For DP's phic phight 2022.
Prompt: the ghost zone goes silent. danny has dissapeared. after three weeks, everyone of ghostkind reappears, and says nothing as to why. something happened in those three weeks, and amity wonders what. (PR137)
why don't you love who I am?
Danny was gone. How could he be gone? One moment he was there and the next he wasn't. Maddie tried not to dwell on the fact that they found out because the school called.
It was a Tuesday afternoon and they almost didn't hear the house phone ring because they were testing the new ghost shield prototype in the basement.
"Fenton household, Maddie speaking. Who is this?" She said in a cheery tone, hoping it was a new client or someone interested in their work. It was neither.
"Mrs. Fenton?" It was Principal's Ishiyama's voice. She sounded serious. "Do you have a moment?"
"What did Danny do this time?" Maddie sighed, pulling up her goggles. Lately Danny had been erratic and uncontrollable. Getting into fights at school, breaking curfew, things like that. It wasn't rare to get a call like this from school. But usually it was Mr. Lancer who called…
"Is Daniel at home with you?"
Maddie blinked. "No. Is he not at school?"
Principal Ishiyama's breath was heavy when she prepared herself to speak. "Daniel Fenton had been absent from school yesterday and today, Mrs. Fenton."
The woman felt her heart flip uncomfortably in her chest. This couldn't be happening-
No.
Calm down. Think. There must be a good explanation.
"He could be with his friends-"
"Samantha Manson and Tucker Foley had been asked about the whereabouts of your son, but neither had seen him since last Sunday."
"Jasmine?"
"She says she had been so busy with finals that she hadn't been home except to sleep since last Tuesday. Confirms she saw him go to sleep on Sunday night."
Maddie doesn't remember much about the conversation after that. It was like her brain and her body disconnected and it worked on autopilot - she hung up, promising she would call the police, and walked back down the stairs to the lab.
Jack was illuminated by the opened portal as she turned towards him.
"Danny's missing. He has been missing for two days."
Danny was still missing at the end of that week, when the police finally took them seriously and stopped dismissing their case as just a runaway teenager. He couldn't have just run away! They would have noticed something, see the signs… Danny had been his usual cheery self the week previous to his disappearance - Maddie remembered talking to him about an exam he was excited about. He was raving to his sister about actually having enough time to study this time.
(Cute but weird, in her opinion. Danny was a straight A's boy up until highschool, and he never complained about not having time to study.)
(She needed to speak with his teachers about homework if they didn't leave him enough time to study.)
Or did he have a new hobby? A new videogame? She couldn't recall…
She couldn't remember the last time she plainly talked with her son. She knew he liked space stuff, he had dragged everyone to that big NASA convention and asked for money to buy a rocket model; but it's been a while since she heard him talk about it. Not even when the last Mars probe was launched - he said he would watch the transmission in his room. He didn't come back down for dinner.
They had asked Jazz when she came home from school, but even if she was sad about Danny's disappearance, she didn't seem surprised about it. They insisted, worried that she was protecting her brother, lying for him and giving him time to run far away enough.
"I don't know!" She finally shouted, slapping Maddie's hand away. "And even if he told me where he went, I wouldn't ever tell you."
She never explained her words and refused to come out of her bedroom, even to eat. When she was interviewed by the police, Maddie was surprised to learn her words had changed - Jazz was suddenly fixated on the idea that Danny would never run away from her, that he didn't tell her where he had gone, but if he did, she was more than happy to cooperate with the police.
Jasmine never explained this change.
In the frenzy that followed the mysterious vanishing of one Daniel Fenton, nobody noticed how ghosts, which had been an almost daily sighting in Amity, had stopped coming.
Not even the friendly and uncanningly human Phantom was seen flying around. Not even a ghost animal was found searching in the garbage or the Lunch Lady messing around at the school's cafeteria.
It was almost as if the ghosts were giving the town a chance to regain normalcy before doing the same song and dance all over again.
Or, Maddie decided around the end of the second week after Danny was last seen, the ghosts took her boy.
