Chapter Six: Good News (At Last)?
He knew he was crying.Inexplicably, impossibly, he was watching himself cradle a girl in his arms – a girl he knew well. One side of her seemed almost as black as her hair, blood as thick as treacle splayed about on her face.
He inched closer. He – the other him, the one holding her – was crying too. He was whispering. Danny crept further forward in horrified fascination.
"I'm sorry," his doppelganger was muttering. "I'm so sorry, Sam. I didn't mean to-"
Danny's inside clenched as if a gigantic fist had crushed them. He couldn't breathe.
When he woke up, the tears were just as real as in his dream.
His eyes were red when he went downstairs to eat. His parents were down in the lab, perfecting another of their crazy ghost items. It was wrong, he knew, to be so bitter, but in a large way this was all their fault…
He wasn't to blame. He'd stepped into the portal, but only to help them, only to do something to get his parents out of their insane gloom, only to do something helpful. And all that had done was given him the potential to be hated. There had to be something ironic in that, he thought.
He could feel his sister's eyes boring into his head like lasers. It had been happening a lot during that week, as if he were her test subject. It was really getting to him. He was already on edge from these nightmares, from all the what-ifs, that he was just exhausted and irritated. He snapped his head up and glared at her.
"What do you want, Jazz?"
His sister just raised an eyebrow at him. "You look stressed," she commented.
'Excellent observation!' he wanted to yell, but refrained from doing so. "I'm fine," he said, stressing the last word. He was getting touchy about it. Honestly, the next person who asked him anything along the lines of 'are you okay' was getting a punch in the face-
"Are you sure that the accident didn't heighten your insecurities, Danny? You've been on edge for days."
"I'm not your patient!" He was yelling now, but he didn't care. "Why are you psychoanalysing me?"
"Because, Danny, recently you've been showing the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and –" Jazz's calm voice made it worse.
"That's… that's bullshit!"
The silence in the room was deafening.
Danny took a deep breath. Being angry wasn't helping anything. Why was he so angry? There didn't seem to be a reason. If he really was some sort of hybrid… it would have to be the other half, and that scared him. Ghosts were bad and everything else was good. It seemed that everybody knew that.
What did that make him?
"I'm sorry," he said, his voice coming out more choked than he would have liked. "I… don't know what came over me. I have to go now." He ran out of the room so fast that Jazz felt that if she had blinked, she'd have missed him.
Jazz thought for a minute, then got out a pad and pen and began to write.
"Danny! Jazzy-pants!" Her father was shouting for her, and the nickname made her cringe. She'd been doing homework, and was spending an unhealthy amount of time worrying about her little brother and the bizarre behaviour he'd displayed that morning. She felt that she didn't have time for this now.
She went downstairs anyway. "What do you want, dad?" she asked, walking downstairs, her arms folded in impatience.
Her father announced cheerfully, "This is my friend, Vladdy! I haven't seen him since college!" He beamed.
Jazz turned to the man. He'd been giving her father a disgusted look, brushing her father's hands off his arm, but turned and smiled when he saw her looking. "It's Vlad," he informed her, shaking her hand. "And you must be… Jazmine!"
She smiled awkwardly; she was already uneasy of the man. "Hi there, Mr…. Vlad?" Where had she heard that name before? It wasn't all that common. Maybe her father had mentioned him before; they had been friends, after all. They didn't look on the best of terms, now, though, and from the look of his attire, he looked financially well off enough.
"Either Vlad or Mr. Masters will do, Jazmine," he informed her. The name certainly rang a bell, and then it clicked. This was Vlad Masters?
Her mother walked into the room. Vlad's face positively lit up. "Hello there, Maddie!" He said cheerily, sweeping her into a hug.
For a moment, her mother stared at him, then she said, "Vlad? How lovely to see you, it's been such a long time! We thought you may have forgotten us after the little… incident… with the ghost portal."
An incident with a ghost portal? That piqued Jazz's interest at once. Something similar had happened before? Unfortunately, they all seemed reluctant to volunteer any information pertinent to what she wanted to know.
