THEN: Sam and Dean arrived at Fenton Works only to be sucked into the world of "ectoplasmic beings" by the overly-enthusiastic Drs. Fenton. After an engaging discussion with Maddie about the origin and nature of these new ghosts, Jack decided to drag everyone down to the lab to see the Fenton Ghost Portal, the Fentons' latest project. Danny was dragged along against his will and was forced to give up any hope he had of finishing his homework that evening.
NOW:
Still steering Sam by the shoulder and holding Danny aloft in one arm, Jack led the party down the stairs and into the lab. Sam stumbled into a room that was much larger than any basement in a residential district had any right to be. The place was littered with bits and pieces of scrap metal, tools, and various gadgets all bearing the name "Fenton", but the main attraction had been installed in the back wall: a huge circular hole dripping with wires and metal plating. Sam peered into it, but it was so dark inside that he couldn't see very far before his view dissolved into blackness. There was something about it that chilled him.
Danny was also staring. He hadn't come down to the lab very often recently, as was evidenced by its current clutter. But still: how had they managed to construct something this big without his knowledge? Jack released him so he could point out to Sam the various bells and whistles of the portal-in-progress. Danny was left to stand alone directly in front of the gaping maw. Another dimension, huh? Where would it open? Right past the rim of the hole, right? He slowly stretched his arm out and was genuinely surprised when his fingers met only the open air inside the tube.
He felt, rather than saw, Dean come to stand next to him.
Dean placed a hand on the edge of the portal and leaned his head inside. "This is one creepy-ass hole-in-the-wall," he said, his voice bouncing eerily off the metal innards of the portal.
"I wonder what it will look like once it's turned on," Danny said, strangely transfixed, retracting his hand and hugging himself. Why was he suddenly so cold? Dean paused at the comment, stood up straight and reevaluated the kid.
Danny barely came up to his shoulder, and he was so scrawny that Dean couldn't imagine he was very popular in school. Guess he still had yet to hit his growth spurt. Danny's hair was neat, black, and maybe just a tad too long for his face, but Dean understood this was probably the current style and couldn't fault the kid for it. Out of all his features, however, Danny's eyes were the most memorable. The kid didn't look at him as he wondered about what a portal to the Ghost Zone would look like. He just stared straight into the blackness of the unfinished shell. His eyes, huge and blue, seemed to glow with an unearthly light. You didn't see a lot of kids with black hair and blue eyes, Dean mused. Only in anime...
Lllllllllleave us in peaccccccccce.
Dean jumped and whipped his head back towards the portal. Danny also started.
Dean whispered, "Please tell me I did not just have my first auditory hallucination, because if so I would like a refund."
Danny didn't smile at the joke. "I heard it too," was all he said, his luminescent eyes widening farther.
After a second more of staring at the portal, Sam's irritated and slightly desperate voice called Dean from across the lab and the spell was broken. After assuring himself that no immediate threat was presenting itself from the portal, Dean joined his flustered brother.
While Danny and Dean had been left alone to inspect the portal, Sam had been hauled over to an easel supporting a large notepad full of sketches depicting the portal's various parts. Jack and Maddie had boxed him in on either side and had started flipping through the pages, Maddie trying to explain the science behind the portal and Jack just ranting about ghosts. That seemed to be his thing. It only took a few minutes for Sam to reach his limit. He was pre-law for crying out loud, not a damn STEM major!
Politely disengaging from Maddie and Jack's respective rants, he called out to Dean and started heading towards the stairs. Jack and Maddie followed him, still talking, with Dean close behind.
When Danny didn't immediately follow the group, Dean called back, "Yo, kid!" Danny started and whipped his head around to look in Dean's direction. "You coming?" Danny nodded, glanced once more at the portal, and headed for the stairs.
After wishing Jack and Maddie farewell and exchanging phone numbers, the Winchesters hopped into the Impala.
Dean turned the key, and the old car roared to life. "I feel like I've been run over by an ectoplasmic truck," he said, rubbing his eyes. When Sam didn't respond, Dean glanced at him and saw his brother's face contorted with thought. He snapped his fingers under Sam's nose, startling him out of his trance. "Hey, what's up?"
