Silence so quiet that it was loud hung in the room as every student suddenly stared at Danny Fenton, who would've liked nothing more than to sink into the ground right now. The worst part is is that he could actually do it. The announcement about Tucker and Sam had come just like Lancer said it would. They asked for a moment of silence, and while they got it, all stares went to Danny Fenton. The urge to walk out was almost overwhelming.
"Don't show them anything. Just keep it together. They're just looking for something to mess with you about," Danny thought as he refused to make eye contact with any of them. But it didn't stop that aching feeling that made itself known again when the principal brought up their deaths. For the students, it was their first time hearing it, but not for him. For him, it was just a blade sliding against an already open wound.
"Thank you. The families agreed to host the funerals on the same day, though at separate plots. If you would like to pay your respects, it will be held two days from now in the Amity Park Cemetery. May their young souls rest in peace," the principal said solemnly as the microphone cut off. Didn't stop everyone in the class room from looking at him. Danny's hands balled into fists as he continued to stare at his desk. If he didn't calm down soon, his eyes were going to start glowing.
"Is there something you want to know?" he asked, his voice laced with a deadly calm that he didn't even know that was in him. There were a few flinches from the tone of his voice, but the stares on him continued.
"They don't take you seriously. Then again, why should you be surprised anymore?" Danny thought, his teeth gritting at the thought.
"That's enough," Mr. Lancer said firmly. With some hesitation, the stares were finally lifted, but Danny began to lightly scratch at his desk while his hands were balled up to try and calm himself down.
Anger seemed to be his alternative to sadness nowadays. He wasn't sure what would happen once he went to the funeral. Anger at Skulker or the misery of losing the only two friends he had. One thing was far sure. After the funeral, he was going for Skulker. And Ember would make sure if that. If she didn't, she would know what it was like to lose something. Only it was something that paled in comparison to what he lost.
"She's not a part of this directly, but she is a part of this now. And I don't know what I'm going to do when I find him, but something will happen," Danny thought as he looked down at his desk to brood on his thoughts. Paying attention to the rest of the lesson didn't even cross his mind.
Members of the A-List table looked over at what they had dubbed the 'loser table.' Because it was where Danny Fenton and his other weird friends sat. But rather than looking over at the table with any kind of distaste or Dash looking over with a type of eagerness so he could pound Fen-turd to a pulp, today was different. They looked at the table and more specifically Fenton, not quite sure what to make of everything.
The sign that he lost his friends was more than obvious, and not just from the fact that he was sitting there by himself. The look on his face was a dead giveaway. His eyebrows were furrowed and a type of shadow was over his face, face lodged in an unhappy frown. The way he ate was almost mechanical; eyes staring at a place faraway. Almost as if he were daydreaming in class, only not quite.
Dash and Kwan, the top jocks and best friends looked at each other with an identical unsure look as they looked at Fenton. They couldn't recall a time where Fenton looked so miserable. They had seen fear, anger, hesitation, and all kinds of expressions, but the miserable look was new. Even with the way Dash treated him, he had never looked miserable. Now he looked like a battery with no electricity; moving more like a robot more than anything. As if habit alone was keeping him going.
"Dash! Dash!" The voice of Paulina Sanchez suddenly hit his ear, almost making him jump. Under normal circumstances, he would've heard her on the first call. He must've been distracted. And by Fenton of all people.
"Uh... yeah?" he asked, his voice sounding slightly dazed. Almost as if he didn't have a clue where he was.
"What's wrong with you? I've been calling you for like thirty seconds," the Latina said with a frown, obviously not used to being ignored. Much less by Dash, who paid her a lot of attention.
"Oh. It's Fenton," Dash said with a point from his right index finger. Paulina looked where Dash was pointing and her frown deepened ever so slightly at the sight of him. Then she looked back at Dash.
"So?" she questioned with an almost unnoticeable shrug of her shoulders.
"Never seen him like this before. I mean, no beating I ever gave him made him look like this," Dash said. The more he looked at him, the more some weird sensation started making its way to the surface.
"He'll get over it. I mean, more like when he's done with school. He's got no one else here," Paulina said, checking her face in her mirror. The way she said it wasn't necessarily cold, but the carelessness of which she said it was almost as bad.
