A/N: Apologies for the long hiatus! Second year kicked my butt for sure, but I'm back at it in third year! I'm studying for boards as well as school now, so updates will come a little farther in between. Without further ado, let's pick up where we left off...

THEN: Danny and Sam have a great time at the opening of Circus Gothica up until the point that Danny announces to the world that he is going to go goth, earning both himself and Sam three weeks of detention. His parents take the extra step of grounding him, only allowing him to communicate with Sam and Tucker outside of school for half an hour per day. And no video games. Every teenage boy's nightmare. Meanwhile, Sam and Dean find Danny's situation akin to the expression "a sitting duck" and can't wait to exploit it the next day. But whatever happened to the little voice from the Circus?

NOW:

Come one, come all to the Circus! Where delights are our mainstay and suspense our bread and butter! Prepare to be amazed, aghast, and amused! In store for you today is a story whose heart-throbbing power has not yet crossed the palette of human-kind!

Without further ado, please direct your attention to Ring One, where the spotlight lands on the brothers Winchester and an unexpected early-morning call for aid...

Sam and Dean arrived at the scene of the crime, pulling up behind the Fenton Family Assault Vehicle. The sidewalk outside the jewelry store was neat and clean aside from the yellow caution tape barring the entrance to the store. Loud voices came from inside, but the brothers couldn't quite make out the words until...

"Good golly, man! This crime scene is obviously the result of some form of ectoplasmic devilry! We're ghost hunters! Let us hunt down the ghosts who did this!" Jack Fenton's unmistakable voice carried perfectly across the still morning air.

Dean slowly bowed his head to the steering wheel, letting the coolness of the leather soothe away the tired thrumming of his skull. "It's too early for this," he grumbled.

Sam, the bright and sprightly morning person that he was, was already halfway out of the car and barely heard Dean's mumbling. "Come on," he said, reaching back inside to poke his brother in the shoulder. "At least this way we'll have something to do until Danny gets out of school."

"But I need coffee."

"We'll get some after."

"After is too late. I need it now."

Sam poked him hard enough that he yelped. "After."

"Fine, fine." Dean got out of the car, feeling each and every one of his twenty-seven years.

Lifting the caution tape up with the back of his hand, Sam was the first one into the chaos of the jewelry store. Where the outside was serene and undisturbed, the inside was full of broken glass and jewelry scattered across the floor.

"Hey!" A flustered cop turned away from barring the two Fenton parents from intruding further into the crime scene to glare at the two of them. "You can't be in here! This is a-"

"Crime scene?" Dean finished, raising his eyebrows condescendingly, "Wow, I almost missed it."

Sam elbowed him in the side. "The Fentons asked us to come," he said in a much nicer tone than Dean could muster.

"Oh," the cop reassessed them with slightly more disgust in his gaze, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "They're over there." As the brothers passed him, Dean caught the edge of the exasperated look that the cop threw them.

Huddled in the back corner of the store, next to a jewelry case that looked like it had been stomped on by a giant, were the Fentons. They had obviously just gotten permission to set up, still pulling miscellaneous equipment out of duffel bags. As Dean and Sam approached, Jack looked up and spotted them.

"Boys!" he shouted, jumping up and enveloping them in a bear hug. "So glad you could join us!" Maddie turned around then too, smiling.

Once they had been released and had caught their breath again, Dean was able to ask, "So, what happened here?"

"A ghostly robbery," Maddie supplied, turning back to her investigation of the broken case. "Phantom and three other ghosts came in here last night trying to deprive this store of several pieces of jewelry. Thankfully, they seemed to have become occupied with infighting and the two officers were able to scare them off."

"Two officers?" Sam asked. "There were witnesses?"

Maddie waved vaguely to the other side of the store, where Sam and Dean now noticed two very tired officers standing with steaming cups of coffee. "Yes, but they didn't give us much other than that."

"Let me see if I can get anything else from them," Sam said, moving away.

