Breaking Dawn
A Danny Phantom Fanfic by Quill N. Inque
I do not own Danny Phantom.
"The humans…They will tire of you. They have already turned against you…"-Prince Nuada, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (2008)
Chapter 2: Back to School, Part 1
Danny Fenton had not slept well that night.
Anxiety and worry clawed in his gut like some kind of restless, wild and ravenous animal, and so enormous was young Danny's trepidation of returning to school that his stomach roiled and churned like a furiously frothing cauldron. His mind had whirled and danced with dervishes of restless, ceaseless thought that stole all possibility of rest away, and it was until the first rays of the sun had peeked over the distant clouds that he'd lain awake, exhausted yet unable to be at ease, in his bed.
Danny had, over the course of that long, endless night, come very close to genuine tears at the thought of having to go to school the next day. Dash, his longtime tormentor, would undoubtedly have a field day of teasing and bullying, and those who did not partake in Danny's belittlement would either try to ingratiate themselves to him or shun him with cold indifference. A few, perhaps, might move to accept him, but the thought of the entire school, nay, the entire town looking at him like some kind of escaped science experiment had made Danny feel sick.
He had already gotten a taste of what awaited him in the unforgiving, crowded corridors of Casper High, and Danny was far from encouraged. Over and over, the hateful catcalls and jeers of his detractors had played out in his head like some kind of merciless, broken record, and even in his mind's eye Danny could see their faces, twisted with malice and bigotry, as they directed their fear and anger towards him.
If such unreasonable, reckless prejudice was what awaited him in the classroom, Danny's life as a student would be transformed into a waking nightmare. The combined efforts of Dash and Paulina were bad enough, but if the entire school was out to get him, even Danny and his friends would have their work cut out for them.
Danny had, for a second time, cursed the memory of Vladimir Plasmius long and bitterly into the wee hours of the morning, and the young man thought to himself that whatever unspeakable torment his nemesis was enduring in the fiery pits of Hell, it wasn't nearly enough. The shadow of Vlad's last act of cruelty had fallen over Danny Fenton, and no matter where he went or what he did, he would never be rid of it. It seemed as if the poison of Vlad's malice and evil had stained the very surface of the Earth, infecting its people with contagion of the villain's cruelty.
He had almost died for these people. Danny had been willing to throw his young life away for them, and yet the people he had sacrificed so much to save had thus far only returned his heroism and valor with revulsion and disgust.
At least he was alive at all. Danny knew perfectly well that he would have been moldering in his grave right now if not for the timely arrival of Agent Thomas Brody.
A miniscule smile split Danny's face as his mind began to wander once more, his face staring forlornly out of the window of Jazz's car as he recalled the stalwart ex-bureaucrat. It was largely by Brody's doing that the (albeit justified) murder of Vlad Plasmius had been swept under the proverbial rug. The FBI Agent who had hounded Danny relentlessly over an ocean and several continents had turned from inexorable foe to stalwart friend when he had seen Danny's valor, and it was Brody who had initiated the self-destruct sequence at Vlad's underground lair. The villain's hideout had been utterly destroyed in the ensuing, cataclysmic blast along with Vlad's body, and the destruction was so total that law enforcement could salvage precious little from the gaping crater. Brody had cleared Danny's name and given him what little was left of his life back, and for that the ghost boy would always be grateful.
I wonder what he's been up to, Danny wondered idly, a twinge of guilt flashing through him. Maybe I should send Brody a card or something. I never really got to thank him, after all…
Danny's smile turned a little sad. Brody had retired to a remote cabin high in the spires of the Colorado Rockies only a short time after he'd actually met him in person, and Danny actually felt somewhat disappointed that Brody hadn't stuck around.
His supporters and advocates, he had learned, were too few and far in between. Though his name was cleared in the eyes of the law, it would take far longer to lift the cloud of suspicion that hung about him in the eyes of everyone else.
Danny felt the blood pounding in his ears as Jazz's pink convertible lurched into the battered section of Casper High's parking lot which had been reserved for student drivers. The port-cache under which the buses had stalled now seemed to shake as the yellow vehicles emptied their human cargoes onto the cracked sidewalk, and the air hung heavy with the scent of diesel fuel and the thrum of the engines. The pneumatic doors of each large bus opened with a sharp, pneumatic hiss, and Danny instinctively crouched low in the back seat as more and more students began loitering outside the school's front entrance. No one was staring at him, not yet, for the long chain of massive yellow vehicles blocked their view-
-But then, in keeping with Danny's usual run of luck, the bus drivers, oblivious to his plight, chose that insightful moment to slowly pull away and out into the street.