Dash turned around just in time to see Fenton stand to his feet and throw his tray away before leaving the lunchroom immediately. Then he stopped suddenly. His shoulders tensed and Dash wondered if he was about to have a seizure or something. He didn't, but he did leave the cafeteria with more urgency. What, was he making a break to get out of the school? He's done the same, and under less understandable circumstances. Personally, he wasn't surprised Fenton did it as much as he could.
"Not in the mood for this," Danny grumbled as he transformed while striding down the empty hallway. Green eyes quickly took the place of blue, and those eyes were steadily searching the middle hallway. With reflexes that came with over a year of fighting ghosts, he turned on his heel and grabbed whoever flew at him by the throat. An ecto blast appeared in the hand of whoever was holding it, but he easily headbutting the person in the face to knock them back before they could shoot it. A very dissatisfied grimace was brought to Danny's face.
"Penelope," he said, his hands glowing with green energy. "Should've known you'd show up sooner or later."
"How could I not considering these wonderful circumstances?" Spectra said with a wide grin on her face. He always hated the sadism of his woman. Her very purpose was to suck the happiness out of everyone just so she could stay young. Definitely one of the ghosts he hated the most. "I mean, I notice your friends aren't-" She never got to continue as she was blasted back by a powerful ecto blast. While the blast definitely hurt, the misery that trickled from him made her smile despite the pain.
"Oh, you always were easy to provoke Phantom," she said, her grin growing even wider.
"If I was even easier, I would let you rot in the thermos. Or burn you like the witch you are," Danny said before floating up to her faster than she could react and punching her in the face. The force made her float down a few inches, but she came back up with a blow of her own. Then she felt her arm being grabbed, followed up by a hand to her throat. Then she groaned from the force she was slammed into the ground by. It was enough to crack the floor.
"I'm not the one who let his friends die, now am I?" she said, her voice coming out slightly strained than before.
"She keeps pushing you. So what? You just going to put her in the thermos hero?" a part of Danny's mind said as he went for the Thermos. But there was hesitancy. The grin on her face made his skin prickle with anger. Just here to try and suck whatever misery she could from him. Then a sniff from her brought Danny back to the present. To his distaste, she was looking younger.
"Oh, please do continue Danny. You're like a fine meal right now," she said as she managed to use her feet to knock him back. But he didn't fall flat. He flew back towards her as fast as he could and attempted to punch her in the stomach with all the force he had, but she had to moved to the side. The floor cracked even more as he planted his fist inside of the floor, promptly removing it and raising a hand to create a shield to block the blast she sent his way.
A low growl escaped from his throat as he shifted the shield into a rope. Like with Ember, he wrapped it around her throat and used it to pull her towards him. Soon as she was close, he punched her to the floor with all of his might.
A gasp of pain escaped Spectra's throat. She could feel that he was miserable, which is what kept her on her feet from how hard he was hitting. But the more miserable he got, his anger grew ten times worse. Misery didn't make him helpless like before. It just made him angrier. As she looked towards him, one of his eyes shifted into a more red hue. Then it settled on the color. Almost as if Phantom had been possessed by Plasmius. But it was only one eye. The other one was an emerald green with rage shining behind the pupil.
"Hone the anger. Hone the power. Make them understand." The voice that spoke didn't even sound like himself anymore. It was something more twisted, something angrier and more vengeful. As he raised his hand to charge it with an ecto blast, the color wasn't green. It was a dark, bloody red.
"Let's find out if ghosts bleed, shall we?" he said, his voice filled with a dark undertone. Spectra did not expect herself to shiver. To anyone. But her own body betrayed her. This didn't feel like the Phantom she knew. The way he was acting now was, as much as she hated to admit it, far more terrifying than anything she had seen before. Vlad's power coupled with his resources made him dangerous, scary even. But it was more like fear was acting as a aura around Phantom. Eyes that once held righteousness held more malicious intent. And those eyes were on her.
"Oh, sh-" Her sentence was cut off by a sudden ecto-enhanced punch that sent her flying down the hallway. But he wasn't done. As she was flying down the hallway, she was propelled even faster by another punch as he kept catching up to her until she was knocked out of the school and through a tree. Her ribs were cracked from the force of all of those punches. That was for certain. There was no time to count her blessings Phantom came from out of the wall, his hands still glowing red.
