Opening AN: Before we get started with today's chapter, I want to say thanks to DJTimmer for pointing out a little blip in the radar from last chapter. Vlad wasn't supposed to have known about Danny's lack of ghost powers yet, so I went back and fixed it. Thanks for catching that, dude! And a special thanks to everyone who has stuck with me throughout the course of the story thus far, I literally could not write these chapters without you all! Your support and reviews go a long way to making sure that this story reaches completion, WHICH I AM DETERMINED TO MAKE SURE HAPPENS, and gets the ending that it deserves! Now, I plan for this story to be about twelve chapters long, but I might make it fifteen chapters depending on where the plot takes me, so we're about halfway there. And now, without further ado, let's get back into the story!
WARNING! THE FOLLOWING CHAPTER CONTAINS FLASHBACKS DESCRIBING EVENTS THAT MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME READERS! VIEWER DISCRETION IS HIGHLY ADVISED!
Disclaimer: I still don't own Danny Phantom or any other franchise that is used in this story! …Which so far includes One Piece, Ah! My Goddess!, Black Panther, Yu-Gi-Oh!, How To Train Your Dragon, Red Vs. Blue, Justice League Unlimited, Naruto/Shippuden, Avatar The Last Airbender, Legend of Korra, Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Jurassic Park, Hellsing, and Ranma ½.
Familial Reconciliations
With the Fentons now alone with their son and five of his wives, the emotional tension was thick in the air as neither side really knew what to do. Jack, Maddie, and Jazz always wanted to find Danny and either reconcile, in the case of the parents, or reconnect, as in Jazz's case, but now that that opportunity had presented itself neither side truly knew how to go about it. It just felt sort of awkward to be in each other's presences after seven years apart once Danny ran away from Amity Park after getting rid of his ghost powers.
For Danny, this was an especially tense and awkward moment.
He'd left home without so much as a real goodbye when he got rid of his powers, and really only left a letter and several files detailing the truth about everything he'd been through in that single year of having his ghost powers.
"Hi guys. Eh, how's it going?" Danny asked, trying to break the awkward silence.
And mentally slapping himself in the face afterwards.
'How's it going? Really? You heard from Vlad how it's going, and not to mention you've made no attempt to keep in contact with them, Daniel! Way to sound like an oblivious jerk!' Danny mentally scolded himself.
But rather than snapping at him or going on a long sarcastic tangent like Sam would have no doubt done, he was instead brought into a big old bearhug by his father who was trying desperately to keep his tears back.
And now, the emperor understands how Vlad must feel whenever this happens to him.
He honestly feels kinda bad for him now.
"Danny, you're alive! Oh, thank God in heaven you're alive!" exclaimed Jack.
"I'm happy to see you, too, dad… but… you're… breaking my… spine!..." wheezed Danny.
Fortunately, Jack heard his now grown-up son and set him down as he released the hug. Danny inhaled deeply to get oxygen back into his lungs and grunted as he snapped his spine back into place with a loud 'pop'. Maddie and Jazz were also quick to embrace Danny, but their hugs, while tight, weren't back-breakingly so. The two women sobbed into their son/brother's shoulders, releasing seven years' worth of pent-up worry.
"My baby boy! I was so worried about you!" sobbed Maddie.
"Where were you, you big dummy? Why didn't you at least say goodbye?" Jazz asked through her own tears.
Danny just smiled sadly and wrapped his arms around his mother and sister, fully understanding the worry and sadness that he caused them to endure by running away and leaving only a note like he did. He had planned to visit and try to reconnect with them during his little self-exile, but the war drastically altered his plans.
"I didn't mean to scare you both like I did. And you have every right to be angry at me for running away like I did, and I have no excuse for making you worry so much." Danny said. "I'm deeply sorry."
For a few moments, the family just stood there in a warm embrace. All they wanted to do was enjoy the feeling of being whole again after seven years of being incomplete. They knew that there was still much to discuss.
And boy, does Danny have the mother of all stories to tell them!
***The Dungeons…***
To say that the dungeons of the Imperial Capital were an unpleasant place would be considered the understatement of the century. They were hardly ever used in these times of peace and nowadays only housed the most dangerous of criminals. Such as members of radicals who remained loyal to the more corrupt political powers from the era of war, such as the Central 46 who were, at one time, the big bosses in charge of the Soul Society. Each cell had members of these groups locked away in smaller cells while Vlad and his own entourage had been separated into two groups and locked up in two larger cells.
Those from Amity who had been arrested by Danny's soldiers found themselves wincing at the screams of agony coming from a single room as the rest of the prisoners shuddered and shook in their cells, knowing that any one of them could be next. And most of those who went into one interrogation room in particular… they never came back out alive!
And if they did, they came out horribly disfigured as they looked like something out of a low budget monster movie!
