Chapter Text
Thing was, Danny was tired. But who could blame him for his shot reaction time?
He was a fifteen year old boy who had the pressures of doing well in high school because he came from a family of geniuses, who just so happened to be a half ghost who spent a lot of his free time (and not-free time) fighting ghosts that came out of the portal to hell in his parents’ basement lab.
He was the sole protector of the town who could go toe-to-toe with some of the heaviest hitting ghosts in the zone, so he couldn’t just spread out the ghost fighting to Sam and Tucker. Sure they helped (a lot), but ultimately it was up to Danny to keep the ghosts out of Amity Park.
So sometimes, he got lazy. He didn’t really pay attention to his surroundings, relying on memory to trek the familiar walk home from school to home. He’d lived in the same town his whole life, and he’d walked almost the same route home for the last five years. He relied heavily on his ghost sense to keep an eye out for an attack.
And that’s why the hand that pulled him to one side got him so easily.
“Wh—!” he exclaimed, trying to get his balance or whip his head around to look at who’d grabbed him but he didn’t see much other than a hoodie sleeve pulling him through some fuschia coloured portal. Okay, not green, so it wasn’t a ghost thing that had tricked his senses.
Before he could really think of anything else, something…strange washed over him. It felt like something tingled through all the atoms in his body, they twisted sharply only for a second in a way that didn’t hurt but felt distinctly uncomfortable. Like being on a rollercoaster that just had crested the highest point and was rocketing towards the ground.
The sensation didn’t last long until he felt his legs give out and he fell to the floor, the hand on his backpack helping to slow his fall to the ground slightly. He felt dizzy, with some kind of…ringing in his ears. His eyes were shut tightly to fight off the nausea but he had to fight to try and discern the noises around him.
There was a hum of voices that it took him a little while to decode, finally he managed to understand what they were saying.
“—ure this is the person we’re looking for?” A man asked, his voice wasn’t anything special but the way he spoke had an air of authority in it. Like he was used to being one of the most important people in the room.
“Yup, this is the human with ghost powers, specifically not a quirk but powers that can be recreated.” A feminine voice replied from much closer to him, likely the person who had pulled him through the portal.
“Excellent.” The man replied before humming. “Is he conscious?”
There was a hand on his backpack moved to his shoulder and shook him lightly. “Hey kid, this won’t take long. You can throw up in a minute if that’s still your problem.”
It wasn’t really. Danny had fought through worse, which is why he made the decision to shake off the hand and stumble to his feet, opening his eyes and looking around.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see that he was in some kind of dingy warehouse that was suspiciously kitted out with a bunch of temporary lab equipment. He recognised some of the things that his Mom would fantasise about owning so they could do lab stuff while they went on a family camping trip.
The lighting wasn’t all that good, but it was lit up enough to take note of the…frankly bizarre appearance of some of those he was in the company of. There wasn’t really a way for Danny to describe just how weird the people were. They had bumps and odd angles where regular people didn’t, in ways that implied that their skeletal structure was different in ways that weren’t an anomaly.
In the small group in front of him, there was a man sat in a chair studying him closely, presumably the voice he heard before from the way that the other people were positioned around him. He was the most normal looking of the bunch, but even then, he had sharp teeth and orange eyes with slitted pupils.
Danny turned around and looked at the person who brought him here, somewhat relieved to see she at least looked normal. Her fuschia hair was incredibly vibrant to the point it was either freshly dyed or…some other explanation. She seemed to be mid twenties at least, somewhat punk looking in her fashion and looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“What the hell?” Danny blurted, backing up from the woman and but not going too far when he noticed there were more weird people behind him. “Why am I here?”
His mind was racing, trying to figure it out. His core was humming with an intensity that he wasn’t sure what to do about, she’d mentioned ghosts. She mentioned powers.
She knew.
Somehow, she knew, and his ghost sense was so deathly silent, he knew that other ghosts wasn’t involved in this at all. Even around the Guys in White, his sense would flare up slightly due to the ectoplasm in their weapons.
The woman held up her hands. “Relax kid, we’re not going to hurt you, you just need to tell us how you got your power, how to recreate it and we’ll take you back to your original universe.”
Danny blinked. “Universe?”
