A/N: Here's the last interlude - next chapter starts Book Two. Hope you don't mind the wait; it took me a while to figure out what I really want to do with this story (and I'm still not fully certain, to be honest) and I couldn't post this without having some of the rest figured out.

Well, here it goes. Keeping up with the mood whiplash. I have decided to stop keeping everything close to the chest so that I could someday theoretically reveal them in a Cool Fashion, and instead will actually give you exposition on things. Hence the interludes. Hurray. So here's a first real look at our MC behind the scenes, 90k words in. Shiny, sparkly…

Danny Phantom.

Without further ado, I bring you Interlude 3. (And Merry Christmas Eve's Eve, everyone.)

Interlude 3: Danny Phantom

Danny sighed, rubbing his forehead, knowing that a lovely pained expression had adorned itself onto his face. His hair drifted down into the corners of his vision, fluffy and white and just as inescapable as the fate of a fluffy, white rabbit trapped in the jaws of its less fluffy, more green predator.

He sunk back further into his chair. He threw his head back to inspect at the fine grains of the ceiling's wood. They were tinted a strange greenish color. Just like they had been yesterday. Today he found himself averting his gaze, avoiding his regularly-scheduled thorough-examination-of-grain session.

It wasn't fair.

He was a full ghost now, and he still felt so heavy.

Countless people were relying on him, out there, outside of his doors. They needed him. Always. To make decisions. To protect them. To rule.

The last one left a sour taste in his mouth.

He hadn't wanted this.

Yet, here he was.

Fully Phantom. A ghost. The king. Dead, all the way this time.

But still existing, he thought wryly, remembering those who weren't as "lucky" as he was. His friends. All gone, now. Well, almost all of them.

He turned his attention back to the desk. The white parchment that lay, almost glistening, on top of it. The sharpened quill that lay next to it. The stoppered pot of ink.

I am Phantom, he thought, feeling sick as for the twentieth time that day, he tried to reach for the warmth of his human heart, and felt nothing.

Eliza, he then thought, staring at that paper.

I must… write.

Hesitantly, he unstopped the ink bottle, and dipped his quill into its murky depths. He let two drops drip from the quill's pointed tip, before lifting the writing implement onto the parchment.

Nothing.

Something was churning inside of him. Something unpleasant. Something that broiled in his gut and whispered nasty things.

He had felt this before, oh yes. Over his life, he had felt it many times. When Tucker had died, when he had first started writing his little book. When… when she had died. When they all disappeared one, by one, by one.

Before that, too. When he had failed. At all his lowest moments. At his most mundane moments when one thing would suddenly tip the scales and this feeling would just overwhelm him. That feeling he had when, he had looked back and realized he had messed up everything. For himself, for Hermione and Neville and Ron, and for the rest of the Wizarding World. He had.

Before that even. He had felt it when he was just a little boy in Amity Park, who had been small and kicked and tormented. When those he thought were his friends had laughed at him and when everybody else looked at him with eyes full of pity. He had felt it then, too. This sick churning in his gut. A burning feeling of shame, whether deserved or not. Like he had done something wrong, like he was something wrong, so wrong that he could never do any right but he had to keep desperately trying, trying, trying.

They are all waiting for me, the thought came, again, unbidden, persistent. They need me.

What was less familiar was the all-encompassing burn he felt, an aching drive that came with it. An itch to act, something that resided just under his skin. It amplified the sickness, compelled it into a turbulent tumult that washed and tumbled around his entire body, sank into his core.

He groaned, setting aside the quill. This wouldn't do.

Clockwork had told him that becoming a ghost was like gaining stability. Becoming simpler, forgetting time. Emotions were stronger, more basal, more explosive, but they tended to be more straightforward. Love was love, hurt was hurt, sadness was sadness, and that was all. Ghosts were just more consistent than humans.

Of course, Danny was a special case.

Danny was always a special case, and he was sick of it after seventy years.

Since he had been half-human and half-ghost for so long, his ghost half had… adopted some properties from his humanity. Like a mold of wet clay, imprinted by the strange complex nuances of humanities, that had yet to settle back to its original, smooth spherical form. It was likely that Danny would be more unstable than most ghosts for several years, until his ghost core reached a new equilibrium.

Or so Clockwork said.

Of course, this was a fact that the Master of Time had failed to neglect until after Danny's second death.

