Author's note: "Here lies the man," lies the girl. - CircusP

(after being) Disparaged

Dissembled

"How did you find me?"

"Even God wants me to have you."

Don't be afraid. Don't be.

I am.

Danny stared at the wall before him, at the dead end he had just run into. He raised a hand to break through the wall with an ectoplasmic beam, summoned ghostly energy to his molecules.

No response.

He gaped at his hand in horrified realization. His mother's solution halted ghostly molecular changes, and this apparently barred his ectoplasmic discharges as well.

He studied the walls surrounding him. No phasing through them. No blasting through them. No time to physically break through them.

She stood behind him in silence for some time.

"Get on your knees, Phantom," she finally ordered with composed tone.

He tightened his fists, clenched his jaw, looked back over his shoulder, glowered at her as he quickly turned the rest of the way. He faced her squarely and held out his arms, palms toward her in bold resignation.

Maddie snarled and kept her gun aimed at him. "Phantom, I'm warning you—"

"If you want to shoot me, then do it," yelled Danny. "But you'll have to do it facing me."

"Don't think I won't, Phantom. But you're much more valuable to me alive."

"Then just take me already. If having me means so much to you."

He again thrust his hands out in surrender, ready for his arrest.

Maddie lowered her gun just a little. "No fight at all?"

Danny hesitated, softened the intensity of his glare. "I just recognize that what I did was…"

His eyes unfocused and lowered.

"Irresponsible," he whispered.

He didn't raise his eyes. He couldn't look at her again.

"So just take me already. Because I can't do this anymore."

Movement on the upper periphery of his downcast vision. Danny tentatively looked up to see her holding a containment device he knew all too well. A burst of light, a whirlwind of sound.

Contracting and

…stretching and

… … ..tightening and

… … … …darkening and

… … … … … … … … … … … …

Blackened edges. Hazy. Wheeling. Head swollen with pulsation. Gravity pulled from all sides. It took him a moment to make sense of his orientation in his fevered daze.

He was upright. And heavy. He wanted to fall, wanted to lie down. But something was keeping him up.

And his neck. Also so heavy with unexplained weight. The lining of his esophagus felt scratched and bruised. He swallowed in an attempt to relieve the painful pressure but only felt that something was pressing against the outside of his neck, something physical and flush with his skin.

He blearily moved his hands to feel whatever was attached to his neck, but they didn't make it far. Stuck tight, locked above him. He craned his head back to see what was restraining him.

He blinked a couple times to be sure his vision was correct. Not far above, his wrists were shackled to the wall behind him. No longer able to hold his head up, he let it fall forward. He could see he was on his knees, shackles around his ankles as well.

He wasn't surprised. He didn't even struggle. He wasn't about to give her that satisfaction.

Still in ghost form. Still unable to use his powers.

But where was he? This was not his parents' lab. He tried to remember, tried to comprehend, but everything was completely foreign. He had definitely never been here before.

And where was she? She had to be here somewhere. Lurking, watching, enjoying his inflicted delirium.

Not that he was in any hurry to see her.

He hung his head and tried to blank his mind, tried to forget everything and everyone. Tried to forget the anti-ghost metal cutting into his skin even through the material of his suit. Tried to forget the searing ache splitting his throat. Tried to forget himself. Tried to see nothing, feel nothing, be nothing.

He was nothing.

A shuffle. Danny wearily lifted his head to find her standing not too far from him, still in her nightwear, arms crossed triumphantly as she studied him. He made the mistake of focusing, recognizing her hair and facial structure immediately. His mother.

No, she wasn't his mother now. His mother never looked at him this way. These weren't his mother's eyes.

He vacated his own gaze, lowered his resistance.

"You had this coming, Phantom," she finally said with dark inflection. "You may have everyone else fooled, but you're still only a ghost. And you're mine now."

Danny blinked once, slowly. "Congratulations," he said thickly, his own timbre hoarse as his glands overflowed and throbbed. He coughed and swallowed the mucosal rising, a lump straining against whatever was pressed to his neck.

Maddie's arms tightened in her folded grasp. Her brow raised, mouth turned up smugly. "How's your throat? A little sore?"

Danny said nothing, made no movement. His mother would've been upon him immediately at any sign of illness with soothing lozenges and coating medication and scented blankets and warm broth and loving concern.

But this woman, whoever she was, reveled in his pain and discomfort.

"That device on your neck partially paralyzes your vocal folds," explained Maddie. "Can't have you using that ghostly wail of yours."

