Chapter 5
It had been an uneventful (all things considered) couple of days. After Danny met the four heroes, and they explained what happened and asked a few questions that he didn't answer, they had left him alone to sleep.
Danny didn't sleep often. Some might call him an insomniac but he can sleep. He just chose not to. It was easier that way. However, every now and then, even when he was awake, he was haunted by the past. He thought about where his life took a turn for the worst, and he remembered all the traumas in vivid details. There was nothing to distract him from getting sucked into his past. The beeping of the heart monitor and the humming of the various machines that he allowed the strangers to hook up to him slowly melted into the voices of his past and Danny got stuck in the faces of his former life.
"MOMMY! DADDY!" The two year old Danny shrieked as he watched the life drain out of his parents and they turned into nothing but cold, mangled flesh and bone. A pair of hands were holding him from running to the corpses of his family. The young boy's world turned into blurs of color and the screams and voices surrounding him turned into background noise and the only thing he could focus on the two cadavers in front of him, bones broken and twisted in inhuman ways and blood pooling around the bodies. The warm eyes of his parents turned cold, staring lifelessly up to the heavens. A small trail of blood dripping down his mother's pale face and the salt and pepper hair of his father greased with the crimson liquid.
The hands restricting him from rushing forward in hysterics were gone leaving his skin cold at the absence of external heat. His mind running around in circles, trying to analyze and process the events that just occurred. People were screaming and rushing around him, some tripped over his small form. His intense gaze was focused on the bodies of his parents through the blur of movement.
"Hi, sweetie. My name is Maddie Fenton. My family and I would love for you to join our family." A woman with auburn hair that fell just short of her shoulders. She had violet eyes and was wearing a teal and black one piece suit that was made out of some kind of rubber. Standing next to her were two people. On her left was a large, intimidating man with graying black hair and azure eyes that held a warmth that made him less frightening. His face held a large, yet sad smile that he directed towards Danny. On Maddie's right, there was a girl who looked to be thirteen or fourteen and she had teal eyes that gazed sadly at Danny in a mimicry of her father. Unlike her parents, however she had fiery orange hair that reached her waist and wore a black t-shirt with blue jeans. Danny studied each of them carefully but was startled out of his thoughts when the social worker came up behind the young girl.
Not an hour later he was sitting in a large SUV with three strangers that wanted him to be apart of their family.
A three year old Danny wandered down to the basement lab of his adoptive family's home. The two older Fentons were currently at a ghost convention one town over and Jazz was at a friends house. Danny managed to trick the sitter into falling asleep, leaving the toddler to explore the house and go into the one place for which he was forbidden to enter: the lab.
Danny has always had the irrational, yet at the same time somewhat rational fear of the lab, and he wanted to conquer those fears like the heroes in all the movies do. As he descended the stairs and turned on the fluorescent lights, his gaze wandered over the bright green glowing substance that is smeared over everything and instead focused on the large, gaping hole in the far wall of the large room. Without his conscious consent, his feet carried him to the wall. The metal floor was cold beneath his sock-clad feet as he stepped inside. His short legs tripped over a stray pipe and he fell, thrusting his arms out in front of him to stop his descent. His right hand met the smooth surface of the wall, and the surface underneath his left hand shifted slightly with a click.
A cackling of green electricity started to build and grow at the end of the hole and Danny felt nothing but his insides burning and his skin freezing over.
Four year old Danny watched helplessly as the large men in white suits pulled his mother's hair and slammed her on the wall, only thing keeping her upright was the hand that gripped her bloody hair. Her eyes flickered between Danny and the body of her husband. The agent broke her neck before he turned to the crying boy in his colleague's grip and watched as he was dragged mercilessly away.
Danny managed to shake himself out of his thoughts before he relived the worst parts of his life. He wondered what happened to Jazz, his adopted sister. She wasn't home when the agents came, and Danny never saw her again. He sometimes wondered if she was still alive and out there somewhere. He wondered what she was doing if she was alive. Danny became slightly more aware of his surroundings and loosened his bruising grip on his arms as they hugged his knees close to his chest. He focused on the slow droning of the heart monitor to avoid getting stuck in his memories again.
Then the door opened.
