Work Text:
}Adopted By Force Au
}[Redacted]
}Need to write how this all started nooo.
----
If you ever asked Danny when did his life became a general fuck-up, his mind would jump immediately to the day of his accident.
He would know that’s not really it, but his mind would still supply that as the first option. Even when he knows that his life had slowly become too much of a fuck-up by before the age of eight.
Jazz had always made sure they had enough. Whether it was about how much they could eat in a day and save for the next one because mom and dad were too occupied with a new invention and their precious portal, or because she just felt the need to mediate everything she had in halves.
“Half a chocolate bar for you, half the chocolate bar for me,” she used to say.
“We can both do stuff now, Danny. Mom and dad are too busy right now, but if we make it right, we can put both our beds together again!”
They would split tasks into halves too.
She would clean and wash the dishes while he would get them dry.
If she cleaned the room from dirty clothes, then he would use the broom and clean from any dust.
It was a system.
It was their system.
And when they couldn’t do it then they either changed it and boxed it for later, or one of them would exchange a task for another.
It worked. It was the little dose of normalcy that this house of madness couldn’t seem to give them on its own.
That was fine though, they both still loved mom and dad. They were nice parents. And they always, always made sure they had food on the fridge.
...Even if it tried to eat them every now and then.
Or if mean kids made fun of him because of his parents...
So, yeah.
Not the best, but not the worst either. For all he has seen on tv, his parents could very well have given them up to an orphanage or something. And maybe start planning to conquer the world, but that’s besides the point.-.
Besides, it wasn’t as if their parents didn’t love them anyways. They were just really busy with stuff.
It didn’t matter. He could take care of himself by the age of ten, he didn’t really need annoying parents that only talked about ghosts anyways.
He only needed Tucker and Jazz by his side and everything would be fine. He only needed his family to keep himself together. Once he was an actual grown-up, he would be able to leave Amity Park and make it to NASA.
Jazz would be the annoying psychiatrist somewhere close and Tucker could be part of Mission Control or an incredible experienced Hacker by then.
Things could work out.
.
Okay, maybe things didn’t work out, but he was still alive right? He could make it work. He only needed to stop passing through the floor and his parents not to notice.
He only needed to find a way to keep things quiet enough to actually process and understand how these powers worked.
Superheroes had gone through it. He could do it too.
Metas weren’t that bad either way. He could do with a little bit of a cool set of powers for a while.
After all, ecto-contamination only went so far. Jazz had got it a few years back after mom had shot the milk and made it glowy once. She hadn’t gotten more than a few days of glowing red eyes.
He could do with this.
(But then again, was he really even alive to begin with?)
.
Things were fine after a few months. He got his powers under control.
...To not keep accidentally phasing through the floor anymore, but hey! A win is a win, right?
Maybe he would have been able to count that as an actual win if he hadn't had to fight his first big real ghost fight with the ghost of a lunch lady just five days after it.
Just saying.
He has a real bad feeling of this.
Danny hopes, really hopes he won’t have to make this a routine thing.
(Boy he was deep in denial back then,)
.
Things got... complicated, so to speak. Fights broke out every day in Casper High, and sure, maybe that would be normal here, if it wasn’t because the ones fighting weren’t human!
Ghost fights were messy. Danny didn’t really know how to properly fight and most of the things he does during one are made completely on sheer instinct.
He passes through most of the attacks and things they throw at him, but he can’t seem to help but to freeze every time it happens. (At least, it used to be at first,)
It felt so weird. It’s almost unnatural how natural intangibility comes when in the middle of a fight. He used to be scared of it, thinking that this may be the time it doesn’t work, but he still couldn’t really bring himself to dodge fast enough.
Then after that his parents got to know about his absences. His gone too longs to the bathrooms to ‘ditch school,’ or so Mr. Lancer said to them.
He swears that man has it for him.
There’s little to say, they weren’t happy about it. Ditching school was one thing, but having his grades be so low? Unthinkable.
A Fenton wasn’t less than a Genius. And a Genius he must be.
Add that to the stress of being Phantom and protecting the city.
Top it with Vlad and his creepy schemes and the whole equation was unbalanced.
There was too much stress, too many tasks that have been put off for too long.
But so
little
time.
It wasn’t a wonder he snapped. It wasn’t a wonder he stopped raising his hand to ask for a bathroom break.
He gave it a rest.
Amity Park didn’t like Phantom as their protector, Amity Park didn’t like the Fentons.
Amity Park didn’t like Daniel Fenton.
So, he tired himself out. Done. Everything he ever did for the town, it seemed, wasn’t worth a grain of salt.
And when ghosts realized he wasn’t going for them anymore? They went for him instead.
That was their mistake. He was too tired out to even care about the consequences. He just started fighting with his fists.
Danny Fenton was not to be bullied again. Not by ghosts, not by humans, not by anything in between and outside of that in this god-forsaken town.
Not anymore.
He was bringing his grades up, and pulling his life together. Morals be dammed, he was tired. And if he needed to get every single ghost he has ever fought inside a thermos for long enough to get his finals done and dealt with, then so be it.
.
Thankfully though, Jazz seemed to have his back.