"You know, I'm starting to understand how things work more," Danny said as he floated down to her. With the force of a bullet, her attempt to hit him was quelled immediately by a punch to her head that had her skull ringing like a bell. He never punched this hard before. In fact, he didn't punch much to be quite honest.
"You enjoy misery. Most of the other ghosts in the Ghost Zone want nothing more to kill me. And what do I do? I don't do what you do," Danny said as he grabbed her arm and twisted it. She bit her tongue hard trying to scream from the pain, but it was hard. Ghosts couldn't breathe, but they still had bones and organs like an actual person. Never before had any ghost ever gave her the experience of breaking one of her bones. That changed now.
"But I'm understanding more now," he continued, his voice lined with a darker echo now. "That's exactly what what you like. That's exactly what you prey on. My unwillingness to hurt you like you hurt me. Like Skulker hurt Sam and Tucker. You don't care about us. And you never have. Tell why I should even care about you? Tell me why I shouldn't hurt you as much as I can just like you try to hurt me. I've healed broken bones, burn marks, cuts, bruises. I've got enough dirty bandages at the bottom of my garbage can to support to that statement. Perhaps I should start making you feel the same way. I want to share my misery with you. Only not in the way you like."
"You're insane," Spectra managed to say, making Danny laugh. From how lighthearted it sounded, it sounded like it was the Danny Phantom that didn't break arms.
"Says the so called 'psychiatrist.' I may be insane, but he certainly isn't," he said with a grin on his face. "Give that pathetic servant of yours my condolences." Suddenly, with the force of a bullet, she felt herself being lifted by the neck and thrown in the air.
With a twirl of his hands, he summoned a rope to his hand and slammed her towards the ground, a large crack sounding through the air. That was her spine. And this time she really did yell out. That was way too much for her to handle.
As if she were dead weight, he then spun around in a circle. She hit every tree on her broken arm, and while this wouldn't have hurt all that much on a healed arm, a force powerful enough to break tress in half like candy bars hitting her broken limb was a bit different. Then she found herself on the ground from another punch, her bottom lip busting open from the force. She couldn't die from this. She knew that. Ghosts couldn't die like humans could. But this would result in quite a healing process. A long and agonizing one.
"Feel that? That's pain you're feeling. Pain so intense that it almost consumes you. Pain that I know well. So many times. But I've learned to deal with it. I doubt you have," Danny said as he raised her head to make her look up at him. "I'm in no hurry to get back to school. In fact, I don't care if I go back today. But the question is whether or not you've learned your lesson. Whether or not I should dump you on your doorstep and slowly heal or leave you in the thermos to feel it more."
"I... what the hell?" Danny thought, suddenly shaking his head. He himself wasn't one for cursing at all, never mind aloud, but these weird blackouts were getting too strange to ignore.
"You'll find out soon," a voice in the back of his mind said. But it felt different. It wasn't like these conflicted thoughts he had with himself. This voice felt like it had its own mind. But it was strange how he felt so close, so... drawn to it. "You'll start to understand. Soon you will. I'm sure if you're as smart as I think you are, you'll figure it out for yourself."
"Wait!" he yelled aloud, but he could feel the strange presence of the voice go. Under normal circumstances, Penelope would've easily prodded him about the random yell he gave off. But now she was more focused on how to make her body ache less. Then she felt her body being sucked into the thermos.
"Am I going insane?" Danny said as he held his head and put the thermos up.
"Not insane, no. You're learning. You're being taught," a dark voice said with light tones of humor and satisfaction in its voice. "I'd say you're becoming exactly what you need to be. A monster to the monstrous."
Ember groaned as she heard a knock on her door. But it was followed by the door just opening without her consent. Looking up impatiently, she saw Kitty with her back turned to her as she backed into the room.
"Can I just have one day where I just sit on the couch and do no... thing..." Ember cut herself off as she saw the state of Penelope when they had to support her into the house.
"He's getting worse Ember," Kitty said impatiently. "Broke her arm, her spine, and beat her like an abused housewife. Still think this'll be over after all is said and done?" The question was very much rhetorical.
