Chapter 2: Explaining It All
Jazz watched in horror as her father pushed the button to activate Danny's belt. Everything seemed very still for a moment, as if no one wanted to say anything. Then the belt started sparking.
"DANNY!" Sam rushed forward to undo the belt, but that was when he started screaming and thrashing about. She tried to catch him in one place, but he was too strong for her. "Mr. Fenton, I need you to hold him down!" Jack Fenton just stared at the screaming form of his son, shocked into immobility.
"DAD, NOW!" Jazz rushed in to help, avoiding his flailing arms as best she could while reaching for his waist. Jack finally broke his stasis, kneeling beside the now prone Danny and holding his legs down.
"MADDIE, GET HIS ARMS!" His wife took her position by the head, pinning the arms down where she had the best leverage. With the most dangerous parts of the body restrained, Jazz and Sam were finally able to unlatch the belt, tossing it to the side like so much trash. "We're moving him to the couch girls." They lifted him-his arms and legs were still twitching, but thankfully that was all. His eyes were closed, though they moved behind the lids as if he were dreaming. They lay him on the couch, Sam sitting so that his head was in her lap. She softly stroked his hair, whispering words the others couldn't hear. They heard the door open, followed shortly by a yell.
"Danny? Sam? Where are you?" Tucker walked into the living room, stopping dead when he saw his best friends. Maddie watched as he looked Sam right in the eye. She knew that he was asking some sort of question, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out what it was. All she could tell was the Sam responded with a head shake and he relaxed only slightly.
"What happened here?" Like the question in his eyes, there seemed to be more than one meaning to what he was saying. Maddie narrowed her eyes in suspension. The children were keeping something from her, something they were all in on. Sam must have caught the look she was wearing, because she sighed.
"Why don't we wait until Danny's awake, and we'll take it from there okay?" Danny's parents nodded, content to wait for an explanation straight from the source. Jazz gathered drinks for everyone while Jack sat down where he was to work on the Ghost Gabber. They were in for quite a wait.
Danny slid his eyes open and closed them with a moan just as quickly. The light was a little much right now, what the skin on his whole chest feeling like it wanted to slide off of his body. Somebody was stroking his hair, and he just wanted to slip into the comfort provided by that. However, if his memories were right, there were going to be two very curious parents wanting to question him. Plus he knew whose lap he was in and it was making him pretty embarrassed.
"I need to get up now Sam." Her hand jerked away from his head, and he felt a little sad about that. He sat up carefully and winced at the prospect of what was coming next. "I need a second guys. Don't try to help me, that'll only make it worse." He took a deep breath and pulled his shirt over his head as quickly as he could. He still screamed, and everyone could see why.
Starting near his waist, and more concentrated there, were dark red welts rising partway up his chest. Tucker could see the same thing from behind him. Jazz left to get the burn cream while Sam stretched out her hand and then retracted it. Maddie cleared her throat.
"Danny, the belt really shouldn't have reacted like that if it was working properly. It's most likely that there was some sort of malfunction. I'm sorry son, I should have checked it more thoroughly before you put it on." She tilted her head forward. She felt a little bad about using guilt against him, but she was worried about the secrets he was keeping. He never looked rested or relaxed anymore, and his grades were far less than she knew he was capable of. He tended to jump at every sound that was more than a whisper, and he was eating enough to make even Jack look picky. Out of the corner of her eye she watched son's face with some shock.
He was still thinking about lying to her. She could see it in the way his eyes were flicking back and forth. His mouth opened and closed before a shudder ran through his entire frame. His head dropped to his hands and his voice came out weakly.
"I'm so tired. Not sleeping, failing classes, fighting all the time...lying. I'm just so tired of it all." He lifted her head to look her right in the eyes. "Mom, I know you've had suspicions over time that you shoved to the back of your mind, things that didn't add up. You brushed it off all those times because you didn't want to believe, but sometimes we have to stop lying to ourselves and just face reality. You know why the Specter Deflector did that to me. Just admit it to yourself." He gave her a small smile and watched the light gathering in her eyes as she finally allowed herself to know what she suspected.
"Time Out!" The entire scene froze as a ghost man appeared with a pop. He surveyed the people frozen while he changed into an old man with a long beard. With a sigh he pulled a medallion out of his robes and slipped it over the head of the shirtless one. He started with a jerk.
"What?" He looked around to catch sight of the ghost, who was now a little boy. "Clockwork? What are you...no." The terror in his voice rose until it reached panic levels. The shifting ghost lifted a placating hand to calm him.
"He had not escaped my guard. I decided the nexus was too insecure, so I placed him 'between the ticks', as I like to call it." He shook his head in the silence and skipped over the explanation. "Just be assured he is carefully sealed away." Danny breathed a sigh of relief, glad that his alternate was not about to menace the world again.
"So what exactly did you need? I mean, I'm glad to see one of the few ghosts that I can actually have a conversation with, but I get the feeling that this isn't a social call."
"Yes indeed. It's not bad news per-say, but I do have some important news to impart." Danny raised a hand to stop him, staring intently the people around him.
"I need you to come back in ten minutes, and don't freeze time when you do." Clockwork raised an aged eyebrow at this statement. "If it's going to be as important as you say, I think I should share it with the people I love." Clockwork gave a small smile.