Dean evaluated his options. He could stay here with the two crazies, or he could go with Sam and potentially disrupt any interview he was trying to get with the witnesses with his grumpy attitude. Sighing, he planted himself down on his haunches and tried to see what the Fentons were doing.

Maddie was slowly scanning across the glass with a complicated-looking piece of equipment. It beeped slowly until something lit up bright green on the display, and she bent closer, pulling out a pair of tweezers. Gently, she extracted a small piece of glass and turned to put it in the stage of a mobile microscope they had apparently plugged into the wall. Dean had to marvel at the adaptability of their equipment. From what it looked like, they had managed to transport most of their lab capabilities into the middle of a crime scene.

He sidled closer, his interest piqued despite his tiredness. "What are you looking at?"

"Ectoplasmic residue," Maddie answered shortly, occupied by her task.

Jack turned to explain for his wife. "When ghosts fight, they tend to leave ectoplasmic residue behind when they are wounded. We can use this residue to see how many ghosts were here and even get a read on what type of nasty they are."

"Huh," Dean said, watching Maddie examine the residue under her microscope. "What does that bit that you found tell you?"

"This was a large ghost that got injured here…" Maddie said. "Probably a strength component to its powers, based on what I'm seeing. Pretty vanilla, actually."

Dean nodded in agreement. Ghosts were generally much stronger than humans in his experience.

Maddie got up and moved to another spot on the floor, bringing out her scanner again. Something pinged again and Maddie again carefully extracted a broken piece of tile and placed it under her microscope. After fiddling with a couple switches on it, she peered inside.

"Another ghost. Different one. Looks like… basic, low-level animation powers. Again, very vanilla."

Dean noticed that Jack was dutifully taking note of what his wife was reporting on a tiny pad.

Maddie looked up and around at the jewelry store, squinting suspiciously. "It's strange, dear." She looked at Jack. "Phantom doesn't normally go for accomplices that are so… milquetoast."

Dean chimed in. "What do you mean?"

"Well, we are used to seeing Phantom associating with ghosts like Technus or Skulker. Big shots with powers magnitudes of times more complex than the ones I'm seeing here."

Dean remembered the beat down he had witnessed Phantom take at the hands of Skulker just a couple days before. "Are you saying Phantom is on the same team as Skulker?" he asked, disbelievingly.

"Why of course!" said Jack. "They do fight a lot, but that's just some routine territory disputes. All ghosts are on the side of evil." Dean stared at Jack for a moment, waiting for him to laugh and follow up with something more rational, but Jack just turned back to taking notes. Dean continued to stare for a moment, floored by the level of idiocy he had just witnessed.

"You know what," he stood, not able to take another second of the feeling of his brain cells dying, "I'm going to go see how Sam is doing."

"Sure thing!" Jack said cheerily.

Dean moved quickly over to where Sam was still interviewing the two officers. Somehow he felt more tired than when they had first arrived. He stood slightly behind Sam, making sure to stay out of his way as he continued to question the cops. Slowly, he put their story together. They'd arrived on the scene late last night to find that a fight was taking place within the jewelry store. Phantom and three other ghosts, just like the Fentons had said. When the cops had arrived, the store had already been trashed. When they busted onto the scene, the three unknown ghosts had instantly disappeared. So fast that neither of the cops could say what they looked like beyond "green and freaky". Phantom, apparently, had stayed put, covered in stolen jewelry as one of the cops had tried to make him put his hands in the air. After rolling his eyes, he had simply phased through the floor, leaving the jewelry behind.

"Why you tried to arrest a ghost is beyond me!" said one of the cops.

"I told you already," said the other one, "I was following standard procedure. What would you have done? Shot him?"

"No way! The way his eyes were lit up red, it would have just made him angry!"

As the two of them started up what seemed like an old argument, Sam stepped away, turning to Dean.