Look on the bright side, Danny told himself, couple more years of feeling like a human.

Is that really a good thing? Danny wondered, despite himself.

He shook his head, trying to shake away the disturbing thought. It clashed too much with what he believed, with how strongly he had clung to his humanity over the years.

Focus, he told himself, bringing his eyes back to the parchment.

Write, he urged himself.

He had to write, before he lost himself completely, this last remnant of himself. He had to put himself into the paper, to keep a piece of who he was, before he fully became a ghost. Before time became meaningless to him, before he could look upon humanity as if it were but a trifle amusement. Before he lost the richness of life and entered an eon of stagnancy, of repeated patterns, of obsession. Before he forgot why he had wanted to always be human.

He had to write this as much for himself, as for Eliza.

No. More for himself than for Eliza.

Because being human was hard. Is hard. Would always be hard.

(He felt it even now, with the ache and press and nausea in his core. Mixed feelings with no sense or reason to them.)

Being human means pain. It means facing every day, facing the risk of having your heart stolen out from you, facing the minutiae and small heartbreaks alongside the vast, ever-present dangers. It means plummeting into the unknown, into a world full of uncertainty and risks, both great and small, in a world where you are vulnerable and small and so, so fragile.

But that risk, that existential terror, is also what gives life its vividness. It is in conquering that fear that leads to the greatest triumphs. It is in the face of adversity and narrowly escaping misery that the greatest laughs come. It is in the company of friends, who share your vulnerability, your smallness, your fragility, that you become bigger, stronger, worth something to your own eyes.

Danny missed that. As time went on, these things would only slip away from him.

All the colors, the nuanced flavors, of life would escape. He would only be left with green. Passionate green, deathly greens, vivid greens – a varied set of greens – but all the other colors would be missing. Metaphorically, and, in the Ghost Zone, literally as well.

Being a ghost was easier. They had their moments of pain, yes, but it was a straightforward pain, sensical. Being human was never sensical. Being human was madness, passion, glory. Being a ghost is safety, obsession, and a sensation of sinking into strong, savory, comforting dream. Turning into a ghost, from being a human, was only another form of death. Danny believed that.

He shook his head again. Too many thoughts. Too many spinning cobwebs. Still alive, he told himself. Still alive enough. A couple more years of human hurt, human love.

Her face flashed into his mind, and he couldn't help wincing at the turbulent emotion that swept through him: joy, anger, regret, pain, that familiar shame. He pushed it all away. He would remember her another time. He had a task to do.

He looked at the parchment again, hesitantly picking up the quill once again.

He made an effort to settle his emotions, picture himself in a lake of calm. Where a drop, the slightest disturbance, would cause a ripple to perpetuate through the lake. Now, the surface would be smooth.

In this way, Danny tried to still himself. Then he wiggled his quill once, before finally setting the blackened tip to the paper.

Eliza, he wrote, imagining her face pinched in concern. Danny writing here, as promised.

He hesitated.

I am now fully Phantom. I still feel

The image of the crystalline lake shattered. He grimaced, then set that page aside.

Maybe he could tell Eliza about his... change later. Maybe now instead, he could just tell a story. He was good at that, at telling stories.

He thought back to Clockwork's words. Next time you decide to write such a 'present', do it in your own voice, the old ghost had said.

They were right, he knew. Especially if he was going to do this for himself, to keep hanging on to the memory of his humanity. He would need to be truthful. He would need to reach deeper. It couldn't just be a story to him.

My own voice…

Danny sighed, looking up to the wooden rafters, almost picturing all of his subjects, his duties, his responsibilities waiting for him behind that thin, fickle greenish wall, then shifted his gaze back to the paper. Core still feeling weighted with heavy stones, he wondered where he should begin.

Something small, he thought. Something innocuous…

.

"Oh!" the Fat Friar gasped, his huge frame looming in front of me. I remember that image vividly, his sudden gasp of surprise, the way he had grabbed his huge, yellow-claden belly and rocked back on his heels, midair, the way all the other Hogwarts ghosts suddenly turned and swiveled unnaturally as I had stepped in through the door, fresh from the sight of Thestrals guiding the Hogwart carriages.

I had always hated being the center of attention. It always made me feel nervous, like I wanted to dart out of my own skin.