“Yep, welcome to an alternate universe from your own, super powers are the norm, and we’re about two hundred years ahead of where your universe is at. Because of this, whatever you tell us, won’t effect your world. As simple as opening a door for a stranger.”
Danny’s mind was racing faster than he could remember. He’d vaguely been aware of alternate universes. It was one of the few things that he’d learnt about the Ghost Zone. The hundreds of doors that lead to unknown places, with no way to discern if a door would lead you to a ghost’s lair or if it’d lead you back in time, or to another planet. He’d thought the gateway to parallel universes was a trick one of the ghosts was playing on him to try and get him lost in the doors.
Because he didn’t want to possibly get lost forever, he’d given the doors a very wide berth, and so he while he knew that alternate universe could have existed he didn’t want to risk getting trapped to test it. But here he was. In an alternate universe. Completely alone.
Fuck.
“What the fuck, no? Just take me back home!” Danny demanded, trying to work out if this was the biggest most elaborate prank he’d been in, set up by complete strangers, or if this was actually happening. “You’re messing with me.”
“Just tell the boss what he wants to know, and we promise kid, nothing’ll happen to you.” One of the weirder looking guys said, his body covered with tan fur, the large ears on his head twitching. And— Oh. He has a tail. Right.
Please just be a really expensive furry suit. Please just be a really expensive furry suit. Please just be a really expensive furry suit.
“How do we know this is really what we’re looking for?” The boss spoke again, directing his question to the woman. “After all, you didn’t allow any of my men to accompany you on the retrieval.”
The woman turned back to him. “I didn’t bring any of your guys because it’s not easy bringing someone there and back, and I can only take one person at a time. It was either, I leave your guy in that world, or I leave the kid on his own while I take the guy back. I already did my scouting before, and your guys would have been spotted in an instant. I blend in.”
“He looks like a normal teenager to me, not the ghost fighter I was promised.”
Danny wanted to run, he wanted to get away from this situation, because for all his bravado and confidence in fighting, this was so far from what he could handle on his own. He stood there awkwardly, making no move to do anything as he just listened. He wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or not that none of the guys seemed to have any visible weapons.
“I did my research, alias Danny Phantom. Used to be an ordinary kid until a year ago when he was in some kind of accident, now he’s half ghost with a bevy of powers, intangibility, flight, ecto blasts, invisibility, duplication I think? Whatever, it’s like the kid has the swiss army knife of quirks. Exactly what you’re looking for.”
His dread was building the more she spoke. How the hell did she get that kind of information? Sure there wasn’t much that Danny could keep secret from the ghosts in the Ghost Zone, considering they knew where he lived and could interrupt his day whenever they felt like it. But that didn’t mean that they had loose lips. Sure Amity didn’t pay close attention when they called him a halfa, or didn’t really listen to the things ghosts would say. But there was no way that they’d be interested in telling those secrets because what would they gain?
In either case, she clearly knew too much for this to be an elaborate unrelated prank.
“So…‘Danny Phantom’,” the boss started in a sly voice, directly addressing Danny. “Tell us. How did you get your powers? You’ll be brought back to your universe with only a slight delay.”
“Why do you want to know that?” Danny rebutted. His mind whirring. Could be threaten them to let him go? He turned to the woman. “If you know all that, then you know how powerful I am. You’ll regret messing with me, if you don’t take me back right now.”
“She’ll take you back when I authorise it.” The boss interjected, standing up now. “And I want to strengthen those underneath me, our foes are powerful. But with your help, we could defeat them. We wouldn’t have to hide who we are, fight back against the system that oppresses us.”
The thing was that Danny was young but he wasn’t gullible. There was no way to ensure that these guys would take the knowledge he could possibly give them and use it for good. He wasn’t even all that sure how to exactly recreate the accident! …Maybe.
Okay he could probably guess, but he didn’t have the schematics for the portal and there no way that he’d be able to give them it even if he wanted to. The schematics had been a casualty of one of his earliest ghost fights, unsalvageable, his parents might have a copy somewhere on their many backup hard drives. But they were scattered over the house, it would take weeks to dig up every single one and then another few trying to locate the file on them.