Sam slapped Dean's hand away. "A portal to an alternate dimension sort of seems like a bad idea, don't you think?"
Dean nodded thoughtfully, remembering the strange whispers he and Danny had heard. He decided to leave out the part about hearing voices for obvious reasons, only saying, "Yeah, that whole concept was bugging me. Are you thinking we should do something about it?" Sam nodded.
Dean put the car into drive and started heading down the road. "Okay, so we call them back tomorrow and say we had a few more questions about those 'ectoplasmic beings' or whatever, and then one of us sneaks down and switches around a few wires or something."
Sam snorted.
"What?" Dean asked, offended, "That's a good idea!"
"I'm just glad you didn't suggest that we set off an IED in their basement," Sam snickered, "But yeah, that is a good idea."
"Dude, I'm not stupid."
"I know." Sam chuckled one last time, just to rub it in. Then he had a thought. "What if they just build a new portal? How do we know that this will stop them for good? From what Maddie said, they've been at this since college, so what's to say they won't just try again?"
Dean thought for a moment, the rumbling engine filling the silence. Then a look of annoyance crossed his face. "We'd need to take their notes. Scientists have notes, right?"
"I assume so. That sketch pad they were showing me is definitely part of it, but I bet they have other notes somewhere with the super preliminary data."
"Damn," Dean's look of annoyance deepened, "So now we've got to disable a friggin' ghost portal, find a stack of papers in that catastrophe of a mess, and get that sketchpad and notes out without them noticing..." He trailed off into brooding silence.
Sam raised his palms in a calming gesture. "Ok, so we've got a plan then. You distract the Fentons and I'll sneak into the lab and cross a few wires and steal the notes."
Dean almost laughed. "Wait wait wait. Hold up. You, the lawyer-"
"I was pre-law."
"Yeah, whatever. Anyway, you, Mr. 'Pre-law', want me, with all my years of mechanical experience, to distract two highly educated scientists while you, Mr. 'Pre-law', sneaks your gigantic ass into their basement and crosses a few wires. A task which I, with all my years of mechanical experience-"
"Okay, okay," Sam raised his hands in surrender, "I get your point. You cross the wires while I distract the Fentons."
"Thank you."
"Just remember to get the notes. If we don't get the notes then we'll have to come back and-."
Dean turned up the volume on the radio until he couldn't hear Sam anymore. "Got it, Moe. Jeeze, I know what I'm doing."
Danny couldn't focus on his essay. He tapped the eraser of his pencil against the paper in frustration and pushed his chair away from his desk. Crossing his arms across his chest, he tried to hold back a shiver. The mysterious cold from the portal seemed to have followed him from the basement to his room. Even two stories above the lab, he was conscious of the portal's exact location in the back of his mind. Like it was watching him.
Ssssssssssssaviorrrrrrrrrr.
That's what the whispers had said. Or what he'd thought they said.
Now, hours after the fact, Danny had mostly convinced himself that he had imagined the voices... but one tiny part of him still lingered over the hissing word. Savior. Who was he supposed to save? And from what?
He huffed in annoyance and picked up his pencil again, trying to banish the intrusive thoughts from his mind. He'd have to save himself from Mr. Lancer if he didn't finish this essay on time. He read the prompt at the top of the page for the thousandth time:
"In 500 words or less and using the persuasive essay format you learned in class, write whether or not Hamlet should have listened to his father's ghost in the beginning of the play."
Every time he read the word "ghost" he would remember standing in front of the portal and the weird sensation of someone watching him would return. He huffed again and stabbed his pencil into his rocket-shaped desk organizer. He knew he wasn't going to get anything done on this essay tonight.
Sighing, he had just leaned over to retrieve his math book from his backpack when someone knocked on his door. He immediately knew who it was; only one person in this house respected his privacy.
"Come in, Jazz," he called, laying his math book on his desk and turning to face the door.
As Jazz came through the door, the smell of something hot and savory filled his room and Danny's stomach grumbled, a reminder of how late in the evening it was.
