What do we have here? Lots of headcanons! I hope you aren't getting tired of them.
Xandarius: Hello! It wasn't my intention to make it sound like everyone who had ever gotten lost in the GZ wound up in Danny's lair. Just some of them. As for how they got there, I'm planning on talking about that in a later chapter. Let's just say, Clockwork was involved.
Jadejem1: I just decide on an underlying cause, and then try to be consistent. This chapter will talk about a couple of those underlying causes. :)
Sorry about the cliffhangers. They just happen so easily.
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Chapter 48: Twisting My Words
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Human-ghost hybrid biology (can you even call it that?) is strange. Complex. Each hybrid, or liminal spirit, to use the technical term, is different. Unique. Their bodies bend to both their minds, their personalities and self perceptions, and their genetics. Further differences are ensured by the degree of liminality they possess.
For example, Spectra possesses a very small degree of liminality. This is how she can fake humanity so well, despite being among the most inhumane of ghosts.
For example, the people of Amity Park all possess a very small degree of liminality. This is why, among other things, Spectra's plan to create a shell-body by extracting the best traits of the Casper High student body could work.
Danny is very, very liminal. One might even say that he is fully liminal.
His system is full of redundancies.
This is why he is so robust, so difficult to hurt, to take out of a fight. Danny could survive on just ectoplasm, or just human food, or quantities of both that would not be life (or after-life) sustaining by themselves. Danny does not need (for certain values of the word 'need') to breathe, even in human form, as long as he has stored sufficient energy in his ectoplasm. All of his human organs have ectoplasmic copies. All of his ectoplasmic organs have something akin to master blueprints stored in his core. This is why Danny can heal so quickly, even in human form. This is why Echo, Fractal, and the other shadows could have lungs to breathe with.
It also means that Danny has not one, not two, but three organs with which he thinks.
(It might actually be better to consider the whole arrangement to be one organ, one brain, with a unusually large number of hemispheres, as opposed to considering the components to be separate. There was only one Danny, after all, and, Ghost Catcher incident aside, he showed no signs of a split personality.)
(Although, it wasn't as if that really showed. Danny's grades hadn't been good since middle school.)
The first, obviously, is his brain, his human brain, the one he was born with. It had, until the accident, served as the sole seat of his consciousness.
Then there is his core, all but intangible and invisible, nestled beneath his heart. One could say that a ghost's core is analogous to a human brain, but, truthfully, it is so much more that that. A ghost can survive being reduced to their core.
(So can Danny. So has Danny.)
Finally, there is the ghostly copy of his brain. It serves (or served, before his human brain and core learned to work together, and more intimate connections were formed) as a kind of interface between Danny's human brain and his core. It was like the corpus callosum, in some ways. It works in tandem with his human brain, is modeled on it, is, except for its substance, identical to it. It lets (or let. There are redundancies. There have been improvements.) information from his core be written to his brain, and vice versa, despite the vastly different formats.
This does cause a few problems.
(Some anxieties should not be soul deep. Some concerns do not translate well from lightning-struck flesh to immaterial spirit. There are things that the living were not meant to know.)
But there are also benefits.
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Danny's idea was simple. It had to be. He was having too much trouble thinking for it to be anything but simple.
Here was his problem:
When Danny 'went ghost,' his core 'woke up,' became more active, more involved with the operation of the body, and his human brain leaned back, took up different roles in preparation for battle (which generally speaking, is what he transformed for). But right now, Danny's core was hurt. Damaged. It was healing, but it couldn't really deal with something as complex as Danny's body. It was trying, as hard as it could to curl up in a little ball of no.
What Danny should do, what he wished he could do, was turn back. Become human again, put his human brain back in charge. Unfortunately, because Danny had recently imbibed a large amount of energized ectoplasm (thanks Fractal, thanks Echo) that wasn't really working. Unlike with his ghost half, Danny's human side didn't have a convenient thing to grab hold of to kick-start the transformation. Usually, though, transforming back was beyond easy. He was dropping to his ground state, his lowest energy level, storing everything for later use. But with his core hurt (he did not want to think: broken) the energy he had taken in refused to be regulated. The fire, having started, refused to be put out.
His brain wasn't really cooperating either, even though it had (probably, Danny didn't, couldn't, keep track of this kind of thing) given him a potential solution. It did not like what was happening. It barely had the ability to control Danny's ectoplasmic body. It wasn't even detectable when Danny was in ghost form. (Danny didn't like thinking about what happened to his human body when he went ghost, mostly because he wasn't sure what happened to it. Injuries from his ghost form appeared on his human body, but the reverse didn't always happen. It was just... confusing.)
On the other hand, Danny's ghostly brain had a much better connection with his ghostly body, and it didn't have anything wrong with it. At least, it didn't have anything more wrong with it than usual. So using that should be fine.
Of course, this wasn't really a solution, more of a stop-gap measure, or a transition point, a step in a larger, still-unformed, plan. Also, the components weren't as disparate and disconnected as Danny made them sound. The system was a cohesive whole, just as a human brain, with its two hemispheres and the cerebellum, was a cohesive whole. The injury to his core had been affecting him even when he was in human form. This was just a way of thinking that Danny occasionally found useful.
So Danny closed his eyes and tried to focus, tried to find the parts of his mind that physical (semi-physical) structure. It was hard. His brains (strange to think of those in the plural) weren't easily distinguishable from one another. That was the point. Or a point.
Knowing that his parents were there, watching him, wasn't making this any easier.
But Danny did find it eventually, and gently pushed on it until his human brain was following it, instead of the other way around. It was a weird sensation, but not completely foreign.