This left poor Danny fully exposed to the almost burning gaze of hundreds of staring eyes. The unblinking concentration of his classmates seared him with an almost physical pain, and Danny instinctively looked away. The students regarded him with a mixture of surprise, awe, indifference, and open malice, and Sam gently put her hand on Danny's shoulder to strengthen his wavering will.
"C'mon," she muttered. "Don't let them get to you, Danny."
"We're right behind you," Tucker added his own support. "And besides, if Dash tries to mess with you, Sam will probably tear out his ribcage and spill his steaming viscera into the street."
"Damn right, I will," Sam retorted. "If he would just give me an excuse…"
"Don't, Sam," Danny said quietly, retrieving his backpack from the trunk. "Dash isn't worth it. None of them are. Just let them have their kicks, and sooner or later they'll go find someone else to push around."
Sam was utterly aghast. "What? Danny, you need to start sticking up for yourself! Now that everyone knows who you are, you'll be more of a target than ever! You can't afford to let people like Dash push you around anymore!"
"Are you kidding?" Danny grinned sardonically. "If I so much as glare at someone, some jerk will have me brought up on assault charges or something. I'm already up to my ears in trouble: there are too many people following my life like a stupid Twitter page, too many media moguls filming my every step, and too many self-important neighborhood watch groups, activists and politicians who are just looking for a chance to get me locked up for incarceration or study. Have you seen the sites that have popped up on the Web, what they're saying about me? For Pete's sake, there's a Senator from Iowa who's using a promise to put me away as a means to get into office! I can't do anything without the rest of the world hearing about it, Sam, and a lot of people are already trying to convince everyone else that I'm some kind of ectoplasmic boogeyman in a teenager's skin. The only way to stop them is to prove them wrong, and to do that…I can't fight back, no matter how much I'd like to. One slip-up might be all it takes; they'll use anything they can find."
Danny shouldered his backpack morosely, his still-aching and injured body protesting as he adjusted the weight of his textbooks. The gravel crunched beneath his shoes as the young hero trod toward the unforgiving world of high school, and his entire body radiated not only sad resignation, but also a quiet, unyielding and iron-clad will.
Sam stared after him in disbelief.
"He's changed," she said quietly.
"The question is," Tucker added, a worried look on his normally cheerful face, "for better…or worse?"
Meanwhile…
Despite Danny's absence over the past month, the halls and classrooms of Casper High had not changed at all. The tiles were still scuffed and scratched, the lockers dented and worn, and the corridors smelled of stale chewing gum, disinfectant, pencil lead, and the pungent scent of packed humanity.
And packed it was, for it seemed everyone in the entire school had turned out to catch a glimpse of the now-famous Danny Fenton. Their voices hushed, their eyes widened with shock, Danny was tempted to plug his ears as snatches of conspiratorial whispering reached him.
"I still can't believe it was the Fenton kid all along…"
"Wasn't he, like, wanted for murder or something?"
"He was on TV last night!"
"How do you think he got his powers?"
Danny felt his heart speed up again as the other students continued to ogle at him, and his footfalls echoed deafeningly in the now-silent hallway as he made to turn the corner. He was eager to get to homeroom, if only for the fact that schoolwork would take his mind off of things like this.
Danny felt the blood chill in his veins. While the judgment of the rest of the student body had weighed heavy on his shoulders, he had never stopped to consider how his teachers might react to his exposure! If Lancer and the rest of the faculty were as bigoted as everyone else seemed to be...
The young man closed his eyes briefly. The image didn't bear thinking about.
"Hello, Danny."
The sudden, unexpected whisper of a sultry voice in his ear made the ghost boy flinch instinctively before he realized who it belonged to. That conclusion was hardly a relief, however, and Danny kept his face carefully neutral as he turned around to see Paulina standing behind him.
"Hi, Paulina," he said politely. However unwanted her company may have been, the cheerleader had so far done nothing to warrant Danny's animosity.
"I saw you on the news yesterday," Paulina continued, tracing a finger along the tip of Danny's jawline. "You were so brave, speaking up like that," she murmured. "And I always did like you."
"Are you talking about me or Danny Phantom?" he replied coldly, brushing her hand away. Danny did not like where this conversation was heading. "You're not fooling me or anyone else, Paulina; it's my ghost half that you 'love,' not me."
"I'm sure I could convince you otherwise."
"I already have a girlfriend," Danny stated, his tone flat.