Her father laughed apologetically, and said in his typical booming loud voice, "Yeah, we thought you hadn't forgiven me for the ecto-acne!"
Ecto-acne? On second thought, she didn't want to know.
Mr. Masters – she wasn't comfortable enough to call him anything informal – gave a strained smile and stated, "Nonsense, Jack, I wouldn't keep such a grudge over the two of you!"
He wasn't a great liar. Jazz's unease was only growing.
"Say, where's Danny?" asked her father.
"I think he's sick, dad," Jazz informed him, not wanting Danny anywhere near this guy. She didn't know why she felt that; she put it down to intuition. "Maybe that's why he didn't come straight away when you called us. I think you should let him sleep."
Then Danny walked down the stairs.
Vlad scrutinized the boy walking down the stairs. He seemed haggard and tired – enough to be as sick as his sister described.
The boy was looking at the floor, then blinked when he saw feet in front of him. He looked up, looking from one person to another. "Uh, hi," he offered nervously, putting his hand behind his neck in some gesture of bashfulness.
"Danny! Where've you been?" Jack – the abominable man – asked, seeming not to notice his son's exhaustion. Typical Jack Fenton.
"Playing Doomed with Sam and Tucker," he said. "I came down to get a drink. I didn't know anybody was here…"
The boy's gaze locked on his for a minute. Vlad smiled predatorily. The boy looked terrified. What of was anybody's guess. Then the boy shivered violently, and Vlad swore that he saw blue vapour emerge from the boy's mouth.
"Danny?" Maddie questioned, inspecting her son worriedly.
The boy laughed nervously. "I… think I'm coming down with a bit of the flu. I'm alright, really."
"I knew it!" Jack proclaimed. "A ghost virus!" Vlad almost clobbered the man for all of his idiocy.
The boy paled even more. "It's… it's just ordinary flu, okay!" he exclaimed defensively, his arms wrapped around his middle.
Maddie seemed to sense his discomfort, then gestured to Vlad. "Danny, this is Vlad Masters, an old friend of your father and I."
"Nice to meet you?" the boy offered; more of a question than a greeting.
"And you too," Vlad said, scrutinizing him again. Something was certainly off about the boy. It unnerved him a little; he was normally quite good at judging people, or so he thought.
"You have to come and see the lab, Vladdy!" Jack proclaimed. "Danny can come along and help me!"
"But, I-" the boy started.
"Dad, maybe Danny should go back to bed. He looks sick," the girl – Jazmine, was it? – offered. The boy turned and glared at her. How… quaint. They were obviously in the middle of some kind of brother/sister dispute.
The boy shook his head and said, "I'll go. Drop it, Jazz, there's nothing wrong with me."
Vlad watched Jazmine stare at Daniel, exasperated, and then she told her father (how could that man be allowed to pro-create?), "I'm going to go and finish my homework now." She practically stomped back up the stairs.
Her brother looked slightly guilty, but not regretful.
Vlad found himself being practically dragged into the lab. Jack's over-eager personality still irritated him, after all of these years. At least the boy had the courtesy to look slightly apologetic.
At least the children seemed to favour Maddie.
"We've only just kick-started the lab, recently," Jack informed him. "It's funny, really, we did it all to protect our children – and then when we made our best creation yet, Maddie and I, Danny got into a bit of an accident down here!"
Protect his children? Who was the imbecile kidding? He posed danger to them just by holding a pair of scissors.
He didn't phrase that, though. What he said was, "An accident, you say?" He stared carefully at the boy, who seemed to be getting paler as they mentioned it.Quietly, the boy said, "Yeah, but that d-"
His father cut him off. "That's right, V-man! Poor Danny here, bit of a clumsy fellow, had a little accident around the lab! We dunno exactly what he did, but he seemed a bit spooked and ended up falling down a flight of stairs, right Danny boy?"
Vlad's eyebrow rose slightly as, when the boy's oaf of a father called him clumsy, the boy's eyes momentarily flashed green. He thought maybe he'd imagined it until the boy, who had apparently somehow noticed it too, began to shake crazily, but didn't answer his father's question (Vlad couldn't really blame him).
