I felt like Cupid had shot an arrow through my heart, shattering it into a million microscopic pieces, leaving just my body to process all of what just happened.

"Is there someone else?" I stuttered.

"Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm in love with Tucker Foley." Another arrow through my shattered heart, and I didn't even pick up all the pieces yet. "But that doesn't mean we can't still be friends, right?" I never really hated the word 'friend' until that moment. She shattered my heart, and she went after who used to be my friend, and she expects me to believe that just being 'friends' is going to fix that? If that's the case, then I'm not going to be friends with them any longer. Not with Tucker, and not with Sam.

I still don't understand how they got together so well. She's a vegetarian; he's a carnivore. She loathes the popular crowd; he practically worships them. She thinks outside the box, he just goes with whatever's happening. She's rich and modest, he's middle class and...not.
About six months after that, I found out that Sam and Tucker were engaged and they planned to get married in April. Around midnight that evening, I went to the park that and just cried on a park bench. Some people passed by to look at me but most of them just left me alone, figuring that I was some sort of jobless bum or something. One person did stop to talk to me, Vlad Masters, who was probably trying to recruit me again. He somehow found out about how I got my heart broken and stuff, and he started talking about how he could relate to that.

He could never relate to what I was going through. I could care less about what he had to say, and the more he talked, the more he pissed me off. I just sat up and told him to go away and let me stew in my misery ALONE. Of course, he didn't listen to me. I transformed into my ghost form, and couldn't help but notice that the normally bluish-white rings of light looked more like a smoky grey color. I didn't think about that too much, as was just concentrating on my anger at the moment. Sensing a fight, he turned into his ghost form too, a white tunic with a black triangle on the torso, black gloves that extended two inches past his wrist, a black belt with an oval silver buckle, knee high black boots, and a white cape with a red interior and a color that flared out and was about as high as his ears. That looked villainous and all, but what was really freaky was his pale mint-green complexion, how his teeth were fanged like a vampire's, his unusual, crescent shaped black hair, and entirely blood red eyes that seemed to glow with the intensity of a blazing wildfire. He looked like something you would find in a horror novel, and technically, he was. Then again, I was as much as a mutant freak as he was.

I don't exactly remember all the details of the fight, but I do remember what happened toward the end. A wicked, secretive grin spread across his face and he just laughed.

"Look at you, Daniel!" he chuckled "Acting upon rage! You're almost as bad as me!" I felt my blood bubbling up in my veins when I heard him say that. I channeled all of my power into one big blast.

"You and I are two entirely different people!" I shouted as I readied my blast "You misuse YOU'RE powers for your own selfish needs! I could never end up like you!" I shot the blast at him and I watched as the wave of reddish energy connected into his body. His horrible screams of pain and anguish were strangely satisfying to me at the time. He fell to the ground covered with gashes and cuts and blood. I walked over to him and he smiled mysteriously.

"Think whatever you want, Daniel." he said as he started transforming back into his human form, still covered with the injuries from the fight "In the end, you're just my replacement." He slowly closed his eyes, and he died with his mouth still in that mysterious smile. I looked down upon his body and I noticed that I felt no guilt about doing this at all. No remorse, no sorrow, just a rush of excitement from the fight, and some sort of satisfaction knowing he was dead. I simply threw back my head and laughed sickeningly before changing back into human mode and going back home. Murder felt good.
Eventually, people found out about the murder and it was pretty much headline news. Mom and dad were pretty shaken up about the whole thing. After all, Vlad used to be friends with the both of them, even if he was cruel and bitter when I met him. I noticed my mom and dad discussing his death in the kitchen.

"I just can't believe it" my mom said as she fought back her tears "It seems like just yesterday we were still in college, hanging out and fighting ghost together." Wait, did she say they were fighting ghosts together?

"The papers said that the cause of his death was unknown," my dad said, also crying "Whatever it was, it must have been pretty powerful."

"But wouldn't you think that he would've been able to defend himself in that case." Mom asked "After all, even without his ghost powers, he's still pretty good at fighting."

"You mean you KNEW he had ghost powers?!" I blurted out suddenly. They turned around and looked at me oddly.

"Of course we did," my dad said "You can't have a ghost portal blow up in someone's face and not notice when weird ghost-like things are happening to the same person."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?" I asked

"Well, Danny," my mom began "We'd have told you this earlier, but you wouldn't have believed us." So my parents told me about their ghost hunting adventures and how Vlad called himself Vlad Plasmius, simply because he thought that sounded really cool.

"The odd thing is," my dad added "Is that you remind me of him when he was about your age."
After that I pretty much isolated myself from everybody else. I keep in touch with my family and Sam every now and then, but I'm mostly an island. I live in Pennsylvania now, and I really don't have any financial problems. Of course, if there's any emergencies or anything like that...well, I have my ways of getting by. Six years after that incident Sam and Tucker had a child, a boy named Jerry Foley. I really hate Tucker. I can't believe he stole Sam from me! He knew I was in love with her, why couldn't he have let well enough alone and let us be? He will pay for shattering my heart and stealing the woman I love! He will pay with his life!


I think I did pretty well for what this was worth. I'm especially proud of the death scene, but the recap of what Danny's life was currently like seemed a bit vanilla. Also, I'm not exactly sure if this qualifies as an angst or a tragedy. But other than that, I like it.