Notes: I had so much fun with this one. I just love it when Dan's bad and Vlad tries to be a good dad but fails. Dan's a little bit too evil in this, but he doesn't mean to really hurt anyone. At this point, he's just got a warped and maybe oversimplified concept of things – not to mention that, despite his brains and good perception, he's very immature in other areas.

This oneshot and the next two are just a little something before we jump into the portal along with Walker for the upcoming chapter ten. Also, it might or might not be my way of stalling as I draft the next couple chapters before posting any new ones. Ahem.

Neighbor

Nobody knew how old Donna Singer was, only that she was very old and very rich. And now that her brother had died, everyone knew that she was the last one left in that generation of her family. It wasn't out of their own desire to know more about her that they knew this, but because she would constantly harass anybody that dared pass by her house with the information, using her wooden walking cane to make sure her words were well-remembered.

Dan was one of those unfortunate victims, and her favorite one at that.

The nine year old was playing out on the sidewalk after a long first week of fourth grade. It turned out that the third graders' playground didn't have a watchtower, which was upsetting to both him and Jenna – it had been their usual recess hangout since second grade. On that Friday, he was unwinding, ecstatic over the fact that the psychotic neighbor lady wasn't around on that warm August afternoon.

He didn't usually go outside to play – there was plenty to do inside his house, or at most inside their own vast yard or by the pool – but there was a new house being built across the street, and there was a particular young worker who was quite accident-prone and who amused Dan to no end.

And so the young hybrid was sitting idly on the sidewalk, simply enjoying the day and the construction worker once again dropping a beam to the ground with a loud clatter. He shouldn't have expected it to last.

At that moment, Dan heard footsteps approaching him, but with a weary sigh he tried to convince himself that they didn't belong to the person he thought they did. When he heard the thumping of a cane on the brick walkway, he tried to convince himself that she wasn't heading towards him. When she had hit him directly behind the head with her cane, however, there was no more convincing himself of anything.

"What are you doing in front of my house? You're planning something, aren't you, you little brat?"

Dan's eyes watered and he rubbed the back of his head. "I'm not in front of your house!" he snapped at her. "I'm in front of – OW!"

"Is that how you've been taught to talk to your elders? See, that's what you get when you're raised by wolves with no mother in sight."

The boy glared heatedly at her, having enough sense to control any unwilling glow his eyes might have shown. "Look, Mrs. Singer," he said through gritted teeth, "I'm not doing anything to you, so can you please just leave me alone?"

Her wrinkled eyes narrowed, and he tensed, ready to duck another swing of her cane. "'Leave you alone?' You've got quite the mouth on you, boy. I can see your sarcasm! Why, if my brother were here, he'd whoop your -"

"I'll just leave, now," Dan interrupted, quickly climbing to his feet and beginning his hasty retreat. Unexpectedly, however, something hit him around the ankles and he fell to the floor, landing rather painfully on his back.

"Do not walk away when an adult is talking to you! And what's more, I was talking about my brother! Not even a little respect for his memory, I can't believe children these days are this incorrigible!"

"Geez, what is your problem, Mrs. Singer?" Dan snapped as he began to sit up, thoroughly fed up with her rough treatment which had been ongoing for far too long.

The coup de grâce for his lack of inhibitions towards the woman came right as the young half-ghost was sitting up. He yelped loudly when he felt his scalp sting something horrible, feeling several hairs get painfully ripped away as Mrs. Singer put her cane down on a long strand of his wavy black hair and tangled it around the walking stick like spaghetti. He angrily phased away from the offending piece of wood, jumping to his feet as quickly as he could and turning to glare at her, his anger unconcealed. She looked at him in puzzlement, baffled at how he had escaped her homemade trap, but he ignored it as he turned his back and stomped off in a fury.

The moment she had placed that cane down on the sidewalk floor and somehow managed to tangle it in his hair – when she had had the gall to mess with his hair – she had declared war. And nobody won in a war against a Masters.

