Danny was glad the 'Fenton Family Vacation-slash-Road-Trip-slash-Ghost-Hunting-Extravaganza' was over and they were finally on their way back to Amity Park. The trip had been as long and tedious as its name, and Danny hadn't wanted to go in the first place. They'd be crossing the city limits soon, and it'd only take another fifteen minutes to get home.
For Danny, it couldn't come soon enough. He loved his parents. He really did. But being around them constantly for days had been taxing, and would have been even if he hadn't been a half-ghost who had to watch himself for ghostly slip ups.
That wasn't even touching on the stress of being away from Amity Park, which was the source of most of said slip ups. Heck, about halfway through the trip, he'd woken up from a nightmare in a panic, convinced something terrible had happened, and only calls from Sam and Tucker telling him that everything was fine had kept him from flying all the way back home to fight the perceived threat.
Although… Now that he thought about it, he wondered… how did they know to call him in the first place?
The GAV ka-thumped over a pothole - not one Danny had made by being thrown into the asphalt at high speeds, incidentally, he remembered those - and the thought was thrown from his head in favor of grumbling. Grumbling, and a faint sense of unease.
He leaned to the side so he could look out the windshield at the skyline, and couldn't help the thought that something was different, something was wrong. Nothing he could see. All the buildings seemed to be there, and he would know.
The 'Welcome to Amity Park' sign flicked by the window, unreadable at the speeds Jack was driving at, and–
And Danny slammed his right hand over his mouth, unlatched his seatbelt with his left, and dove for the tiny bathroom in the back of the GAV. He got the door closed and locked behind him, and immediately fell into the tiny cubicle shower, dropping to his hands and knees.
His ghost sense dripped and oozed off the tip of his tongue and past his lips, heavy and almost liquid, despite still being insubstantial mist. It fell in wispy curls and silky folds, dispersing along the floor and leaving behind feathery patterns of frost. He retched, trying to clear his airway, and managed to draw in a single gasp of fresh air before his ghost sense reasserted dominance.
Well. Danny was assuming this was his ghost sense. It lacked the usual sense of accompanying hostility, and while his ghost sense might make him gasp, it had never made him gag.
"... motion sickness?" called Maddie from the front.
"Y-yeah!" rasped out Danny. He winced at the sound of his voice, then shivered once, violently.
"Don't worry, son! We'll be home in no time! And motionless! With fudge!"
Bluish mist pooled in the bottom of the shower well, and spilled over the shallow plastic lip, into the rest of the bathroom. Danny was glad that his mother had insisted on the bathroom door having a plastic seal and a separate ventilation system after one too many 'incidents,' otherwise the mist would be leaking out into the main cabin of the GAV.
He shivered again, and a hum from his core turned into a croon in his throat. To it, the cold felt like a comforting welcome, even though it was the one producing it.
But what was making it produce cold like this? Even Pariah Dark hadn't felt like this. Going into the Ghost Zone for the first time hadn't felt like this. Nothing felt like this, like being suddenly supercharged in the worst way, to the point of losing control, but also feeling paradoxically good, power dragging fingers up his spine, wrapping around him like a blanket.
He got in another breath, then lost it, giggling as a delicious chill spread from his core all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes.
What he should do, what he wanted to do was go ghost and fly away somewhere he could release all this energy safely. But his parents had upgraded the GAV before they'd left on the trip, and had spent the last several days explaining all the new features in detail.
There were a lot of weapons. A lot of weapons.
There were detectors, too, ones that would be able to see Danny if he was in ghost form.
Possibly more importantly, the walls were painted with Fenton Paint, and Danny couldn't phase past that.
Another wave of cold bloomed from his core, and he exhaled more frigid fog. He could feel ice on his wrists and hands, and he snatched them up, off the floor, blinking tears out of his eyes. Those tears fell to the floor with tiny clinks.
Afraid of what he'd find, he pressed his tongue against the back of his lower lip. His tongue was slow, heavy, it didn't want to move. Tiny spears of frost crunched against one another, then were bound together by another plume of mist. He could feel more frost forming around his back teeth, locking his jaw open. Danny crooned again, and the sound was oddly content for how terrified Danny was.
Sudden, sharp pain radiating from around his core forced him to double over the rest of the way into a fetal position, trapping his arms between his legs and his chest. There was ice forming around his core. He knew this with a terrifying certainty. There was ice forming around his core, in his chest, in his organs. He could feel it creeping across the outsides of his lungs, freezing them in place even as he choked in a final breath past the mist still curling past his lips. He could feel his heart slow then stop as his blood turns to slush, then freezes solid.