My center, my core, had already felt itchy when we had first entered Hogwarts grounds. When everyone's heads began turning my way, like a wave that propagated from the Fat Friar, to the other Bloody Baron, to nearly headless Nick, to the other first years, the itch became unbearable. One day – no, it was only one minute – back at Hogwarts, and already things were going wrong. I had a secret now, and it was already in danger of being revealed.

.

Too much, Danny thought, shaking his head. Again. From the beginning. He tore off the page and set it aside.

.

King's Cross Station. My parents had driven me there, Jazz worriedly peering at me over Dad's shoulders, where, to her great protest, she was koalaed onto Dad's back. After my accident, both Mom and Dad had become over-the-top affectionate and overprotective of both of us. Being thirteen years old was apparently not a good enough excuse anymore for escaping a piggy back ride. I had only escaped the same treatment from Mom by virtue of needing to appear respectable to my friends. She understood those things.

"Danny!" Neville's voice came from behind, and I whirled around to meet the grinning, but worried, face of my friend.

I opened my mouth –

.

No.

.

When I entered the DADA classroom, Remus was there, standing in the front of the room by the lecture board. He turned sharply towards me, his hand snapping towards his wand pocket – stopping only when, with a stricken look, his eyes met mine.

.

No, no. It's not right.

.

I sat in the corners of the hallway, far past curfew, cradling myself. I was just so alone. No one knew, not the whole truth. And now, now...

.

Earlier, he thought, growing frustrated, mind growing sharper. I need to show what happened. Tell it to myself. Accept it. This is about my death. My second one, and… by proxy, my first one.

Eyes determined, he set his quill to parchment.

.

When I entered the portal, I had been shaking.

Nervous with fear, anticipation, a sharp tentative hope of failure. It was cold, dark, and quiet. Only a subtle hum of machinery filled the air.

I held a little OR MOSFET in my fingers, as I stumbled about the lab, using the reflections of the green status lights on sharp corners of metallic machinery to guide me. It took me painfully long to collect the soldering iron, a flashlight, a screwdriver, wire cutters, and a loose collection of wires.

I had come to fix the machine I had broken.

I knew, knew it had been my sabotage that had done this, that had led to the crestfallen faces of my parents when they stood before their broken machine. My parents wouldn't look twice at their old circuit diagrams once they had been finalized, wouldn't check to see that one little switch had been modified. Maybe Mom would, but Dad would never, and Dad was the one in charge of the circuitry side of the portal. And they had tested every other component of the portal, before starting it up with a bonzai.

I had gulped, throat dry as I look down at the little piece I held in my hand, mentally going over the metallic pins. One pin for the inside button, another for the plug signal. The third pin hooked into the main portal's mechanism, where the signal would be taken in and amplified. All I needed to do was take out the AND MOSFET, and replace it with this one, matching three wires to the right metal bits.

Easy, I had told myself.

Then I stepped in, tools gathered in one hand, flashlight in the other. I walked to the panel with the neon green "ON" button. I looked around quickly. Everything was dark. No status lights - everything was turned off. I, naively, thought it was safe.

I began unscrewing the panel, careful as I lifted it off, trying not to catch the green casing of the ON button. My other tools were on the floor beside me. I prodded around with my flashlight, trying to find something that matched the shape of the MOSFET I had, my hands feeling very cold.

I couldn't find it. It was all gleaming circuit boards, nothing easy to solder. I thought I was looking in the wrong place.

I remember frowning, leaning, back. I remember my eyes drifting to the green casing of that button. It should be in this area, I told myself, feeling a sudden trepidation grip my heart. In the diagrams…

I looked around again. No status lights. I was cold. I wanted to be done with this.

I'll peel up the casing, I told myself, reaching for the screwdriver. Then I hesitated. No, I'll get the chisel.

So I scrambled back to the main room, stumbling about once again as I searched for the right tool – a chisel. I came back in a rush, only just slowing down as I reached the fringe of the portal entrance, stepping carefully over the wires. I remember it so clearly.

Button casing is just aesthetic. It means nothing, other than giving the user a pretty surface to press against, just like how keyboard buttons are just plastic covers for the real electronic buttons. I thought that the MOSFET might have been hiding behind the casing, and that I just needed to remove it to see it.

I clearly did not have a degree in electrical engineering. I knew just enough to be dangerous.

The gleaming circuit boards that I saw then, they contained the MOSFETs, in a condensed form that looked nothing like the little OR piece I held in my hands. It was inaccessible by hand-held soldering.