She moved closer to him, placed a warm hand on his face.

"I expect you'll be screaming a lot, after all."

not his mother not his mother not his mother not his mother—

Danny remained motionless, put all his effort into not flinching from her touch, halted all expression. He wouldn't let her see what he was really feeling. His only remaining power. The one thing he wouldn't let her take from him.

She caressed his face in silence, taunting him, trying to incite something in him. Contact so gentle it hurt.

But he was determined to win this game. He kept his eyes open, his breathing steady, let her play with him with her fingering violations.

"Well," said Maddie at last, quietly, wistfully. "As much as I'd love to stay here and begin working on you, I have to find my son." She walked to a table and picked up the belt she had been wearing earlier, reattaching it to her hips. "But I'll be back."

Danny watched her for a moment. She smoothed back her hair, inspected her gun, cleaned her goggles.

"Your son," he rasped out, the words chafing his stressed airway.

Maddie looked back at him with a frown. "Yes," she said carefully. "My son."

Danny raised himself to a standing position, first one leg, then the other, knees shaking, calves buzzing with unwanted use. "You say you have to find him. Is he missing?"

Maddie narrowed fierce eyes at him. "Do you know something, Phantom?"

Danny's lips tugged into the smallest smirk. "I know you're not going to find him."

Maddie pursed her lips, nostrils flaring.

"He's gone. And you'll never find him."

Maddie stepped up to him so quickly that Danny instinctively pressed himself to the wall behind him.

"What do you know, Phantom?" she spat. "Tell me now. Tell me where he is."

"I have no idea where he is," said Danny. Truthfully, even. With no power to change back, he wasn't her son, and she certainly wasn't his mother. "But he ran away, didn't he?"

Maddie faltered in her stance.

"He did," confirmed Danny. "But he didn't just run away. He ran away from you."

Her lips curled on themselves. Her eyes misted over.

She couldn't have both of him, her ghost and her son. He wouldn't let her have both. She could choose only one, and she had made her choice perfectly clear.

He'd hide from her in plain sight.

To spite the scientist.

(To protect his mother.)

"You'll never find him," asserted Danny. "Because he doesn't want you to find him."

She raised a quick hand to strike him. Danny shut his eyes and braced himself. But then she lowered her arm, her whole body quivering.

"I'm going out to look for him," she said definitively with breaking voice. "I'll be back to deal with you later." She pointed at him aggressively. "And for your sake, you better pray that I find him."

She turned to leave but stopped when Danny chuckled.

"Pray to who?" he asked with shaded mirth. "God? The same God who allowed this to happen? The same God who wanted you to have me?" He looked up at the ceiling of this unfamiliar lab. "I'm pretty sure God doesn't give a fuck about me."

His neck snapped back as she yanked him forward by the collar, shackles digging into his bruising wrists. She stared him down with a menacing snarl and a deep blush across her cheek bones, her lips so close to his he could feel their vibrations, the electrons being exchanged between them. His own face flushed with cold ectoplasm.

"As you'll soon find out," she said evenly, her words venomously passing between his slightly parted lips, "I give even less of one."

She shoved him back into the wall and stormed out of his line of sight. The lights shut off, an unseen door slammed and locked, then ringing silence fell. Danny stared forward in a static trance, his ethereal glow his only source of light though it only illuminated a small area around him.

His mother was gone. On a futile search for her son she'd never find.

His wrists cramped and clenched in his anti-ghost restraints. He fell as far as his chains would allow him, down to his knees. He hung limply in resignation, a broken effigy wrapped in wire, throat eroding with clotting paralysis, arms prickling and bleeding dry in their forced position above him, head dividing with numbing catatonia and dulling ache and unwelcome memories.

Nothing else in this world matters to me more than you.

Just that day. She had said that to him. Mere hours ago.

It hurts me to see you like this. I don't want to do any of this to you.

NO he couldn't associate these words with this woman now—

She wasn't his mother. He wasn't her son. She was out looking for someone that wasn't him, for a boy long gone.

She wanted him to be her ghost, her prisoner. Fine. That's what he'd be.

She wanted to be his captor, his subjugator. Great. Then that's all she was.

But I'm only doing this because I love you.

He had pushed her away, driven her to madness with this identity he had insisted on lying about for so long.

His eyes rimmed with stinging tears.

I really do love you so much.

She was gone.

He missed her already.

(For a continuation of this ending, please check out my other fic titled Dissembled!)