"Looks like Phantom was either fighting to rob the store first or to keep the other ghosts from robbing it. The fact that he was holding a bunch of jewelry when the cops walked in is pretty damning," Sam said, looking around the jewelry store.

Dean looked around too and saw something in the middle of the floor. A pile of very expensive looking jewelry. He pointed at it. "Yeah, but the fact that he didn't take it with him even though he most certainly could have points pretty convincingly in the other direction for me." Sam took a couple steps closer to examine the pile.

As he bent, Dean continued. "And Maddie said that this sort of thing doesn't fit Phantom's profile: his..." Dean hesitated to use the word "accomplices", but he couldn't think of anything else. "His accomplices were low powered, basic run-of-the-mill ghosts instead of ones like that guy with the missiles."

"Well," Sam said, straightening up again and surveying the scene as he thought aloud, "If Phantom is actually helping Amity Park with their ghost problem, it could be that these were just new ghosts to town who were trying to rob the store and he was trying to stop. I mean, the cops walked into the middle of the fight. It could have just been a case of wrong place, wrong time for Phantom."

"Yeah..." Dean looked at the pile of jewelry as if it held the answers he was seeking. "Something just feels off about this whole thing." He paused, putting his thoughts together. "Did you notice that the cops said Phantom had red eyes?"

"I... huh, not until you said something about it."

"Yeah... so maybe this wasn't Phantom at all. Just another ghost impersonating him."

"Or Phantom - who can shoot laser beams out of his hands and fly - can turn his eyes red and this is just the first time we've heard about it."

Dean hummed in discontent. They were missing something. He could feel it. They really needed to talk to Danny. "Guess we'll just have to be on our guard and wait til Danny gets home from school."

Sam sighed, nodding.

"Great." Dean clapped his hands together, brightening considerably. "Now for some coffee."

Such conflict... such indecision. It's a good thing our ignoble hunters don't know what's happening in Ring Two, otherwise, they might have chosen a more violent option than "watch and wait"...

Sam looked over at Danny where he sat across from her in Mr. Lancer's class, gently snoozing into his classwork. The dark circles under his eyes grew more pronounced every day, and she couldn't help but notice how he looked more and more like a corpse with each midnight ghost hunt. His cheeks had lost their baby fat only a few months into this whole ghost hero thing. She and Tucker fed Danny as much as they could, trying to keep him from going from thin to hollowed, but it was like playing tug of war with a monster truck.

Danny shifted in his sleep, his sleeve moving up his arm to reveal the brown edge of the bandaid she had put over a gash last night after the attempted jewelry store robbery. He'd hit his head too, although there hadn't been any wound, which had blurred the night's events. She chewed on a fingernail. Danny tore himself up and ran himself down, carrying on with uncorroded altruism. She secretly wondered if there existed a fight too big or a challenge too great that would break that spirit. She secretly hoped that she would never have to find out.

And underneath all her worries for her cr- friend. Yes. Friend. Neither of them needed the stress of whatever the other option was. Underneath her worries for him was a storm of questions like sharks in bloody water. Was Danny dead or alive? Or somehow both? Had she killed him the day of the portal experiment? Was her encouragement of his vigilantism the thing making him wear himself out night after night protecting the city? Even worse, was his defense of Amity Park attracting dangerous ghosts rather than driving them away? What would his future look like? What would hers look like? What would their future -?

No. No. None of that.

She deliberately looked back at the whiteboard, having lost the line of Mr. Lancer's explanation of Romantic literature completely. Normally she would be interested; Romantic poetry was full of emotions that she could relate to. Despair, anger, guilt, unrequited love...

Huffing, she tried concentrating on something else, doodling a black cat in the margins of her mostly-empty notes.

All of a sudden, Danny started, sitting bolt upright. This made everyone around him jump and look around. Even the dumbest person in their class had noticed that when Danny got agitated, ghost attacks tended to follow immediately after. Knowing what to look for, Sam watched the air next to Danny's mouth for his telltale wispy ghost sense. But it didn't come.