"Spare me you trying to prove your obnoxious point and tell me what happened," Ember said as she got to her feet so Penelope could sit down.
"Well, when you told me that Phantom's friends died, I figured I could get a nice feed in. And..."
"And you can't tell me that I told you so, because I did!" Kitty exclaimed, making Spectra wince slightly. From her injuries and the sound of Kitty's voice.
"Yeah, yeah. You were right. That does not help the fact that my injuries are taking a while to heal. My spine is still screaming, and I can barely move my arm," Penelope said, wincing as she tried to move her previously broken arm. "Never expected Phantom to hit that hard. Or be as intimidating as he was. Red ecto blasts, a red eye..."
"Wait, that's new. Red blasts?" Johnny asked.
"Yeah. They hurt more than his regular ones too," Spectra said.
"I think it's the fact that he doesn't care about not hurting us anymore. He split his power levels with clones when I fought him after they died, and they hurt. Felt like I was about to be split open if he kept hitting me with it," Ember said.
"Ok, so we got a pissed off Phantom who hurts us more and more each time we attack him. I say we wait until Phantom calls in his deal with Ember and hope he goes back to the way he was before so we can move on with our lives," Johnny said.
"For once, I agree with you. Instead of making him helpless, misery just makes him angrier now," Spectra said.
"But as far as going into town just to start a fight, I'm thinking about not doing that anymore," Johnny continued, making the three women in the room look at him strangely.
"Is your boyfriend insane?" Spectra asked Kitty.
"More like I don't have a desire to have Phantom treat me like a crash test dummy. Like, he hurt you worse than he did me the other day. And I have the feeling that he's just going to hurt us more and more. I suggest you think about the same thing Kitten," Johnny said, looking at her seriously. The serious look on his face threw her for a loop for a moment. And she couldn't deny that he had a point.
"Er... I'll think about it," Kitty said.
"You two are insane. Getting rid of Phantom sounds even better idea now. He's just going to be an even more pain in the sign," Spectra said.
"And it'll be even more of a death wish! I'd rather stay in the Ghost Zone rather than find him and get my ass kicked before getting sent back in. It's not like a bruise here or cut there than I can shake off. No, I had to get Kitty help me patch myself up because the wounds were so bad. And he could do worse than what he did to me. So excuse me if I value having my body in one piece," Johnny explained, sarcasm in his voice.
"Oh, boy. Ember? What about you?" Spectra asked.
"He might have a point," Ember said in a resigned tone as she had her arms crossed. Pain was not favorable for her. Before Phantom went off the deep end, she didn't get hurt very much. And her healing factor helped with dealing with what little damage she did took. Unfortunately, all of that seemed to have changed.
"Are you all insane?" Spectra asked as she looked at everyone around her.
"No. We're just not masochists," Johnny said.
"What I like to do behind closed doors is none of your business," Spectra said, making Johnny reel in disgust.
"Ergh! I wasn't serious!" he exclaimed, making Kitty roll her eyes.
"So was she. I hope," Kitty said, thinking the last part. "Enough of that. Penelope, things are not looking great when it comes to invading Amity. It's not like I even live for causing trouble. Maybe there are better things to do with our time."
"Like what?" Spectra asked.
"Like partying," Johnny suddenly interjected.
"Oh, grow up, would you?" Spectra asked, making Johnny roll his eyes.
"Oh, yeah. Because wanting to party means I haven't grown up. Makes a lot of sense," he said.
"If you two don't shut up, I'm going to kick you out," Ember said, her tone annoyed. Spectra's mouth snapped shut. She wasn't getting thrown out on these wounds. "In any case, I myself don't want to have to keep healing myself after fighting the dipstick. I'll have to come up with something else to pass the time I guess."
"Since when did you people stop having fun?" Spectra asked.
"Since we liked not getting our asses kicked ten times worse than before," Johnny said.
A/N: Ideas are coming into play. There's an idea I definitely want to get going with Danny, but I also want to make some emphasis on some changes with the ghosts. The idea that Danny is hurting them a lot more for invading the town can definitely changed whether or not you want to keep doing something. It's basically masochism at that point.