It wasn't hard to break into Mrs. Singer's house, being half-ghost and all. If it had been his grandparents' house, or even his own, he would certainly have set off a myriad of alarms being in his ghost form at this time of night. However, it was only an old lady's house, which meant that phasing inside was easier than walking into a supermarket in human form.

Dan took his sweet time inspecting the place until he found a few things that would be useful to his plan, as well as the location of Mrs. Singer's bedroom. He studied a couple things over here, took a few things from over there, and before he knew it he was ready to start his good, clean, wholesome fun of traumatizing the neighbor.

With a snigger, he turned invisible before flying up the staircase. Dan hesitated only a second before grabbing the handle and throwing the door open with a loud bang, phasing through it as it bounced back from the wall and floating near Mrs. Singer's bed as she shot up with a strangled gasp. He was surprised that she still had her hearing intact; he'd been debating on whether she used a hearing aid or not for the longest time. Or maybe she'd simply felt the door slam. Either way, it didn't matter, for he still had the rest of the act to put on.

"Who's there?" she asked in a quivering voice, and Dan took that as his cue to invisibly fly closer to her, practically feeling the shivers that shot down her spine as his ghostly presence caused the temperature around her to drop. Her breath hitched, and as quickly as her old and tired bones would allow her, she climbed out of bed and shot her hand towards the phone.

Dan, however, grabbed the telephone before she could reach it and turned it intangible so that her hand went right through.

"What the Sam heck is going on?" she asked herself before grabbing her cane and she speed-walking towards the door. Dan could sense the fear radiating from – it made him feel strange to know he caused the feeling, and he began to have second thoughts before pushing it to the back of his mind. He let her walk away, holding in giggles as he flew down the stairs at light speed.

When Mrs. Singer finally made it down the stairs, there was quite a sight set up to greet her. A group of ectoplasmic skulls, floating eerily and slowly in mid-air, grotesquely accurate to what actual human skulls looked like save for the green glow that defined them.

"Ahh!" the woman screamed before she suddenly found a hidden burst of speed inside of her and lunged towards the phone set by the staircase banister before Dan could get to it. "Red Huntress, Red Huntress...!" she muttered frantically to herself as she looked through the yellow pages besides the phone.

Although invisible, the nine year old's eyes widened a fraction as he realized what trouble that would mean for him, and he dove headfirst into the book that Mrs. Singer was flipping through. Him and Box Lunch had discovered that Dan was rather gifted at possessing objects, and he was going to use that to his advantage during this particular scare.

As if caught in a violent wind, the pages of the phone book began to flip erratically this way and that. Mrs. Singer backed away with a slight squeak, dropping the phone in her hand and leaving it to dangle uselessly from its cord a foot above the floor.

The young half-ghost jumped out of the phone book. It took a moment to get his bearings and he was thankful that the woman had not noticed him, since he had lost invisibility when he had come out into the open again. He took a deep breath and braced himself to do what he had been practicing all afternoon.

He created eight shadows of himself, not quite duplicates but rather mindless specters set out to do a single task. The respective clones each jumped into one of the porcelain kittens sitting on the tabletop some ways away from the staircase.

"Meow!" the real Dan imitated the sweet, innocent cry, and Mrs. Singer immediately turned her attention to the cats on the table. She stumbled back as eight pairs of rather menacing-looking scarlet eyes glared at her from the bodies of her precious porcelain cats.

"What's wrong Mrs. Singer?" all the shadow clones said in unison, their voices echoing more than was normal.

Before the woman's strangled cry could become more than that, the real Dan once again jumped into an inanimate object, and the eight shadows disappeared from existence in a frightening display; the gray, rather shapeless bodies lifted from the porcelain pieces and floated in the air for a second, their red eyes – their only visible part – all seeming to stare at Mrs. Singer with intensity, and then they disappeared in wisps of smoke.