She frowned as Danny raised his hand, asking Mr. Lancer in a robotic voice if he could use the bathroom. Mr. Lancer sighed in resignation like he always did and let Danny go with the bathroom pass. Sam watched Danny carefully as he turned the doorknob and left, but couldn't tell that anything was overtly wrong. Maybe, for once, he really did have to go to the bathroom.

When Danny didn't return for the next three periods of class, however, Sam knew that she had been mistaken.

She caught up to Tucker in the hall outside the cafeteria. They had the period before lunch separately. "Tucker! Have you seen Danny?"

Tucker shook his head. "Where do you think he went?" He leaned in so he could whisper, "Ghost?"

Sam pulled Tucker to the side so they weren't standing in the flow of hungry students heading in for lunch. "I don't know," she said, letting her worry shine through, "He's not responding to texts or calls. And he's been acting weird ever since the thing at the tracks. With the circus."

Tucker had pulled a gadget out of his pocket and was typing away furiously. "Luckily," he said absently as he tapped the screen, "I installed GPS locators in all of our phones so we can find each other if needed."

Sam moved to stand beside him. A map popped up on the screen with a loading symbol rotating above it. She couldn't help herself. "Come on, come on." She didn't know why she was so worried. Danny disappeared on a regular basis. Off to be the hero. But... there was something they were missing. She could feel it.

The device beeped, honing in on the location of Danny's phone.

"The tracks," Tucker said, mystified.

"The circus," Sam whispered.

"Circus Gothica? What's he doing there?"

"I... I'm not sure. The show isn't until tonight. We were going to go together."

"Oh reall-"

Sam kicked Tucker in the shin. "Shut up. Now is not the time."

Tucker yelped, hopping on one foot. "Maybe he dropped his phone when y'all were there the other day?"

"Maybe..." It was a distinct possibility.

"Listen," Tucker said, gingerly testing his weight on his foot, "Danny runs off all the time to do ghost stuff. Maybe he just got caught in something that's taking a bit longer than usual. I didn't see anything on the news, so it can't be anything that serious. We can go to his house after school and see if he went home. We can't afford to miss any more classes based on a hunch or we'll be in detention until the day we die."

"Fine, fine." Sam took a deep breath. "You're right. We don't have proof that anything's wrong. We'll go to his house after school and he'll be there."

"Right."

"Right."

And now, dear audience, the brothers Winchester and our intrepid teenage sidekicks close in on Ring Three. But before the finale can start, we must visit the home of the Fenton family where all that is hidden begins to come to light.

Dean pulled the Impala up to the now-familiar curb outside the Fenton's house after school let out. They were a little late. Dean had taken a nap after their early morning crime scene adventure and had accidentally overslept. Sam had been doing... whatever he was doing and had missed the passage of time. On their way over, they watched carefully to see if they could spot Danny walking home. After all, if they could give him a ride, it would be much easier to question him. But they didn't see him.

They hesitated before the door of the Fentons' house. It was never easy to upend somebody's world. And although they didn't know for sure that Danny was involved with Danny Phantom, Dean could feel it in his gut that he was. As a hunter, Dean trusted his instincts, so when he finally raised his hand to knock on the door, it was with the resignation of an executioner raising his axe.

Before he could touch the door, however, it was ripped open. Dean and Sam, nerves strung tight, both jumped back, hands going for weapons.

Jack stood in the doorway, just as surprised to see the Winchesters as they were to see him.

"Hello!" he said, finally. Then he looked over their heads, scanning the streets, uncharacteristically worried.

Dean felt his stomach sink. "Don't tell me," he said, pulling his hand away from the gun in his waistband, "Danny isn't home."

Eventually Jack's gaze came back to them. "Uh, no," he said, distracted, "Maddykins and I have been calling him for the past half hour or so, but he hasn't picked up." He sighed. "We thought he was taking his grounding seriously. I can't say I'm not a little disappointed."