Either she was making an amazing job at distracting her parents during that first difficult year of being something else than human being, or it was making sure to memorize and destroy every blueprint and weapon they made against him.
Because that’s how they worked.
If he was out there fighting and protecting the town, then she was backstage memorizing the lines.
And if he decided to go and memorize them with her instead, then she would be learning and practising* magic.
They were siblings, they fought and screamed and trashed on each other, but when it mattered enough they would be having each other backs.
Until the accident* happened.
Or rather, Vlad happened.
Again.
.
It was a sunny day in Amity Park, clouds could be seen in the sky filling the scenery of the Singing Forest as a whole majestic place.
The forest itself was dangerous. Ever since The Change happened in Amity Park more and more creatures seemed to make home around these parts.
It didn’t really matter what they were, but the fact that they were.
At least for the rest of the citizens of the town.
The Singing Forest didn’t really sing, per se, but gave off random vibrations during the night and the day seemed to never really happen fully when walked inside.
That wasn’t really a problem for Danny though. He was powerful enough and recognized just about it so he doesn’t get killed or eaten here.
He wasn’t here out of curiosity either, nor he was here for relaxing.
He was here because of his ice powers building up too much. Danny didn’t go out as Phantom anymore, and even if he tried making an ice sculpture every day, it seemed like it was still not enough.
He needed to download all of the build-up energy before it became dangerous, hence the trip to the Singing Forest; the only place in which he could do it at large scale without necessarily stepping into the Ghost Zone.
It would take him about a day to release all the energy he wanted without causing a fight, but they had all agreed that it was the best option of all.
Getting inside the Zone would inevitably cause a fight to break, and while Danny did like the rush of adrenaline of a good fight, he really didn’t want to deal with the sore limbs and possibly broken bones.
He had gotten better over the years, but not that good.
.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t get there on time.
Maybe..., if he liked fights more and could actually deal with the consequences of them, he wouldn’t have to take too long to release his energy.
Maybe if he was better trained he would have been able to fight it out and go back.
Maybe that’s why Vlad decided to put on road his last and most viscerally enraging plan.
.
It was already dark when he got out of the forest. A canvas of frost and layers upon layers of snow clearly visible from the outside, if anyone were to look, they would find some small sculpture of lanterns across the forest guiding the way to the outskirts of Amity Park.
If Danny were to look to the hour, he would find it was close to five in the morning.
He flew to about a mile outside the grounds of Amity Park before start his walk back home. Granted, it took a lot of time to get there. It would be about two to three hours before he managed to actually make it to his house and take a well deserved power nap and get on with his day.
When he got to his street, he found himself with the scenario of a crowd of people in front of his house.
And his house in shambles.
Pieces of concrete and what he guessed were burning pillars of his now destroyed home.
.....
....
.....
.......
.... ...... .......
.
He fled from Amity Park, being not a place he could stay in anymore.
Not without a risk of being taken by Vlad.
.
Jazz had a plan of escape in case anything of the sort ever happened.
Of course, that plan also involved her as a major piece in-game for this to work, but hey, who was Danny if not an avid survivor and quick thinker?
The plan was simple, though. And it worked fine for a couple of months in the cities of choice she had made him memorize.
The problem? Was that his luck wasn’t the finest, and his instincts were even worse.
Years of fighting and training did that to you, apparently.
It started with little things; some rando’ tried to either kill him or pick on him, kind of an unclear situation. The guy was probably drunk, or high, or in a really, really bad situation himself.
Point remains in the fact something bad happened and the very bad person that did the bad thing ended up in the hospital.
Or Danny thinks he ended up in the hospital.
...Danny hopes the guy ended up in the hospital, actually. He really doesn’t want to think on the moral implication of his actions when startled. That was a Jazz thing, so he’ll let it be a Jazz thing for now.
Then it spiralled to other bad things happening around him that he just couldn’t ignore thanks to the Very Good Morals that Jazz put on him.
Aannd to the fact that he was usually involved as a hostage, or that those things inconvenienced him enough to actually do something about it.
He was a runaway not suicidal. Getting attention to himself wouldn’t be ideal and he knew it.
And just for the record: Danny did let most of the things be resolved by the heroes.
He just stumbled on these things far too easily to pass undercover.
So, when the police tried to get close to him to answer some questions on the spot?
He bolted immediately.
-Well..., not immediately immediately per se, but soon enough to not be able to get caught for more questioning on the future.
Or the police records.
OR Vlad.
It happened a couple of times, so he had to leave a couple of times. Crossing down the towns he could go back to safely from then on, Danny realized that there was only one spot that he could use for living relatively safe and anonymously enough.
Gotham.
It was the last choice, and it was definitely not the best.
But it was the emergency one and Jazz and him hadn’t had started the escaping plan all that long ago.
And it had holes. A lot of them.
He was the one to suggest Gotham as a last resort thing. They could both live safely there thanks to their awfully good fighting and surviving instincts, it was full of crime, it was one of the best places to get yourself under the radar and one of the places in which robbing wouldn’t be so much out of place that they could be targeted specifically as suspects.
It was perfect.
It was awful.
They both knew it then and they both still accepted it as good reasoning.
So, Gotham it was.