All was quiet, but not long enough for Mrs. Singer to make a decision about whether to try the phone again or run for the door at the other end of the house, as the next second she felt something brush against her arm.

"Mrs. Singer," a voice whispered rather mischievously. A scream died in the woman's throat as she turned around. There, the pot of begonias sitting on her windowsill seemed to be acting almost playfully towards her as the flowers swayed their leaves and a couple of petals dropped to the soil below.

"See what you've done? I do so hate this compost, Mrs. Singer," one of the flowers spoke in an unmistakably clear voice.

That seemed to finally help her make up her mind as she bound towards the hallway which would lead her to the front door, her breath erratic and tiny frightened squeaks complementing her slow jog.

Meanwhile, just behind her, Dan jumped out of the flower pot and regained visibility once again.

"And now for the finishing touch..." he said humorously to himself, screwing up his eyes and sticking out his tongue in concentration for his next feat. And just like that, the young half-ghost was replaced with an old man, though his hair seemed much too dark and he seemed unnaturally short. Not to mention that, when his eyes opened, they were a vivid red.

He watched her make her way through the wide hallway towards the front door. Convinced that she wouldn't get there too quickly, the boy posing as an old man levitated off the ground where he had landed and began to fly up the stairs.

However, as soon as he got to the landing, something grabbed him by the back of the shirt.

"Turn back," it hissed in his ear, and the half-ghost nearly blanched before morphing back into his normal ghost form.

But of course, Dan knew that voice quite well.

"D-Dad!" he exclaimed, turning around to see his father in his ghost form and looking anything but happy to see him. He tittered nervously. "W-What are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question," his father replied, eyes narrowed in a manner that made Dan flinch inwardly.

Dan looked away. "Uh..."

Vlad waited for a response before sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose. "The ghost alarm went off in the lab, and I just happened to be in there. The ecto-signature on the screen seemed awfully familiar, so I decided to see what a certain somebody was doing out of bed. I was curious to see how far you were willing to take this."

Dan's eyes widened and he turned away, his cheeks red with embarrassment. Of course! He had phased out of the house in his ghost form! His room was on the third floor, after all. That had set off... duh! Oh, he couldn't believe he had been so stupid!

"Now, do you mind telling me when you learned to shape-shift?"

Getting over his slip-up, the boy couldn't hold back a proud grin, despite seeing that it further irked his father. "I asked Amorpho to teach me."

"Who?"

"Mom's friend."

Vlad's mouth twitched a little, as if holding back a smirk or a smile. "Hmph! And he says my allies are bad influences!" he said to himself in a light tone. Seeing that he was distracted, Dan took the opportunity to nonchalantly begin to make his way back home.

"Not so fast, Dan." The young half-ghost flinched and sighed, turning back to look at his father. "Who were you impersonating earlier?"

"Uh, Dad, Mrs. Singer's probably gonna call the cops or Jenna's mom or something," Dan reminded him before he could be further interrogated. Both Vlad and Dan turned to look down the winding stairs and saw that Mrs. Singer was still visible down the hallway, fiddling with another phone. Vlad sighed and abruptly grabbed Dan firmly by the arm before phasing them through the wall. Dan squirmed uncomfortably in his dad's grip, resisting the urge to go intangible to escape the upcoming scolding.

Once they were safely within the limits of their own veranda, Vlad returned to his human form and motioned for his son to do the same. With a sullen pout, the boy reluctantly descended before a set of blue-white rings transformed him back from Dark to Dan.

"Alright, back to the issue," Vlad said, not hesitating to continue the conversation and Dan rolled his eyes. "Who were you impersonating?"

Naturally, Dan hesitated in his answer, though he eventually adopted a thoughtful yet smug look – which, to be honest, disconcerted the billionaire. That look never meant anything good for him in particular. "Mrs. Singer's brother. I was gonna put on one of her dresses and play around a bit."