Tucker barely held in a yelp of fear at the sounds of what could have been flesh being stripped from bones, along with a man screaming in the most pain they've probably ever been in. He quickly leveled a half-hearted glare at Sam, who was sitting in the adjacent cell with some GIW agents.
"You had to try and guilt trip him, didn't you?" Tucker asked.
It was clear that he blamed Sam for their current predicament. And rightfully so.
"Me? What'd I do?" Sam asked incredulously.
"If you hadn't tried to manipulate Danny with the blame game and set him off, we might have at least been able to stay for a few days without being treated like prisoners! But no, you just HAD to try and guilt trip him into fighting for Amity Park, a town which, need I remind you, drove him out in the first place because they didn't want Danny Phantom around anymore!" Tucker exclaimed. "Besides, you tried to make it sound like we were still his friends when you know perfectly well that we had both foolishly severed that bond of friendship seven years ago! He is under no obligation to just up and fight for us just because YOU think he should!"
Fortunately for him, only Sam, Valerie, and Vlad could hear him since the screams drowned out most sounds in the dungeons.
"He shouldn't have left in the first place! When he became Amity's resident hero, he swore and oath to protect the town! He has a duty and has to follow through with it!" Sam argued, her less logical side winning out over her rationale. "Besides, I could have salvaged our friendship and things would go back to normal once we convinced him to regain his ghost powers."
"Would you listen to yourself? Have you learned nothing these past seven years, or did you forget it all after you found out that Danny is the emperor of this new empire?" Tucker asked, more than a little frustrated over Sam's behavior.
"Besides, you heard what he said, Sam. His empire has already spent too much of its history fighting wars that it doesn't even remember the cause of, and he doesn't want to drag his people into another war, especially one that doesn't involve them, unless there's no other choice." Valerie added.
Sam ground her teeth and glared at the two but couldn't dispute their points no matter how much she wanted to. She could only mentally curse them and their logic at defeating her spiteful and petty side. She sputtered as she tried to come up with a rebuttal before settling for crossing her arms and turning away from them both.
"Screw you, guys!" Sam said.
Tucker merely smirked and said "No thank you, I have a wife for that."
"Yeah, and thanks for the offer, girl, but I'm straight as a board." Valerie teased.
Which Sam did not appreciate as she too was one hundred percent straight. She had just been waiting for Danny to come to his senses and come home so that they could finally be together once he got a clue about her feelings for him. Yeah, good luck with that when he's already married to several beautiful women who are also strong and independent.
Not to mention the fact that they'd mangle you if you tried anything with their man.
"Well, well, well, look what we have here."
The whole group was startled as, apparently, they'd been so out of it they hadn't noticed that the screams had stopped. Nor did they see the two people walk up to their cells. One of them was a woman with purple hair that was done up in a ponytail that looked kind of like a pineapple, pupilless brown eyes, wearing an open beige trench coat and orange mini skirt with a mesh bodysuit underneath.
Next to her was a man with a shark-toothed grin that could only be described as maniacal. He had pale skin, long black hair, and glowing red eyes with slit pupils. He wore a red ensemble that consisted of a pair of circular heavily tinted wire-framed orange sunglasses with goggle sidings, a red fedora with a black rim around the middle and a wide, floppy brim, and a long red trench coat. Underneath that he wore a charcoal suit, leather riding boots, and an intricately knotted red cravat. The look was topped off with a pair of white gloves.
"I don't know about you, Anko, but I do believe that our emperor has just sent us some fresh meat." the man said, his smile never faltering. "And from what I'm smelling, they're from the other side of the Veil."
The woman, Anko, mirrored her partners smile with a smirk that was full of sadism of the highest order. This caused Vlad and his entourage to shudder as they could already tell that this experience wasn't going to be a pleasant one.
"Such generosity our emperor shows us. Shall we repay his generosity by squeezing ever last morsel of information out of these maggots, Alucard?" Anko asked.
"We shall, indeed, my dear Anko." Alucard replied, his smile widening more than what should be physically possible.
As their cell door were opened, our group from Amity Park realized…
They were now thoroughly screwed.
***Royal Garden…***
After the rather tearful, and quite literally back-breaking, reunion, Danny had invited his family to the royal garden to make up for lost time. A few servants, though Danny doesn't like using that term, brought tea and snacks for the group to enjoy while they caught up on all that they missed in each other's lives. And Jack and Maddie were beside themselves with joy, albeit also slightly worried, when it was revealed that Danny was married to eight different women who loved him for who he was and didn't marry him for something as trivial as political power or money. In fact, Danny's last three wives had returned home from their missions soon after Vlad and the others were sent to the dungeon.