"I rescued a bowl of soup for you before Dad started working on the water filter again," she said, placing the steaming bowl on his desk. She glanced at the math book next to it, gasped, and pushed the textbook aside. "I remember Hamlet!" she said, picking up his unstarted essay. "So many family issues and childhood trauma..." she muttered, scanning the prompt. Danny grabbed the bowl of soup and took a bite, bracing himself for the psychoanalytical tirade he knew was coming. To his surprise, Jazz only frowned at the empty paper and then at him.
"Danny," she said, "Haven't you been working on this essay the whole afternoon?" Danny swallowed, not sure whether he should feel guilty or annoyed.
"Yeah, why?" he replied before taking another bite of soup.
"It's just that studies have shown that bashing your brain against something for hours isn't very productive -"
Danny rolled his eyes. "Tell me about it."
"- and you've been working really hard ever since the school year started, I mean, it's like you're always up here in your room, studying."
Danny cocked an eyebrow at her. "...and that's a bad thing?"
"Well, it's certainly not healthy," Jazz said, sitting on the corner of his bed, "I bet your Vitamin D levels have gone down significantly since the beginning of the semester and the lack of physical activity is probably affecting your psyche, not to mention the effect of decreased contact with your friends. How often have you hung out with them since school started?"
"Uh, first," Danny swallowed another bite of soup, "that's none of your business. And second, I'm trying to get good grades from the start so I can get into a good university so I can get into the space program at NASA. Not studying sort of defeats the purpose, don't you think?"
"Universities look for more than good grades, you know," Jazz crossed her arms, not conceding anything, "You should hang out with Sam and Tucker some this week. Just let go and have some fun. It might clear your mind enough for you to finish this essay by Friday." She got up and started for the door.
"How'd you know it was due on Friday?" Danny asked her retreating back.
"I took English with Mr. Lancer too, remember?" She vanished down the hall.
Danny shook his head and took another bite of soup before facing his homework again.
By the time his eyelids refused to stay open another second, he still hadn't gotten anything done and the portal was still haunting his subconscious. Flipping his desk lamp off a little more aggressively than was absolutely necessary, Danny went to bed with Jazz's words repeating on loop in the back of his head. Universities look for more than just good grades, you know.
To his chagrin, he was woken several times during the night to loud mechanical noises coming from the lab. With the Winchesters' visit, his parents' drive to complete the portal had reached a frantic level and they had been working on it ever since the brothers had left that afternoon. The only time they had come up for air had been when his dad had come up to the kitchen for water and discovered the filter was still possessed.
When he woke the next morning, it was seven minutes before his alarm was set to go off at six and he felt just as tired, if not more so, than when he had fallen asleep the night before. The noise that had woken him was the high pitched whirring of some sort of power saw and he knew that he wouldn't be able to ignore it and go back to sleep. And so, reluctantly, Danny threw back his covers and got ready for the day. By the time he made it downstairs, the noise had stopped. A peek into Jazz's room on the way down had told him that she had already left for school. No doubt she was curled up in the school library reading an article about the trauma that possessed water filters could inflict on teenagers or something equally as boring.
Before he left for school, Danny peeked down into the lab to check on his parents.
"Danny boy!" his father ambushed him at the door and steered him towards the portal. From deep inside, Danny could make out his mother illuminated by the flame from a blowtorch as she welded something in place on the wall of the long, metal tube. "How's it going in there, Maddie?" his father called. The blowtorch shut off and Danny could hear footsteps approaching from within the darkness.
"I'm just about finished," Maddie said as she stepped into the light of the lab and removed her
goggles. "We'll be all set for testing this afternoon." Danny gaped at her.
"Y'all are testing this thing today?" Despite his general revulsion at all things ghostly, the concept of opening a door to another dimension excited him beyond words. "Can I bring Sam and Tucker over to watch?"
Touched by their son's excitement, Jack and Maddie unanimously agreed and sent him off to school so they could finish the portal in time.
As Danny walked down the street, he saw the Winchesters' sleek black car round the corner heading for his house. Buoyed by his anticipation, he waved at them as they passed.
When he reached the entrance of Casper High, he spotted Sam's dark hair and Tucker's red beret in seconds and hurried over to them.
"Guys!" he called as he approached, "You'll never guess what's going to happen this afternoon!"