Vlad's eyes widened. "You what?"

"But you did the same thing to Grandpa the other day!" he defended, then sniggered slightly. "Even though it kind of backfired."

Vlad faltered in his anger, and his eyes narrowed as he tried to counter the argument. "That's not the same thing!"

Dan challenged his father's look right back. "Yeah-huh!"

"Do as I say, not as I do, Dan," the man quickly snapped. He felt rather sheepish; yes, he had very much abandoned all plans to kill his son's grandfather at present, but that didn't mean he didn't engage in some harmless (...more or less) pranks and scares every now and then. Of course, it wasn't as if Jack Fenton was an easy man to scare, and like Dan had said, even simple pranks would sometimes go awry for the billionaire. It seemed that Vlad was more of a villainous plot kind of man.

And he meant it when he said that he wanted his son to do as he said and not as he did. He had felt no shame in his actions, both past and present, until Dan had started acting up like such; he couldn't even remember the last time the boy had gone two weeks without getting in trouble for something morally questionable, after all, and he couldn't help but feel like he wasn't always the best role model for his son.

Nevertheless, that didn't mean that he would ever reveal those thoughts to anyone but himself. He had to be a confident man to make up for Danny's faltering parenting which very often confused the boy. After all, Danny seemed to have become a great fan of the "because I said so" argument, and Dan was not a child who too kindly to unclear or nonexistent reasoning for anything.

Vlad sighed, and he sat down on one of the benches underneath the veranda. He looked at Dan, and the boy seemed hesitant but eventually made his way over to the spare seat.

"Son, the difference between your grandfather and Mrs. Singer is that Jack isn't susceptible to being easily scared, and his heart is not as physically weak as Mrs. Singer's. I know you're not aware of what it's like to experience a loss – and I hope you don't have to go through that any time soon – but Mrs. Singer just lost her brother. Something as simple as this could have sent her the same way as her brother."

Dan contemplated his father's words, feeling rather embarrassed for not planning this out as he should have – both in regards to getting caught and making sure that his prank was harmless (i.e. nobody would die as a result). Still, another thought struck him, and he raised an eyebrow and cocked his head to the side. "But wouldn't she be happy to see her brother? Maybe she'd think it was his ghost," he countered.

"Dan, not everybody wants their dead friends and relatives to come back as ghosts. In fact, most people don't."

The boy couldn't hold back a glare. "But why? I mean, seeing them as ghosts is better than not seeing them at all, right?"

"Dan -"

"Actually, I was being way too nice with her! She's been smacking me around with her cane for forever, and she pulled my hair after school today! I was almost bald!"

"That -"

"I scared her a little bit in exchange for it, and I was even going to let her see her dead brother! I was doing her a favor!"

"Mrs. Singer is a hundred and two!" Vlad finally exclaimed, his jaw slightly dropped from hearing the nine year old's tirade. "Why would you think scaring her in such a way would be okay? You could have easily given her a heart attack!"

Dan shrugged. Sure, he felt bad about that last part, but otherwise he thought he was justified in seeking revenge of some sort. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Vlad didn't say anything, but silently stared at him for a long time. After a while, Dan became rather nervous, and was about to ask his father to say something when the man finally did. "Alright, that's it, you're grounded for two months."

Dan's eyes widened. "Two months?"

"That's right."

Dan glared, but after a pause said, "But you won't tell Mom, right?"

"This time, I think the situation calls for it. Now come on, I want you back in bed. It's late," the man said, ignoring the boy's pout and heated glare in his direction as he stood up, making his way towards the door.

When he looked back, however, he noticed that his son's pout had turned into a smirk that he was obviously trying very hard to contain. Vlad looked at him in a wary, suspicious manner. "Why are you smiling?" he asked slowly.

Dan turned the other way when he could no longer hide his smile. "I'm remembering Mrs. Singer's face when her begonias started talking. It scared the shit out of her!"

"DAN!"