Dean and Sam exchanged a look.

"Maybe he got held up at school," Dean said. He didn't know why he was standing up for Danny, but his hunter's gut told him it was the right thing to do and he trusted it.

Jack looked over the street again. "Maybe you're right."

"Tell you what," Sam said, an idea taking form, "We'll go to school and see if he's there. Then we can pick him up and bring him home."

"No, no," Jack said, waving the offer away distractedly, "You don't have to do that."

"We insist!" Dean said, putting on his most reasonable expression. "That way, you can be here if Danny gets back while we're gone!" Jack hesitated, so Dean clapped him on the shoulder and pulled out his car keys. "Don't worry! We'll have him back in a jiffy."

The Winchesters pulled away from the curb finally feeling like they had gotten a step up in the quagmire of mysteries surrounding Danny Phantom, even if they still hadn't talked to Danny. That feeling disappeared instantly when Sam spotted Danny's friends trudging up the sidewalk a few blocks from the school. Dean slammed on the breaks and jumped out of the car.

"You!" he said. Sam facepalmed and bustled out of the car to do damage control. Dean stalked towards the teens. "Where's Danny?"

The kids both looked wary at this question. "Why should we tell you?" said Tucker, "You literally got kicked out of school for impersonating federal agents the other day."

Sam Manson added, "You may know Danny, but that doesn't mean we trust you."

Dean looked at his brother and a silent agreement passed between them.

Sam took a deep breath and looked back at the teenagers. "Look, we know Danny is Phantom."

The Manson girl let out a snort of laughter. "Do you know how often we hear that from Wes? Try again."

"Trust index is decreasing," muttered Tucker in a singsong voice just loud enough for the brothers to hear.

"Listen," said Sam, raising his hands in a calming gesture, "We just want to talk with him."

Manson and Foley gave each other an exaggerated yeah, right look.

"We just want to know if he's a ghost or a human. If we should help him or... not."

"You mean 'or kill him,'" sneered Tucker. "We've heard it all from his parents, so save your breath."

Sam Manson exploded, "Danny isn't the enemy here!"

Dean saw his opening and jumped on it. "Danny Phantom or Danny Fenton?"

Sam shut her mouth, turning bright red.

"So, are you going to help us or not?" Sam Winchester said, pinning the two teens to the sidewalk with his gaze.

Across town in canvas darkness, Danny knelt before his savior. Red mist seemed to swirl all around him, comforting and cool. He didn't have to make the hard choices anymore. He could give all those decisions to the voice in the mist. It was a little nasally, to be sure, but Danny had never heard anything more melodious, more beautiful, more... absolute in his life.

"You are a strange one," said the voice, "The Ghost Crystal has never had this much trouble holding onto a spirit." Danny felt a presence move around him, observing him. "We'll just have to make sure you stay closer to home than the others... at least at first. My own personal ghost boy. What a treat."

Danny's vision swelled with static and the red mist pulled back to reveal the shadow of a man standing in front of him holding something glowing red. The light illuminated the edges of boxes crowding the edges of Danny's vision. It also revealed the planes of the man's pale face and wide, intense eyes.

"...Treat?" Danny asked, woozily. "I... who are you?"

"Ah, you're awake." The man smiled widely, revealing bright teeth and an impressive expanse of gum. "Time for your first lesson." The man squatted down so he was level with Danny, the red glow coming with him. Danny's gaze was drawn inexorably towards the swirling mist within the orb and he felt his world fading again. But that was okay. The voice had said it was. All was as it should be.

"I am Freakshow," said the man. His wide eyes seemed imbued with the red color of the mist. "And I am your master. Do you understand?"

Danny blinked. Far removed from his old life, ensorcelled in a beautiful calm and blessed by this wonderful voice, he knelt before his master. "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, master."