"Yeah?" Paulina pouted. "Who?"
"Sam Manson."
Paulina's face twisted into a mask of disgust. "You're kidding," the cheerleader snarled.
"I've never been more serious," Danny looked her in the eye, unafraid. "And while I'm at it, I want to set the record straight: I'm. Not. Interested. In. You."
"Wrong answer, Fen-toad," a new and very unwelcome voice interrupted Danny without warning. "You should have taken Paulina up on her offer. Now look, you hurt her feelings! "
Danny slowly turned around again to face a grinning Dash Baxter and several of his cronies. "Since when did you care about anyone else's feelings?" he asked.
"I do care about people's feelings, just not about yours," Dash sneered back. "Where have you been all this time, Fenton? I was starting to worry that I'd lose my favorite punching bag!"
Danny's fought to control his temper, but nonetheless his eyes flashed green with anger as he stared Dash Baxter down. "I need to get moving, or I'll be late for class," he said.
"Tough luck for you then, Fen-turd," Dash laughed, grabbing Danny by the collar of his shirt. "We're not done here!"
Danny's eyes began to glow even brighter. "Yes. We are."
Dash faltered momentarily, taken aback by Danny's passive yet unyielding resistance, and he almost cried out in alarm as Danny phased right through his hand.
"You want to know where I've been?" the ghost boy asked, his voice cracking. "Trying to survive, for starters! Do you know how many times I've come close to dying in the past month alone? I've lost count. I have fought tanks, cops, and fighter jets, I have been punched, electrocuted, shot, and almost decapitated, and all the while I've had to run for my life because my archenemy framed me for murder and tried to have me executed!"
Danny, still lacking solidity, levitated himself off of the ground and flew right through Dash's torso without another word. Like an arrow speeding from a bow, the ghost boy shot down the corridor in his haste and turned into the familiar door of Lancer's classroom-
-But Danny, unfortunately, miscalculated on his aerial maneuver. The encounter with Dash had rattled his focus, and so instead of stopping at the entrance, he missed it completely and phased all the way through the adjoining wall.
Cries of astonishment and alarm sounded in Danny's ears as the hard, unforgiving floor rushed up to meet him, and the ghost boy struggled to his feet, red with embarrassment, as his head rang from the impact. Everyone was staring at him in shock, and for this reason the ghost boy averted his eyes so as not to bear witness to their scrutiny.
The only comfort Danny had was that Sam and Tucker had save a seat for him.
"Welcome back, Mr. Fenton," Lancer, Danny's longtime teacher, looked up from taking attendance as a small smile hovered on his face. "Theatrical as your entrance into this room of learning was, perhaps it would be better if you tried the door next time."
"Sorry," Danny muttered, looking away as he went to take a seat.
"Mr. Fenton?"
"Yeah?"
"See me after class."
Danny resisted the urge to bang his head repeatedly against his desk. Oh, come ON! What'd I do now?
"Now, as many of you may remember, for the past few weeks we have been covering and analyzing the works of many great authors, such as Shakespeare and Emerson," Lance droned as he began the lesson.
No, I don't remember, Danny thought fiercely. I was too busy trying to avoid the electric chair.
"We concluded Romeo and Juliet on Friday," the teacher continued, "and if any of you bothered to do the homework assignment I gave over the weekend, please pass it up now."
If Danny had happened to have a sword on him at that moment, he would have seriously considered impaling himself on it. The young man's face fell as more and more of his classmates handed in their leaves of paper, and the skin on Danny's arm broke out into goosebumps as Lancer fixed his gaze upon him once more.
"Do you have your homework, Mr. Fenton?"
"No," Danny admitted, biting down on the thousands of waspish remarks that bubbled in his throat. As always, he expected a lecture from his teacher, followed by a detention or perhaps punishment work, but then the young man was astounded when Lancer merely nodded in response.
"That's understandable, Mr. Fenton. My colleagues and I have been made aware that there were…extenuating circumstances concerning your absence."
"Really?" Danny asked, bewildered, forgetting momentarily that everyone else was still ogling at him.
"Very much so," Lancer replied. "Now, if you will open your textbooks to page four hundred and thirty-five, we will begin our journey into the works of J.R.R. Tolkien."
That made Danny perk up his ears.
"Isn't he the guy who wrote 'Lord of the Rings'?" someone asked.