She and Jack concluded that it was the most logical explanation - Danny had been kidnapped by the dreaded Phantom and his group of ghost lackeys with the objective of hurting the resident ghost hunters. Cheap move! She hated it, she hated so much that her son had been put on the line because of her, that she did not hold down Phantom hard enough when she had him in her hands a that day a bit before Danny's-
Yes. It had to be retaliation. She held no doubt about it, but the police only looked at her weirdly and wrote down a few lines before she was 'kindly' escorted out of the precinct. She knew what it looked like - she hadn't showered in days and her suit was stained with some ectoplasm, failed experiments to locate Phantom from this side of the portal. She wasn't crazy. She had proved ghosts were real! She proved a portal could be made! She could prove that Phantom took her boy!
She learned that the ghosts came back when Jazz went down to the basement with some sandwiches and a nasty judgemental glare.
"Phantom hasn't been seen yet." She answered before her mother could ask. "Mom, leave it alone. It's been three weeks. You need to mourn… the family needs to mourn. Together."
Somehow, Maddie got the feeling that Jazz didn't mean her words.
"I know, Jazzy." She tried to project motherly support with her shoulder touch, but her daughter tensed instead of relaxing. She saw her eyes wander to what she was working on. "Mommy is going to fix this."
"Mom, there's no 'fixing' this. Phantom didn't kidnap Danny!" Her eyes went back to her latest invention. "What's that?"
Maddie accepted the topic change. "It's something new I'm trying to figure out."
"What does it do?
"It will locate Phantom for us, sweetie."
She chose to leave out the part where it would dissolve the ectoplasm of Phantom's body and completely destroy him for daring to touch a hair of her little boy's head. She felt like those words would make Jazz hover more and get in the way of her work.
Still, her daughter's eyes flashed with concern. "And?"
"Nothing else, honey. I just want my son back. I don't care about Phantom."
Lies. All lies. When did she start lying to her own family? When did she start giving out excuses to not join Jack in bed?
Maybe it started when the police requested to interview her alone, without Jack at her side. Maybe it started when she realized the police were hinting at some kind of domestic violence situation as a probable reason for him to run away.
(Why? She had asked. They refused to comment, faces hard and condescending. Gone were the soft smiles and the understanding eyes.)
(When she confronted Sam and Tucker at school, she overheard the rumors going on, whispers of Danny laughing off a huge bruise around his wrists the Friday before he went missing.)
But it didn't matter what everyone believed. She would prove that Danny was fine, just scared and alone and lost wherever Phantom had taken him to get back at her.
When Jazz finally came back up the stairs and left her alone in the basement she chuckled. Ghosts may only be an echo of consciousness in a body made of ectoplasm, but they could hold a grudge, apparently.
The next time she trapped him and had him chained in the lab, she would be prepared to never let him go.
Maddie softly caressed the face of her son in the picture, who was smiling at the camera. She didn't remember the occasion, but the whole family was there smiling as well.
They don't smile anymore.
Not since Danny was whisked away by that wretched ghost scum.
It didn't make sense to smile if Danny wasn't there, if he could be hurt and scared or even-
If Phantom was still out there, which she proved was true, and no, Jazz, she wasn't 'batshit crazy', her machine had worked - if that criminal was still roaming freely, she couldn't smile. She would make him pay even if it cost her own life.
She didn't have much to lose anymore, Maddie thought in her darkest moments. Jazz moved out shortly after the highschool graduation and never called her, except at Christmas and her birthday; Jack divorced her the year after that, claiming that she had been consumed by her hate, that the Madeline he married left with Danny that dreadful day.
It became clear to her that they simply didn't care enough about Danny. She let them believe whatever they wanted, look at her however they wanted. She would bring Danny back. She would make them see.
"Commander Fenton?" A voice said from the other side of her door. "It's time."
Maddie stood and placed the family photo on her desk, her lips curving slightly upwards, but not enough to call it a smile.
She turned towards the door, adjusting her uniform jacket, clearing her mind of any thoughts of family, smiles and warmth. She had to leave that behind if she wanted to become the kind of person who could find Phantom and make him pay; the kind of person who could lead the GIW into the total extermination of the ghosts; the kind of person that wouldn't give up after the third attempt of assault to the Ghost Zone.
She would find Danny and show them she wasn't crazy.
She would prove that the ghosts were all monsters all along.
