"Danny?" the voice came softly, protruding into the sanctity of his drugged sleep like a pair of warm hands, gently easing him into the world of consciousness once again. "Danny, I'm home."
Groaning, the dark-haired boy slowly pulled open his eyes to stare up at the ghost who stood over him, his cape flapping delicately in the breeze that blew in from his open window. His red eyes glowed warmly in the darkness of his bedroom, and when Danny Fenton's vision—or perhaps the fog that had fallen over his mind—cleared, he was briefly very alarmed, feeling as though he'd woken in the midst of some R-rated horror movie and was about to be the victim of some ungodly monster…and maybe he was, but his memory, one which always eluded him when sleep came in great amounts, returned, and the fear left.
"Vlad?" Danny asked quietly, his voice roughened by his long sleep. "Where'd you go?"
In the darkness of the bedroom, the boy could just make out a gentle smirk as it appeared on the man's pale blue lips. The eyes seemed to narrow slightly, the eyebrows turning down and coming together in a point. Danny could see the lip and nose twitch, as if in disgust, very briefly, as the man reached out one cold gloved hand, one which was covered in some sticky and warm substance, and caressed his face gently.
"That's nothing you need to worry about, my little badger. How was your nap?"
Danny immediately cringed away from Vlad's hand, his face twisting in a grimace of disgust of its own, pushing himself weakly against the headboard of his bed as he sat up slightly so as to escape the sickly substance that now decorated his right cheek.
"W-what is that?" he choked out, wiping his cheek on the back of his hand quickly. "What's on your hand?"
"Oh, nothing, my boy," Vlad said easily, and Danny could hear vaguely the sound of this nothing being wiped off of the man's hands and into a cloth. "Now, how was your nap?"
"Fine," Danny replied uneasily, pushing himself further up from the mattress of the bed. He reached over blindly and began to feel for the cord of his lamp, brushing the picture frame he kept there—this one of he and Jazz when they'd been a little younger, she just entering high-school and he still in seventh grade—followed by the supposedly incredibly expensive glass box that Sam had accidentally broken and had given to him so her parents wouldn't find it. Before getting into bed, he'd put his earrings, which were simply too sharp to leave in if you were planning to lie down, inside it, because it was relatively intact—it was only chipped, but Sam argued that her parents would refuse to use it if they saw the small defect.
"What is it supposed to be used for?" Danny remembered asking, staring at the thing in disbelief.
"When you're rich, Danny," Sam said, smiling at him in that resentful way she seemed to adapt when she thought of her parents' fortune, "there's usually a lot of this crap laying around your house, and it doesn't have any purpose other than to collect dust."
Danny's darting hand inadvertently knocked the small crystal object from the surface of the table, and the boy sucked in a tight gasp. His mind began to race as the idea that the last thing he had that Sam had touched might lie on the ground in a thousand pieces surfaced, and as if fueled by this foresight, his hand shot out immediately to catch it. However, in the darkness, his fingers did not come close to skimming the box's cut-glass surface, and it seemed that if he had, in fact, known the box's exact trajectory, he still would have been unable to catch it, for his hand was not remotely quick enough.
However, Vlad's was.
The light of his lamp came on and Danny grunted, his eyelids slamming shut as the warm glow pierced the veil of darkness that hung over his eyes. He heard the sound of his earrings being dropped back into the crystal box, that recognizable noise of metal tinkling against glass, followed by that of the lid being fitted into the box's base once again.
"My, isn't this pretty?" he heard Vlad remark softly. "Did this belong to Jasmine?"
With some difficulty, the boy managed to pull his eyes back open slowly, grunting again as they began to adjust to the light that now flooded them. Though his vision was blurred, he could just make out Vlad's tall, slender figure; one of the man's hands was clasped formally behind his back, the other, cupping the glass dish, intact. He was smirking softly, but his face remained very calm and, incredibly, void of any emotion…just as his had appeared as he'd held the gun to the man's head.
Immediately, Danny Fenton saw the blood that coated Vlad Plasmius' once silver suit and dripped down his face in streams, pooling in the folds of his cape. His black gloves, now red, despite the fact that the man had attempted to cleanse his hands of the substance.
Danny stared at him with wide, glistening eyes, his face paling significantly, his mouth falling open slightly. After a small moment of silence, he tried softly, "You…" Ultimately, however, he was unable to finish his sentence; perhaps this was due to the overwhelming sense of fear that had engulfed him and his speech or simply because he was at a loss for words, but he could say nothing else as Vlad tapped the side of his nose with one bloody finger in a secretive manner, smiling knowingly, and placed the glass box into his hands which lie limply in his lap. Then, the man turned and started for the door.
"I'm going to go heat up your dinner now. I'll be up with it in a moment, and while you eat we can talk. All right?"
And without waiting for an answer, Vlad Plasmius left the bedroom without bothering to open the door. Instead, he simply phased through it.