My mission had been doomed from the start. Worse, I doomed myself with my next actions.

I didn't know how to snap off the button casing, so I decided to try to peel it off with my chisel. The chisel got caught.

I, stupidly, stupidly, decided to apply just a little bit more force, pushing back on the chisel to leverage more torque –

A snap. My hand jerked.

A click. I had one moment to process what that meant, my eyes widening as I began to berate myself for the screw-up –

A spark.

Oh shit, I had thought. It's on –

A bright, illuminating flash scalded my eyes.

Then pain.

Pain, pain, pain.

Pain like my insides were being turned to jello, my bones to sugar. Pain like my guts were being sizzled on a hot frying pan, while they were still inside me. Pain like a thousand hot nails were being driven into my head, my brain, my heart, all at once.

Sizzling green. Sparks. Fire. I was being consumed, being deconstructed molecule by molecule, being turned into nothing but ash and dust and the mere idea of having once existed. And oh, it burned. On, and on, and on, it burned until nothing seemed to exist but green fire and scalding pain.

At one point, it stopped.

Fresh coolness entered my veins, settling the rest of my body into a new equilibrium. I felt a jerk, pulled in a direction that I hadn't known existed. I was on fire, but I was also cold, and freezing, and suddenly, I was nothing more but shaking on the ground in the midst of swirling green, green, green, all around me.

Abruptly, I forgot my pain. I was launched into strong new emotion, dwarfing all previous thought in its enormous magnitude. My eyes fixed themselves to the swirling green of the portal.

So mesmerizing.

It always had been so mesmerizing. That deathly green.

Humans could never look away from their worst nightmares. From calamity. Something about disaster would always pull us in, a strange attraction to the grotesque, to aberration, to that which sets our heart alight with thrilling fear.

The unknown compels us, and I was trapped inside of its cold embrace.

If it weren't for Jazz, I might have stayed forever transfixed in the border between two worlds.

"DANNY?" her voice then screamed, footsteps loud and echoing. It all sounded like it came from underwater. I twitched, just that.

"Dan – oh my god." Her voice sounded close. "It's on."

Her voice grew scared.

"Danny? Are you in here?"

She stepped closer, and suddenly, feeling and fear, real fear, returned to me tenfold. I imagined her stepping into where I was now, and knew it could not. happen.

I plunged towards her voice, jerking myself in a direction that I had only just learned existed. I fell out of the portal with a flash of bright light, tumbling and too warm, and landed in front of her feet.

She crouched down. "Danny?" she whispered, voice sounding choked.

I couldn't speak. My lips felt rigid, my body depleted of energy. The lab floor was blessedly cold against my cheek, and I felt myself slip, until my head was suddenly lower than my body and I was peering into backness.

"Danny!" she cried, and pulled me up. The lab was back now, and everything looked so bright.

I managed a groan.

"Let me get you upstairs," she said. "I'll get you a blanket. You're so cold… What happened? Should I-I get an ambulance?"

I shook my head numbly. One arm wrapped around my shoulders, my sister led me gently upstairs.

From here, my memories are foggier, more apt to blend into one another. Jazz woke up our parents, and they ran some tests, checking for a concussion. Jazz didn't mention me disappearing into the floor or coming from the portal, only that it was an accident. Mom, who now had plenty of experience with the ER from her summer job, eventually said that everything looked OK and noncritical, if a little strange, and that we could get it further checked out at the doctor's tomorrow morning.

The ghost portal stayed on. After that, it couldn't seem to be shut off. Mom and Dad saw it the next day, and rather than looks of elation, they only shot guilty looks at me.

.

A burning sense of backlash bit at his heart as he penned the last words.

He grimaced.

It still didn't feel right.

None of it felt right, this kind of storytelling. It felt lackluster, forced, and wrong. It almost felt like he was making a mockery of his own life, his own story, but he was helpless to do anything better.

Like he couldn't help the little lies, the little made-up stories he invented to span the gaps between memories.

Like there was just some part of him that couldn't reveal some of his shames, even if others he abandoned to light without a thought.

This attempt at pure honesty was… too much. He felt as though he was trying to be honest and himself so hard that more was eluding him, that more little details and stories were slipping through his grasp and into a deep, unreachable abyss. And that feeling now burned, because now he was actually trying and it wasn't working.

Speak in your own voice, Clockwork had said.

Well, he had tried. So at least there was that.