First there was Boa Hancock, a former pirate and the current leader of an island known as Amazon Lily. And as you can probably tell by the name, it's an island inhabited exclusively by women. A literal island of amazons. Boa herself is considered the most beautiful woman in the world, her beauty being second only to the mermaids, and honestly any single straight man would agree with those comments. And even gay men would agree that she has near unmatched beauty. She has a well-proportioned figure when compared to her two giant abnormal sisters, Boa Sandersonia and Boa Marigold. She is very tall and slender as she stands about a head taller than her husband and has long black hair that extends past her waist with locks of hair that frame her face and fall to her chin while showing off her high forehead, dark brown eyes with long, voluminous eyelashes, and pale skin. Her figure is quite buxom with very well-developed curves in all the right places.
Fortunately for Jack, he was a faithful man who only had eyes for his wife and only stared for about two seconds before turning his attention to the two ladies who had arrived with Hancock.
Maddie probably would have slapped him upside the head if he didn't.
The next two women were a little on the unusual side, with one of them looking totally otherworldly. Yet they could tell that she wasn't a ghost. In fact, neither was her totally human looking companion. At least, she wasn't a ghost in the traditional sense of the word.
After Hancock came a woman named Franceska Mila-Rose, or just Mila-Rose as everyone else calls her. Mila-Rose is a tall, dark-skinned woman with green eyes, and long, thick, wavy brown hair. Like the rest of Danny's wives, she too has the coveted hourglass figure that most women would kill for, but she also had this strange hole in her body located midway between her navel and her chest. She had these strange white bone pieces on her head and neck that formed a three-sectioned crown on her head and a thick necklace. Her outfit was white with black trim and seemed to be heavily modified to resemble attire belonging to an amazon warrior, with multiple pieces of armor covering her chest and upper arms, gauntlets on her forearms, and a white skirt.
The final woman looked mostly like an ordinary human, but there were some glaring differences that showed that she wasn't. For one, rather than having hair growing out of the top of her head, she had what appeared to be a pair of horns with three strange tentacle appendages growing out of her head. One out of the back, and two going over her shoulders and draping in front of her chest. Her skin was orange while her face had these white markings on it. A wing-like mark on each cheek, a pair of diamonds on her forehead, and a set of zigzagging lines that tapered off where her eyebrows would be. She was dressed in a simple outfit which was mostly gray and had some layers of armor for protection, and she had a pair of sword hilts attached to her belt, though one appeared to be shorter than the other. This was Danny's eighth wife and the final empress, Ahsoka Tano.
After both sides got over the shock from the introductions, they hit it off right away. Danny was surprised to hear that Jazz had married and with a child of her own, but he was still ecstatic to be an uncle and said that she was free to bring her husband and child over to visit whenever they wanted. He did jokingly warn her against using a fake ID to get in next time, though, which they both had a good laugh about. Everyone was having a good time just talking, getting to know one another in the case of Danny's family and wives, and enjoying the peace and quiet of the garden.
Maddie even commented that she could never have planted a garden as beautiful as this one, admitting that she did not have a green thumb. At all. After about an hour, though, curiosity began to get the better of Danny's immediate family as a certain question had been swimming around in their minds for a while now.
"So, you girls all married my son? How did that happen?" Maddie asked.
The smiles seemed to drop as the atmosphere turned somewhat somber. Knowing that this would be especially hard on some of them, Danny allowed some of his more emotionally sensitive wives such as Korra and Mila-Rose to curl up against him as he put a comforting arm around each woman. The way they all met and fell in love varied, but they all had some sort of defining element of tragedy in them.
"It was different for all of us, but we all fell for Danny during the war." Korra said as her smile grew somewhat somber. "For me, Danny saved me from a life of being enslaved and being turned into either some slimeball's plaything, or a mindless, obedient weapon for another warlord."
***Flashback…***
["I had just helped put a stop to Amon's war with the benders of our country and had returned the bending of everyone he'd taken it away from. Except for the really bad ones, of course. Unfortunately, not long after Republic City's first president, Raiko, was voted into office, he set me up by luring me into a trap."]
Korra gasped as she was struck by chi blockers, immobilized and unable to call for help, as they'd made certain that she couldn't do anything except blink and breathe. She hit the ground hard as her body went limp, her eyes frantically darting around as she tried to process the situation. After a few seconds, President Raiko appeared in her peripheral and began speaking with the chi blockers as he handed them a set of five gold bars each. She couldn't hear their conversation very well, but her father had trained her to read lips while she was still mastering waterbending. He'd told her that it was better to have the skill and not need it than to need it and not have it.
And now she knew why, and seriously wished that she could fight back against her captors.
Raiko had paid these men to capture her and sell her on an illegal slave market!
And with the lands at war with each other, nobody would notice her disappearance until it was too late!
Korra was helpless as her arms were shackled behind her back using platinum cuffs, just in case she could metalbend even though she'd never done so before, and her legs shackled soon after. She was quickly loaded into the windowless trunk of a van and hauled off to who knows where.
