Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Danny looked back towards the window. It must be close to noon. He had gotten a good amount of sleep. Probably the best he has had in a long time. He looked at Sam.

"Vlad wants to talk to you." Her violet eyes stared at him with uncertainty and she waited for his reaction.

He continued to stare at her for a moment before his gaze once again stared out the window. The sun remained just below its highest point. He continued to stare. He pushed down the ball of anxiety that seemed to pierce his chest. It was now or never. "Let's go."


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"Your plan worked." Danny was still staring out the window, but his view had changed. The emotionless expression he had adopted since he had sat down in the armchair across the living room from Vlad still stuck to his face like glue, despite the topic he was steering the conversation toward. "Did you get what you wanted?"

"What are you talking about, Daniel"

"It's ironic how easily, no… how quickly I have gotten over you calling me Daniel. I guess being contained, tortured, and constantly being called Phantom was all it took," Danny chuckled slightly, unsure of how he was keeping his composure. The irony of it all was helping tremendously.

Vlad's normally self-confident and unnervingly calm demeanor wavered, replaced by a look between guilt and pity.

"I'll repeat myself. Did you get what you wanted? Cause, I mean, someone should benefit from this, right?"

Vlad shifted uneasily, causing the couch to emit a slight creak. "Daniel, I never meant-."

"Never meant what? To capture me? To clone me? To become the bad guy a part of you, the Plasmius I have come to loathe, already reflects? Because congratulations, two out of three isn't bad," He retorted, sarcasm overwhelming evident in Danny’s voice, contradicting the stony expression he wore like a mask.

Vlad stared open-mouthed in shock for a second, and the world seemed to slow down. Danny glanced outside. The sun was still seemed to hang just below its highest point, just like it had before he left his room. When he glanced back, Vlad remained shocked for barely a second before he took a deep, seething breath. "I am not the bad guy here, Daniel! Your mother is, she is the one that agreed. You seem to think that I was the judge and the jury, but that is just not true. I did want the first two experiments. I did was a sample of your DNA. But why would I need to know how you died? Why would I want to cause you more pain than you could handle. All I wanted was you by my side, an apprentice to pass on my skills, another Halfa to bond with in a world of ghosts. If you had died, do you honestly think that could ever have happened? Even if I had succeeded in cloning you, how long do you think it would last before it destabilized, and I had to resort to another method? I am not the bad guy here."

"You think that just because your little plan didn't end in murder that you are absolved of blame?" he whispered. "That you had no part to play? I know who Maddie is, I know what she did, I know. I know better than anyone in this house, anyone in this city the horrors that I experienced by her hand. But what are you playing at, Vlad?" Danny practically spat his name. "This may be a game to you. Another failed experiment, another imperfection in your grand plan. But this is my life now. I am forced to deal with your greed, your selfishness, because you didn't know when to stop. Maddie may have been the monster in the end, but you've been the monster since the beginning."

Vlad looked, for the first time in his life, at a loss for words. Then he looked like a volcano about to erupt. Emotions danced across his face: Anger, frustration, guilt, confusion, shock. Vlad lowered his head to stare at the ground. Silence covered the room like a blanket.

"Daniel, I'm sorry. I thought that… I thought that this would be like my other schemes. That I would get what I wanted at the beginning of the plan, and you would be there to stop the plan from going too far. Maybe I shouldn't have relied on the fact that good always wins. I was foolish to believe that a hero has a one hundred percent success rate in an unfair world. I guess I got so used to losing to you that I never realized what impact a win on my part would have caused. I never realized that what I thought was a win for me was a loss for everyone. I never thought that Maddie could, or would go to the lengths she did. Most of all, I was foolish to blame her, when I was the one that started this whole mess. I know I have said and done some very horrible things in the past, but Daniel, please forgive me."

Vlad honestly looked sorry. He didn't have the look of pity that Danny had become so familiar with. He didn't look guilty, like he was waiting for someone to point a finger at him. He looked remorseful, he looked like everything Maddie should have looked like, but refused to. He looked like a changed man, the cold glint in his eyes replaced with a sincere one.

He glanced at the window one last time. The sun had finally reached its peak. "You got one thing wrong. You should blame Maddie. I do." And then he left.


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When he got back to his room, he sat down in his desk chair. He’s not sure if it was from the adrenaline of yelling at Vlad or the change of scenery, but for the first time in a while, he sort of felt at peace. He had mostly been lying in beds, or on the floor, for the past month or two, so it gave him a sort of confidence that he had been devoid of since the first couple of weeks in the lab. But something still felt off. There was a coldness that seemed to radiate from his bones, from his core. He couldn't quite figure out what was holding him back from returning to his human form.
As he finished the thought, Jazz entered the room, somewhat hesitantly, similar to the way Sam had when she told him Vlad wanted to talk to him. "Were you wondering how it went?" He meant it as a question, but he already knew the answer.