He sighed, then rested his forehead in the palm of his left hand, as his right, with the quill, rested on the table.

It was just so much easier to tell a story about a young boy named "Danny". Easier to take a step back. He could tell his story, and pretend that it wasn't really him, but know it still was, and slip in all the little lies without this burning feeling of wrongness.

Besides.

If it worked, if his original way still told the larger, real story for himself and for Eliza, then what was the point of confronting this ugly feeling? Was there really a point to "speaking in his own voice"?

Clockwork had advised it, but Danny doubted that the Master of Time had advised it because he had Seen something. No, this was too inconsequential.

This was much more likely: his mentor had decided that he knew better than Danny as to what was good for him.

That grated, and, stubbornly, he decided that he would keep telling this story his own way. That there was nothing wrong with it. That he could still reap all the benefits without speaking "in his own voice."

Seventy years wasn't enough for Danny to lose his rebellious streak.

He picked up his quill.

He felt the burning feeling, the wrongness, ease somewhat.

Time to write, he thought to himself, for real this time. Time to tell the story of Danny, a boy just entering his second year at Hogwarts…

And how very lost he is.

.

.

.

A/N: Long ramble (feel free to skip):

About the ghost theory and "simplified" mentality, I am using Undertale as a strong reference. Monsters in Undertale are the parallel to ghosts in this story; as always, humans are humans. To a monster, their Soul is literally love and compassion. To a human, these things are not required, because we are strange and incomprehensible and can commit senseless acts without knowing why. (Shoutout: Undertale is a really good game, and if you haven't played it, I'd highly recommend it for the feels, subtle intellectualism, pure fun, and agonizing feelings of guilt and self-recrimination.)

If you'd like, you can think of UT-monsters/DP-ghosts as the expressions of humans in "nice" stories, like Teen Titans, the OG Danny Phantom, most teen fictions, a lot of high fantasy (Wheel of Time, LoTR, maybe some of Sanderson's books, just cause he's an idealist and is out to inspire people), when you don't look too deeply into them. They are still very "human" by our perception, but also very different from what a real human is. (Though some ghosts in this story are even simpler/basal than that, as Nocturne's dialog told us.) Real humans are wonky and weird and have way too much backwards nuance to properly convey in a book, so we often simplify them into archetypes or a collection of archetypes.

Hermione, I feel, is very much a prime example of this, as her basic character in most fanfic stories I've read (and probably the HP movies as well) is reduced to "quasi-badass bookworm who reprimands others for not following the rules". Further exploration on why she likes the rules, why she likes books so much and values learning, how she actually feels about and perceives other people, is often limited. She is righteous, and that makes it easy to turn her into utterly, perfectly righteous, but that is not all that she is. I'm rereading some of HP and it seems like she is very much a distant character in the beginning, and I think there is a reason for that – she just really isn't connected to Harry, or anyone really, in a deep way where they actually understand her and her thoughts. Maybe that changes in the later books; I don't remember them well enough.

The best book that I have ever read that shows a "real human" to my perception is The Egyptian, by Mikael Waltari. A good fantasy follow-up is Robin Hobb's series about Fitz (first book is the Assassin's Apprentice). Other books only touch on some facets, some themes, or some ideas on what humanity is, rather than giving it to you all upfront and complex and ugly. Classics often fall into that category.

There is a certain sense to simplification, however. It is extremely admirable to write a clean, cohesive story, and if you are trying to get a point across, KISS is the supreme reigning principle. Irrelevant action is the bane to a reader's understanding. One single topic can already have so much nuance, that adding anything else would make the entire subject incomprehensible. Making humans into archetypes, especially side characters, is often the best way to handle them. That is a true writing principle.

And of course, the first book of this series also simplified a lot, reduced many principles and many characters into parables. Danny was writing it for Eliza, after all.

(Though admittedly, many things are not as clear as they should be.)

We'll see how close I can get to "real" humanness, moving forward. Luckily, I'm not trying to make a point here, only throw a bunch of "life" at you and write whatever I am excited to write about. So I can excuse myself for my overgrown story and keep trying to capture that feeling of a "real human" that I'm after and make these long rambling statements in my author's notes.

And honestly, if any of you agree/disagree/have other thoughts on the above, I am more than happy to hear them and discuss them with you. I like these kinds of topics, even if they sometimes fill me with existential depression. Alas.