Separation
By Cybra
Warning: Spoilers for "Ultimate Enemy." Ye hath been warned.
Disclaimer: Danny Phantom is Butch Hartman's.
"No! I don't want this! Danny, please! I know you lost your family and friends (…and Lancer…), but you still have me! I'm begging you: Don't let him do this!"
The mental cry went unheeded as Vlad's ghost gauntlets—a set of impossibly long claws extended from the fingers—plunged into the fourteen year-old's chest.
A mental scream of agony.
Danny Phantom had never thought that anything could hurt worse than the accident that had fused him to Danny Fenton. The specter went limp as he was ripped out of the boy's body, his spirit wrenched away from Danny's.
His ghostly body dangled from Vlad's claws.
'I can't feel him anymore…!' he shrieked in the silence of his own mind.
After all they had gone through together, after all they had faced, Danny had chosen separation. True, the boy had thought that separating them would mean losing the painful emotions of his human half…
But what Danny had not realized was that he was causing the phantom just as much agony that his human half had experienced.
For the first time since the deaths of Sam, Tucker, and the rest of the Fentons, Phantom felt loss, real loss. Danny had always been his better (if a bit misguided at times) half. He had felt sorrow when Danny's loved ones had died, for he could feel his human half's agony; however, their deaths were not as painful as being ripped away from Danny.
He opened his eyes and pulled away from Vlad, tearing himself off of the man's ghost gauntlets and surprising Vlad. He grabbed those same ghost gauntlets and slid them over his own hands.
'Let's see how you like being only a half!' Phantom thought, reaching inside of Vlad and hurling the human half in one direction and the ghost half in another.
The ghost gauntlets fell off of his hands.
Phantom glanced back at Danny. He wanted, desperately, to rejoin the now terrified boy.
'No. If Danny doesn't want me, then I'll go.'
But he could not stand being only a half anymore. He wanted to be whole somehow.
Phantom's eyes landed on Plasmius.
'Maybe…'
He flew into the ghost half of Vlad Masters.
The merge with Plasmius did not go well. It did not hurt quite as much as the original merge with Danny Fenton though it came close. He fought for control, but Plasmius was darker, more evil.
Just as he had once been without the good influence of Danny.
'This was such a bad idea…!'
Phantom screamed as the merge finally completed itself. It took him a few minutes to regain his bearings.
And when he re-opened his eyes, he stared at Danny Fenton.
"He betrayed me…" the voice in his mind that sounded like Plasmius whispered.
"Not Danny…" Phantom reached out towards the boy for a moment.
The Fenton boy curled up as tightly as possible, trying to make himself seem as small and harmless as possible.
Phantom's eyes narrowed before he hissed, a forked tongue snaking out of his mouth.
"Kill him."
The ghost ray did its job quite efficiently.