“No, for all I know, you guys are criminals, after all you did just kidnap me. I’m not gonna give you that information so you can hurt people.” Danny refused jutting his chin, he let the wash of transformation flow over him, taking in how some people flinched at the whoosh and others prepared themselves for a fight. He brought up his fists and let them glow green. “Take me back, and leave me alone or you’re going to see exactly what I can do.”
The boss hummed. Before he reached out his hand and pulled it into a quick fist. He felt a foreign feeling wash over him, trying to grip onto something but unable to find purchase. He watched the man pull back slightly with confusion, whatever it was that he tried to do had clearly failed. With that, his face scrunched up before he snarled.
“Kill her, and capture him.”
“What?!” The woman squawked. Clearly taken off guard at the order, her hand dipping into her pocket and pulling out a knife. Danny didn’t take much notice, because as soon as the order was made, the goons around them started to charge.
He threw weak ectoblasts at them, watching them recoil when they were hit, a couple of the more agile goons managed to dodge, and one that got hit kept coming so he shot more blasts their way. There was one that hadn’t gotten hit and managed to get in close, this one was large and hulking. One of his arms thick with muscle tried to punch him in the gut, but Danny turned intangible, going to punch him with his charged up hand.
Some of the goons were getting up again, he heard a commotion coming from further down the warehouse they were in - reinforcements. The woman who’d brought him there was holding her own pretty well with a small knife, until he saw the boss reach an arm out in her direction and do the same thing he tried to do on Danny. She yelled in pain, which let her opponent punch her hard in the forearm which made her drop her knife.
Danny made a decision.
He flew over to the woman, scooping her up by grabbing under her arms and flew them both out of the warehouse. He made sure he was invisible as to lose them, but Danny knew that when he flew high he was pretty dang fast, being able to fly through the entirety of Amity in only five minutes.
The woman was yelling, presumably in fear because she likely didn’t know what was going on. A vindictive part of Danny couldn’t help but think ‘Karma’ but a kinder side decided that they were probably far enough away to put her down and talk.
He landed on the top of a tall building, putting her down on her feet although shock made her legs fall out from under her.
“Alright you better give me answers, I just saved your life back there.” Danny demanded, folding his arms as he stared down at her. There wasn’t all that much light, the streetlights were well below and the light pollution levels weren’t that bad, but Danny’s own cold bright glow was enough to see her.
“Look I didn’t mean for this to happen!” The woman threw her hands up, standing on shaky legs, he noticed she was taller than him by a few inches. “You were just meant to tell the guy what he wanted to know, and be on your way! For all you knew this was a dream, and the consequences wouldn’t matter. How was I supposed to know you’d turn him down?”
Danny raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “If you did that research on me, you would have known that I don’t let innocent people get hurt. That’s pretty much my whole schtick. Of course, I wouldn’t help guys who hurt people no matter if they were in my universe or not!”
“Urgh this is what I get for dealing with villains. Should have just moved universes for a while until he lost interest in me, not like I’m stuck here.” The woman grumbled to herself, wincing as she tried to assess the damage in her arm.
“Look — just take me back and we can forget about all this!” Danny ordered, fighting the urge to stomp his foot in frustration. He just wanted to go and scream into his pillow for the next five minutes before passing out for the next thirty six hours.
“Fine! Fine!” She yelled before she waved her unhurt arm in a casual practised movement before she stopped. She looked at where she’d waved her arm, before she blinked. She waved her arm again, with nothing happening.
“What are you waiting for? Is this some weird dance?”
“No! I’m trying— it’s not working. Why isn’t it working?” She asked to herself, moving her injured arm in the same way, with no results. She was visibly starting to be more distressed and less vaguely annoyed. “What the fuck?”
There was a pit opening up in Danny’s stomach the longer it became clear that whatever she was doing wasn’t working. There was something about her distress, the way she tried to hide it under her calm facade, her body starting to shake and her jaw setting.
Something occurred to her, she pulled her shirt to one side and showed a mark in the shape of a lock above where her heart would be. She did the motion again, and the lock glowed slightly. She stumbled back a step.
“I— I can’t.” She said weakly, turning to look at Danny with a manic look in her eye. “I can’t take you back. He…did something to my quirk.”
“So I’m—” Danny started, before swallowing. “I’m stuck here.”