["They took me to this camp where they intended to 'train' me into being a submissive slave. I was put with the waterbenders after they had applied a special seal that blocked off my ability to bend the elements of fire, air, and earth. In this room they had us locked up in individual cells and pumped in dry air to keep us from waterbending."]
Later we find Korra locked up in a cage that was only just big enough to contain her, her clothes replaced by worn and dirty rags that barely covered her properly. She sat with her knees brought up to her chest, a look of hopelessness in her eyes as she seemed resigned to her fate. And she wasn't the only one there.
She was put with several other waterbenders, all of them female, and in similar states as she was, though some had been broken more than others due to the various 'training' methods that the slavers used to turn their captured prisoners into submissive slaves who would follow their master's orders no matter what. But Korra was the Avatar, and she wouldn't break so easily. She'd proven that multiple times.
Korra just hoped and prayed that help would arrive soon.
Later on, she was on her knees in her cage, hunched over as her arms were held out straight by shackles attached to long chains while a guard used a long stick with a cup attached to one end to give Korra and the other slaves water to drink. She and the others may be waterbenders, but it made no sense in the minds of the slavers to let their 'merchandise' die from dehydration. But they always took these safety precautions as they knew that if they weren't careful, the prisoners would use their bending to launch a slave rebellion and fight back.
["And they would always bind our arms in chains, making absolutely sure that we were immobile before giving us any water. Any food we were given was either covered in mold, rotten beyond belief, or just plain infested with maggots. Many of the very young and very old died of malnutrition because of this. It was absolute hell in that camp."]
Months had passed since Raiko sold her out, and Korra was once again sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest as she began leaking silent tears from her eyes. Hope for a rescue was almost totally gone from the young Avatar, and she hadn't been able to connect with her past lives recently. It was almost as if she'd been abandoned by the Avatars of the past, left to rot in loneliness and misery.
She hadn't felt this helpless since Amon took away most of her bending before Aang restored it and gave her the knowledge of energybending.
And she hated it!
["I don't know how long had passed in the time that I had been brought there, but my day to be sold was soon upon me. I was so scared of the life that I might end up leading from then on, when I heard unusual noises within the camp."]
Korra gasped and looked up when she heard the sounds of fists impacting flesh along with the voices of the guards as they cried out in pain. Her eyes widened even further as she heard what sounded like some sort of energy attack followed by an explosion as more guards screamed in agony before falling silent. She flinched as the doors to the room were blown back by an explosion as smoke billowed into the room and quickly cleared. In walked Danny, in his younger years, looking absolutely murderous as he continued to attack the slavers.
They tried to use guns, blades, and even their own bending against him, but Danny proved to be more than a match for their mediocre skills and easily used his own sword, a mighty halberd, to cut down any and all of his foes while using martial arts and energy blasts to kill off the rest. When he was absolutely sure that he had killed all of the slavers, he called in soldiers who had been there with him and moved on to the cages. At first, Korra was afraid that he would start killing off the prisoners, but those thoughts were dashed when he quite literally ripped the door off of her cage and started helping her out of it.
["Danny had arrived and freed me and the rest of the slaves, destroying the slave market camp and killing all of the slavers in it. After that he surprised me by flying me back to Republic City where he revealed all of the evidence that he had gathered against Raiko to not only get him booted out of office, but also seize control of Republic City and gain their aid in stopping the war and unifying the warring countries."]
***End Flashback…***
Korra closed her eyes as the painful memories of that slave camp clawed their way to the surface when she told her story. Danny just held her tighter as he silently let her know that he was there for her.
"After saving Korra, I made it one of my top priorities to completely abolish slavery by destroying every last slave market and human trafiking ring I could find. The looks of defeat, hopelessness and resignation… it was… it was bad, to say the least." Danny said.
It was clear to Maddie, Jack, and Jazz that the events of this war had scarred their son/brother more than just physically. And some of these scars ran deeper than others. They vowed to help him, and his wives move past the trauma and help them heal the scars on their hearts.
But for now, they were content to just sit around and share stories of everything that's been happening in their lives recently. The good, the bad, and the unexpected.
***To Be Continued…***
Ending AN: Yeah, if you couldn't already tell from Korra's flashback in this chapter, I really don't like Raiko from Legend of Korra. He was a total douchebag who actively supported Unalaq's takeover of the Southern Water Tribe and refused to send them aid. He may have been the first president of Republic City, but he was the absolute WORST president of Republic City! Next chapter will go a little more into detail about how Danny met the rest of his wives, but I put Korra's flashback in this chapter mainly because hers was the only one I could think of at the time. I hope you all enjoyed this new chapter, and please don't forget to leave a review for this chapter! Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!