"Indeed," Lancer nodded. "Tolkien also wrote several other books as well: The Silmarillion covers much of the supposed history and pre-history of Middle-Earth, and The Unfinished Tales provides a valuable companion to the well-known trilogy. More recently, Tolkien's son Christopher wrote The Children of Hurin, a tragic tale concerning a hero whose family has been cursed by the Dark Lord, Morgoth."
"I thought the other guy was supposed to be the villain," another student added. "Snakehead or something, right?"
"I believe you are referring to Sauron, and the answer is no," Lancer began warming to the subject. "Morgoth was the first Dark Lord, a fallen Valar, or god, who was cast out of the heavenly realm of Valinor. It was Morgoth who began the practice of breeding Orcs, Balrogs and even dragons for his armies, and it was also Morgoth who turned Sauron to evil. Sauron, you see, was of a lesser race of angelic beings call Maiar who served the Valar, and in time he actually became Morgoth's chief lieutenant. Sauron managed to escape after Morgoth's downfall, and over many centuries he set himself up as a Dark Lord in his own right."
"The Silmarillion provides a more in-depth look at Morgoth, but it is The Children of Hurin that we will look at today," Lancer continued. "The book takes place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit, during what Tolkien referred to as the 'First Age' of Middle Earth. If you will come and pick up a copy from my desk, we can begin."
Much later….
Tucker glanced almost in grudging respect at the book in front of him as the shrill ringing of the bell sounded in his ears.
"You know…I actually enjoyed that," he said, shoving the novel into his backpack. "And the fact that Turin has a black sword is just beyond cool."
"I feel kinda sorry for him," Sam shrugged. "He can't catch a break."
"That makes two of us," Danny muttered. "I don't suppose they used me as a character base, did they?"
"I doubt it, Mr. Fenton," Lancer said from behind. "Though if that were true, it would not surprise me."
"What are you talking about?" Danny replied, puzzled, as he turned to face him.
"You and Turin have much more in common than you think," Lancer nodded at the book in Danny's fingers. "I thought of you many times when I reread that novel just the other day, especially in light of all that's happened recently. Why don't you borrow that for now and try to finish it? I can always get more copies, after all, and there are probably still some spares left in the library."
"Uh…"
"I'll award you fifty bonus points if you can finish the book and tell me at least two different ways you and Turin are alike," Lancer added.
Danny wasn't about to pass that up. "Deal," he conceded, before remembering something else. "Wasn't there something else you wanted to see me for?"
Lancer grinned mysteriously. "I just did," he said. "Have a nice afternoon."
"Not likely," Danny replied under his breath, turning to go-
"One more thing, Mr. Fenton," Lancer's voice stopped him once more.
Danny fought to stifle his exasperation. "What?"
His teacher looked him in the eye calmly, and his tone was surprisingly sincere.
"I'm glad you're all right. You might choose not to believe it, but I was rather concerned. Give my regards to your parents, would you?"
"Sure," Danny nodded, his eyes grateful before he sped along his way to his next class.
Lancer could not have known it, but his relatively small contribution in the effort to lift Danny's spirits had an effect that even he could not have anticipated. The unexpected words of kindness from Danny's normally dour and dry-mannered teacher had been just what the proverbial doctor had ordered.
In the crowded hallway, Danny was jostled and shoved as he raced to beat the clock, and the students resembled little more than herds of cattle as they poured into the corridor in ever-increasing numbers. But even as Danny's personal space vanished completely, his heart rose a little bit higher in his chest.
Danny, ever so slowly, began daring to hope that perhaps he was not as isolated as he may have feared. Perhaps people would accept him, given time. Perhaps…his ordeal was over.
But he was wrong.
So very wrong.
Before Danny's life even began to improve, his days were about to get a whole lot darker…
A/N: Well, that doesn't bode well! XD I'm sorry I couldn't fit all of Danny's school day into one chapter, but I just can't write a chapter that big in one sitting right now, what with homework and all. *Cries* I'll try to have the next installment up tomorrow, but after that I can't say for certain when I'll be able to update. And PLEASE REVIEW! If YOU have any ideas or suggestions, LET ME KNOW! ^^ Finally, as a reward for your patience, I will confirm that we have not seen the last of Agent Brody, and Danny's academic career, as well as the rest of his life, is only gonna get more difficult. XD
(My God, I think I'm turning into a sadist...)
Your humble servant,
Quill N. Inque.
P.S. I gotta say, I was FLOORED by the reaction I got to this story! I was truly startled at how many people favorited it or put it on a story alert, and I cannot express enough how happy I am that you're all enjoying "Breaking Dawn" so much! Thanks, everybody. ^^