"Yeah..." Jazz cleared her throat. "Um… I mean, if you want to tell me."

"It went better than I thought it would." he paused for a second. "I think he was ashamed. Mostly after I told him off," Danny finished with a smirk. Jazz seemed elated that he found some of the current situation worthy of chuckle here and there.

"Yeah, I guess you really opened his eyes to the fact that, despite being a billionaire, his actions do affect others," Jazz added. "I mean, I wasn't eavesdropping or anything, I just caught a few words here and there." Jazz added a few frantic 'I swear I wasn't being bad' gestures and stood there looking apologetic.

"It's okay Jazz, I wasn't going for the subtle approach," he said as he smiled at her overreaction. She looked relieved, and then started smiling when she noticed his happy expression. He guessed smiling really was contagious.

It was really nice to just sit and not be alone. With Jazz, it didn't really feel like we just had a conversation about Vlad. It felt like old times. Hell, it felt better than old times. Now, he appreciated the company, the feeling of being able to talk without getting thrown around. He appreciated how Jazz was still the Jazz he remembered. He looked up in confusion. Something about that sentence seemed to set off bells in my head. "Hey, Jazz?"

"Yeah, Danny?"

"Have you had any theories about why I'm still in ghost form?" he asked, curious to see if anything she said would help his thought process along.

"Not anything major. I guess if we are trying to find the answer, we should look at why ghosts become ghosts, and why they stay ghosts. I would think that you have stayed connected to the human side of you, because of your DNA… And I would like to think that Sam, Tuck, and I have something to do with it," she concluded with a grin.

"So, ghosts normally have an obsession. That's how ghosts are created. That's what determines the makeup and what keeps them connected to the world. But I don't have an obsession."

"Well, I guess we should try and come up with a few ghosts that may not be driven purely by obsession. I mean, Frostbite and the ghosts of the Far Frozen may uplift you as the savior of the ghost zone, but I wouldn't call it an obsession. They are kind and jovial, but they still remain ghosts. And what about Klemper? He does have an obsession, but doesn't it stem from a loss? Klempler is alone. Undergrowth's obsession was caused by the destruction of nature by humankind. Sidney Poindexter never even had what he "lost". As soon as he escaped from the mirror he immediately sought popularity. All these ghosts, and these are just the ones off of the top of my head, were created from some sort of loss."

"Loss…" Again, the conversation was stirring up some emotions. Was it fear, loneliness, was it something worse? It was hard to identify. Mostly, he felt confusion, and a little bit of anger. Maybe, with all of his senses and emotions he had been bombarded with since he got out, he was too overwhelmed to put it all together. But with the sudden turn in the conversation, some of the feelings started to fall into place. Some of the emotions that he had tried not to think about lately seemed to refuse to go back to their hiding spot in the back of his brain. Maybe it was loss that he was feeling. But loss felt differently than he thought it would.

Inside, he felt angry. Angry at Vlad, angry at Maddie, angry at Sam and Tucker for falling for Vlad's trick, angry at Jazz for not hearing his screams before they were muffled by the oily rag, angry at the world, but most of all, he was angry at himself. He hated that anybody could make him feel this way. Make him feel broken inside, like the pieces of his old self, Danny Fenton, couldn't be put back together again. Angry that the Danny from before, the Danny that could handle any ghost, any situation, didn't exist anymore. He was angry that the Danny that existed now, the one stuck -stuck in ghost form, stuck in memories, stuck in a nightmare- couldn't put the pieces back together again. Like some sort of demented fairy tale and he got stuck with the role of Humpty Dumpy. There were cracks and missing shards, mismatched puzzle pieces barely holding the soul that attempted to heal inside. A weakened version, a shadow of Danny Fenton that barely floated off the ground where a hero once stood.

"Danny?" He heard Jazz say uncertainly.

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay?" She sounded really worried now.

He could see why. When he looked down, his hands were clenched and he felt tense all over. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, and he felt the sudden urge to be alone. "Ye-Yeah." He managed to choke out. "I just need to think for a little bit." He rushed past her and bounded up to the roof. A minute later he found myself seated on the edge of the ops center, his legs dangling into space and the wind blowing through his hair. He was still angry, but being at the familiar spot, up high and close to the stars, calmed him down a little. Tears streamed down his face, but he felt better because of it. It was a release from all the emotions he had kept bundled inside. He realized that he didn’t believe in the old Danny. The Danny that had been so resilient in the face of danger, always willing to stand up to the forces of evil, human or otherwise, seemed so far away. But maybe by standing up to Vlad he had felt that resilience, the urge to fight that had given his old self a purpose. It gave him the slightest bit of hope that maybe all is not completely lost. He may not be able to become the old Danny, but maybe he could work towards a new Danny. One better off for having gone through what he had. He had a long way to go. But he felt slightly warmer than he did before.