He pulled himself up into a siting position, and blinked tiredly at his parents.
"Okay," said Danny. "I think I can work with this."
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Maddie watched Danny sit up. There were so few differences. She couldn't get over it.
His eyes were green, his ears were tapered, his teeth were sharp, his hair was white, and his skin was darker. But his features, they were the same. Beneath the swirling green, his eyes were the same as they had always been. How had she been so blind?
"Are you okay?" asked Danny. "I know this is- I- do you- Do you hate me?"
"I should be asking you that," said Maddie. "Danny, we- we've done such awful things to you. We hunted you. We-"
"It's okay. You didn't know. I never- I never blamed you."
"He should," said Echo, darkly. "You know what you've done. You made those things, and you made them to hurt, to maim. You designed them that way."
"Echo-"
"You hurt him," said Echo, throwing his arms protectively around Danny, and glaring at Jack and Maddie. "It doesn't matter that you didn't know who you were doing it to, you were doing someone, and you meant to do it."
"The things we've made, they're only supposed to affect ghosts-"
"That doesn't matter," snapped Danny. "They're people, too." He hissed, suddenly, bringing a hand to his chest. "I need to focus."
"Is there anything we can do to help?"
"No," said Danny. His aura flared suddenly, splitting into two bright blue-white rings and washing over his body, leaving him human again. Then he went limp in Echo's arms. "Hmm. That was weird."
"Clever, though," said Fractal. "It was interesting." He moved so that he was tight against Danny's side, and brushed his lips against Danny's ear. He sent a glance in Maddie and Jack's direction that made it clear that he was taunting them. "We can use the data."
"Data?" said Danny. He blinked twice, hard. His eyes were still green, but less luminous. Then he shrugged out of Echo's embrace. "You probably have questions," he said. "Lots of questions." He pulled himself into a cross-legged position. "I can answer them. Or try, at least."
"Why wait until now to tell us?" asked Jack, a hand on Maddie's shoulder. If he hadn't been steadying her, she probably would have fallen over.
"I was scared. Not of you," he said quickly. "I just didn't want to hurt you."
"Hurt us?" said Maddie, incredulously. "Danny, our house is full of weapons that can hurt you. We were- We were making things specifically to hurt Phantom- to hurt you. You should have said something, anything."
Danny flinched. "I know, but..."
Both of the shadows shifted so that they were slightly in-between Danny and Jack and Maddie. "You do get that we aren't human, right?" said Fractal, his tone light.
"And don't be all like 'of course,'" said Echo. "You clearly haven't registered the implications of this yet."
"Echo," said Danny, a note of warning in his voice. "I didn't want to hurt you." He looked down, to where his ankles were crossed. "I didn't-" He bit his lip. "I have an obsession. This," he brandished his hands, although what he was indicating wasn't clear, "it isn't cosmetic. It isn't skin deep. This is me. I'm- I'm as much a ghost as I am a human. I- I've- I just want to help people and I don't want to hurt anyone."
"That's your obsession?" asked Maddie, carefully, cautiously, dropping to her knees and reaching out to Danny.
Danny nodded convulsively, but leaned back into Echo. Maddie let her hand drop. "Yeah," he said.
"That's why you didn't tell us?"
"I- Partly. I guess. There were other reasons that made more sense, and there were always, you know, interruptions. Stuff. I guess. I'm sorry. Please, please, I know that I've screwed up, but..."
"Danny. Danny, we love you. You know we do."
"You're our son, Danno. Nothing is going to change that. Not whether you're a ghost, a human, or something in-between."
Danny sniffed, and then threw himself at Maddie. Maddie flinched a little, but Danny didn't appear to notice. He was too busy clinging to Maddie and crying. Jack patted Danny's back slowly with his large hand. His face was pale and shocked.
"Thank you," said Danny, just barely intelligible. "Thank you." It took a while for Danny to calm down enough to stop crying, but, finally, he calmed to mere sniffles, and occasional trembling sobs, and curled into Maddie's side. He was so tiny. So fragile.
The shadows were watching with huge, bright eyes. Maddie got the impression that they were prepared to jump in at any moment. Like predators. Ready to pounce.
"The shadows," said Maddie. "They're part of you."
"Necessary things," mumbled Danny.
"What?" asked Maddie.
"He means that we serve functions, have purposes," said Fractal. "You could say that we're parts of him. Under the right circumstances, Danny could act like either of us. But that's not really why we exist. If that's what you're asking."
"Your purpose is to explain things," said Maddie, remembering what Fractal had said earlier. "And his?"
"What do you think?" hissed Echo, sounding even more feral than before.
"Be nice, Echo," said Danny indistinctly. Echo huffed and turned away, still watching them from the corner of his eyes.
"I wish you told us before," said Jack. He had pulled Danny and Maddie into his lap, and was rocking them back and forth.
"Me too," said Danny, sleepily.
"We could have fixed this," said Maddie. "We could have fixed this ages ago."
"Fixed what?"
"This... whole thing." She looked warily at the two shadows, who were beginning to bristle. She leaned close to Danny. "We could have spared you all this," she whispered. "We could have gotten rid of this right away. Right after the accident. We could have made you better."
Danny was suddenly wide awake and staring at Maddie and Jack, betrayal etched into his face- and were his ears canted back? Like a cat's? They were.
"This isn't something that can be fixed," said Danny.
"You don't know that, Danny, we can-"
"No. You don't get it. You can't fix this. That's like- You're saying that you can fix this, fix me, but I'm not broken. I like being like this. I'm not sick."
"Danny, you've already said that this is affecting your mind."
"You- You're twisting my words!" said Danny angrily.