Jack continued, despite his son's lack of response, "And when we saw him, the Fenton Ghost Portal had finally started working!" While Vlad stiffened at the idea of such an incompetent man creating a successful ghost portal even with Maddie's help (he'd have preferred Jack to have had no hand in any of the work in the lab in the first place), Jack just grinned and obliviously patted the boy on the head almost fondly – it made Vlad's lip curl up in distaste – and then spoke, concerned, "Hey, Danny, you okay, son?"
The boy – Daniel, he reminded himself – looked nervous and said, "Uh, yeah, I think maybe Jazz was right… I just need to go and lie down…" The boy started to head out of the door.
He couldn't have that. The boy was something of an interesting puzzle; he needed to fit together what was making the boy seem so jumpy. Luckily for him, his old 'friend' never seemed to ask questions (it was probably beyond his brain capacity, Vlad thought) and it looked like it was coming in handy. "Jack, may I have a little talk with young Daniel over there please?"
"Sure!" said Jack cheerfully, and Daniel scuttled over towards him slightly, but he looked at him as if he felt like he was a mouse being cornered by a cat. Vlad smirked. The boy was so wary of him; he seemed to have alarm bells going off in his head.
Smart kid.
"And while you're doing that, I'll go and get some of that high-tech weaponry to show you so I can blather on to you about ghosts!" Jack continued. Vlad smiled. This was his chance.
He didn't know exactly what he was going to say. The boy looked like he was going to run away, so Vlad grabbed hold of his arm to prevent it happening. The boy froze, once more looking terrified, and his hand went intangible, and-
Wait.
His hand had gone intangible. He remembered what Jack had said… an accident – maybe… like his? The boy could be powerful. He had a lot of potential. Vlad wondered why the boy hadn't even made a remotely threatening gesture yet, and looked up.
Daniel looked like he was going to have a panic attack. His breath was hitched up and he was staring at his arm like it was the end of the world. He jerked backwards, away from Vlad, but that was all he did before just staring at it again.
All of a sudden, Vlad knew. The way his eyes had flashed green, the way talking about ghosts had made him so uneasy, the way he was acting if such a little accident was the end of the world. The boy was terrified of ghosts. More than that, he was terrified of himself.
"You're a ghost," Vlad stated aloud, wondering if it was for his own benefit or the child's.
"No!" Daniel's furious denial again made him raise an eyebrow. Perhaps he had been trying to lie to himself, to say it wasn't true, that he was still completely human –
Vlad knew it wouldn't work for long. He'd tried it himself, after all. All of a sudden, he saw an opportunity to test the boy – to try and recruit him, corrupt him, to steal the boy from Jack the same way the man had robbed half of his humanity back in college. He could come out of it with a powerful ally… and if things went wrong, he could sort it out by doing exactly what the boy wanted… and more.
"Horrible creatures, ghosts, aren't they?" Vlad said conversationally. "And to have one inside you… but I can get rid of that. I can make you become yourself again from before this mess…"
The boy looked up, blue eyes glistening with tears – he hadn't realized that the boy was crying – and whispered in a voice hoarse with hope, "Really?"
"Absolutely. I can make sure that such a foul creature within you will never bother you again."
"You… can?" he said, staring at Vlad, still shaking from fear. He leapt at him and latched onto his arm. "Please, please do-"
"So I take it we have a deal?" Vlad held out his hand. The boy stared at it for a moment, and then shook it.
"It's a deal," he sounded so quiet, but then he looked up, smiling slightly at the thought that this nightmare could all go away soon. He didn't seem to know when it'd be done though, so he didn't see a problem asking. "When can you do it?"
"It will be done in due time, my dear boy," said Vlad, inwardly smirking. The boy had fallen right into his trap… and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Author's Notes: I've been wanting to do that last scene for what feels like forever. Since I started the fic, certainly. Now, I have more planning to do - planning up to my next pre-written scenes (ie. those with shady graphic images).
Danny's conversation with Jazz was hard to write. I was worried the 'bullshit' thing was OOC, but bear in mind that he's exhausted and stressed, and is just losing his control with her. It's not something he'd say with his emotions under control... but when he said it, they certainly weren't.