Despite this, despite the pain, part of him still found this comfortable, pleasureable. The cold was good. The power was good. Whatever was doing this, it felt like home and safety and welcome back. He knew, he knew he could use this, once he got it under control, to help and protect people, his people, his city, his family, his friends, better than ever. Ice clattered against ice as more tears fell from his eyes. His core purred happily, and all the ice crystals around it reverberated with the tone.
It hurt. It hurt so much to have all those crystals inside him chime, vibrating enough to feel them inside his flesh, inside his bone, but it also soothed him in ways he couldn't explain.
He could still transform, could still go ghost. But the GAV's defenses were still there, still active. He'd be trapped again, just in a different way, and for all he knew, this could get worse if he went ghost. Right now, his out-of-control powers were only freezing him, but they could very easily freeze other people. People who didn't have built-in resistance to being frozen solid.
(The humming purr of his core stuttered momentarily, as if that had finally gotten through to it, but the moment didn't last.)
And either way… his parents would know.
No. He wouldn't transform.
He blinked tears out of his eyes again, but this time he could not open them. His eyelids had frozen shut. He tried to shift, to bring up a hand to break away the ice, but the cold had made his joints and muscles stiff, immovable.
He was stuck. Trapped. The only parts of him still mobile were the fog pouring out of his mouth and nose, the growing ice, and his core, humming away without a care in the world. Everything else was frozen to stillness.
Trapped, and he wasn't even trapped alone, somewhere he would have time to figure this out and get it under control. Any moment, they would arrive home, and his parents would want to know why he wasn't coming out, and when he didn't answer, they'd barge in, because they'd worry, they would, and they'd see him like this, and know he couldn't be anything but dead.
Ice crept up and down his spine, filling in the gaps between his bones. It touched the base of his skull, and spread slowly along his scalp, like a hand carding through his hair. The feeling sank deeper, into his skin, his muscle, his bone. Someone approved. Someone was proud of him. Someone cared. Someone was thanking him. Someone wanted him. Someone loved him.
Each and every part of him sang with the song of his core. He was frozen solid, coated with ice inside and out.
Danny stayed that way for what felt like hours, his feelings churning between the externally-induced happiness of his core and the very real dread of his parents finding him like this. But for all that he was, nominally, in human form, the parts of him that were human were asleep in the ice.
The calm won out.
The calm… Out the window, Amity Park had seemed remarkably calm.
The thought slithered away from the numb, chilled fingers of Danny's mind, and he let it. He'd been distracted by a new sensation. An unbearable lightness. It filled him up as thoroughly as the ice, with his core as the kernel. It felt like his soul was straining against the upper surfaces of his body. It felt like he was having a fight with gravity that was far more personal than usual. It felt like peace and contentment, just out of his reach.
Below him, there was a resounding crack as he lifted up off the floor to float mid-air. His core-song grew louder, without the damping effects of touching something that wasn't in tune.
He didn't know how long he hung there, floating, in the air, his thoughts becoming progressively sleepier and more abstract, drawn out into slow, simple cycles by the lack of anything to think about. His usual methods of time keeping were out of reach. No light, not action, no breath or heartbeat, and for all that the ice and the song and the floating made him tired, they barely put a dent in his energy.
But then, past the layer of ice over his ears, he felt-heard the door open, and people came in. He couldn't see them, of course, but he felt their warmth/energy/emotion, and they looked on him kindly, lovingly, with gentle affection and concern. They touched him with warm-cool hands, and he let them direct him, effortlessly, first out the bathroom door, then out the GAV, and from there into his home.
Weightless cold pulsed through him again as they crossed that threshold, the power even greater here than outside. The hands withdrew, then, for the first time since they'd found him, and his core-song turned plaintive, the notes making his notes ache bitterly. But the hands returned, their journey not yet done.
They continued, into the kitchen, through the lab door, down the stairs, and–
Danny couldn't help it. His song turned sad, mournful. This was where he had died the first time, for all that it was also where the power coursing through him was the strongest. Those with him wept as well, feeling the same, he could tell. But they didn't stop. They pushed him steadily deeper into the lab, steadily further and further into power, into pain.
Into the portal.
He passed into the Ghost Zone, and whatever was feeding him power simply went away, as if it had never existed. Danny's ghost sense stopped streaming from his mouth. The sublime weightlessness receded into the regular weightlessness enjoyed by most things in the Zone. The things that were keeping Danny awake, stopped.
He slept.