"As you wish. Keep the pendant until I return." He disappeared in a flash of light, leaving time paused to give Danny a second to get back into the proper mindset. He turned his eyes back to his mother, who had her mouth slightly open to say something. He felt the gear medallion cool down as time started again. His smile widened when he heard the words she whispered.
"Danny Phantom." Right on cue Jack, who hadn't really been following things, stood up with a gun in his hand.
"Where! I'll take that ghost out-or not, but I don't like it invading my home."
"Mom, do you want to take this?"
"No sweetie, I think it would be better coming from you." Danny sighed and took the gun out of his father's hand.
"Dad, I want to explain some things to you, but I need you to calm down when I talk." He waited until his father was once more seated on the floor before "You guys had just finished the ghost portal and it wasn't working. I invited Sam and Tucker over to check it out, and Sam mentioned going inside." He caught the looks directed her way. "Well, it might have been her that pushed me into doing it, but she didn't really say anything I wasn't already thinking. I put on my lab suit and stepped inside. I put my hand on the wall, but I hit the on button instead." He paused here as something occurred to him. "Why did you guys put a power button on the inside anyway?" Jack started talking before his wife could.
"Well son we wanted to be able to have the power switch interact with the ectoplasmic energy emanating from the Ghost Zone. We bought this house because there was a weakness in the barrier that separates our two worlds but it wasn't strong enough." Danny laughed, though it sounded a little grimmer than a laugh should.
"The place where a person just died is always the thinnest area in the barrier. When I pressed the button, the portal was flooded with power trying to connect the worlds together but it couldn't. Instead of making its way to the grounding rod, it chose to go through me." There was a gasp of horror from his parents.
"But the Fenton portal was designed to use enough electricity to kill a human three times over! It's a miracle you're still alive!"
"I'm not mom. Or I'm sure I'm mostly alive, but I'm definitely not the same. I felt myself dying. It didn't hurt, but I could feel something cold creeping up on me." He blew out a breath. "It was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me. I didn't want to go. There were so many things I wanted to do..." His mother and Jazz both noticed the way his eyes flicked to Sam, but they decided to keep it quiet. "Then something happened that took me months to figure out." He put his head in his hands and Tucker patted his shoulder (one of the few exposed places that wasn't red) while Sam stroked his knee. He had never talked much about the day of the accident, and now they knew why.
"Danny, you don't have to answer this, but how in the world did you find all of this out?" Everybody could have sworn they saw a pinking color spread over his skin for a few seconds before he answered.
"I joined the Ghost Zone National Library. Anyway-" He was interrupted by at least three different people.
"THERE'S A GHOST ZONE NATIONAL LIBRARY?" Danny scowled as the pink darkened to red.
"I don't really have a lot of time now, so please...here's what I think happened: As I was dying, the barrier was thinning, which allowed some more potent ghost energy to start slipping through. That ectoplasmic energy mixed with the electricity that was powering the portal and blew a permanent hole to the Ghost zone. I happened to be in the middle of that hole. Now, a healthy human can apparently enter the Ghost Zone unprotected for a short period with no ill effects-something to do with 'self-contained Biometric energy'. However I was dying, so my energy was way off, pulsing around in a mad attempt to make me stay alive. To further that end, it absorbed a vast amount of the ghost energy and used it to bind me to this plane." His mother nodded.
"Ghosts are very good at keeping themselves from moving on, so their energy would facilitate that."
"Yeah. It was a good try, but unfortunately life energy and ghost energy aren't really meant to exist in the same body, especially if that body is living. The two powers fought one another, and that's where the pain came in. It felt like I was being torn apart. Eventually, it was over and I was ejected from the portal where Tucker and Sam took me up to my room."
"But who won the struggle Danny?" His mother sounded as if she didn't really want to hear the answer, but had to ask.
"They both did mom. My life was saved, so the life energy is still there. I was changed though. I think that every part of my body was infused with ghost energy, to the point that I think a DNA test would register me as a different person. I was changed from the bottom to the top and when I came to I looked very different." He took a deep breath. "Mom, dad, I am a half ghost that goes around fighting the destructive ghosts and I call myself Danny Phantom." There was a strained look on Jacks face, as if he were refraining from shouting "GHOST!". He felt the medallion warm up and knew that he had to prepare them as quickly as possible. "I have a friend showing up any second, a ghost friend, so I would appreciate it if you wouldn't attack him." The words had barely left his mouth when a young child ghost blinked into existence.
"Greetings, friends and family of the Protector. I am Clockwork, guardian of the time stream." Danny cleared his throat to distract his father from drawing one of the many guns he continually had available.
"Like I was saying, Clockwork came by a little earlier with something to tell me, and I decided that it would be nice to share it with the people I love." He took his mother's hand and patted his father on the shoulder, willing them to understand his feelings. She smiled at him and turned to face the ghost in expectation, but his father was a little less accepting of the visitor.
"Danny, why didn't you tell us earlier? We could have tried to find a cure, some way to separate the ghost energy..." Danny grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him square in the eyes.
"No! You are never, EVER to even consider trying to separate my ghost side. Promise me."
"Danny, it wouldn't be that..."
"PROMISE!" His parents looked somewhat taken aback, but Clockwork knew exactly where he was coming from. All Jack knew was that his son was digging his fingers into his shoulders with a force he didn't suspect him capable of and looked more determined than he had ever seen him.
"I promise Danny." His son let out a hard breath.
"Thank you dad."