Chapter Text
Based very heavily on this prompt, but I only plan on following about half of it and then going out into left field.
Heads Up: My understanding of canon is tenuous at best, and I will not be researching anything.
Danny Fenton took another glance at the Infi-Map as he sped through a green, swirling sky. “Clockwork better appreciate this,” he grumbled under his breath as he ducked under a floating door and corrected his course.
There were so many other things he’d rather be doing with his day off.
Sundays were the one day a week that Danny kept completely free of anything.
The other six days were filled with the family business. As one gap year bled into two, Danny had spent more and more time in the lab with his parents. He found that while he was good at inventing things, he didn't really enjoy it. It definitely wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Sundays were supposed to be for focusing on exploring his interests and deciding what he wanted to do with his future. Danny probably would’ve used the day to play Doomed with Tucker and Sam instead.
Regardless, Sundays were not for running errands for the Master of Time.
Danny flew over a floating purple island and dodged a burst of flame that erupted from the ground as he continued mulling over his thoughts.
He didn’t think he’d mind as much if Clockwork had bothered to give him more information about his mission, but the ancient ghost had simply smiled at him and told him that someone’s life was at stake and that Danny was needed.
So, Danny had gone. Of course, he’d gone. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.
Danny followed the last winding curve on the map and found himself in front of a glowing silver hole torn in the sky.
Peeking inside, Danny could see a dim, decrepit basement. The only light in the room came from the glow of the natural portal. He flew through slowly, spinning around to take in his new surroundings.
The first thing that Danny noticed was the smell of mildew and rot.
The second was the oppressive weight in the air. Everything felt heavy, and there was something wrong nearby.
The third was that Danny’s ghost sense was going off. Danny phased through the ceiling and out of the building all together, and he found himself in a city that was unlike any he’d ever been in before.
A thick blanket of gray covered the sky, giving the city an early sense of night, despite the fact it was still well before dinner time.
It was large, much larger than Amity Park. It sported rows of apartment buildings with boarded windows, abandoned factories with graffitied walls, and a gray park filled with trash. In the distance, Danny thought he could make out a collection of skyscrapers, but he couldn’t be sure through the gray haze.
Danny wondered if he might be in one of the dingier areas of Chicago.
He didn’t think he’d ever been in a place with more death in the air.
Shades darted about the shadows of the alleys behind dumpsters and buildings. Danny had seen them before outside of Amity Park- spirits of people and animals without enough ectoplasm to take a form visible to humans- but he’d never seen them in this quantity before.
The emotions they poured out into the air were almost overwhelmingly powerful. A steady drumbeat of Pain, Fear, Need, and Loss washed across Danny like the tide.
Danny’s ghost sense went off again, tugging his core and leading him into one of the darker alleys. There was a being stronger than a shade somewhere nearby. He just needed to find them.
He found her lying on the ground between an overfilled dumpster and an upturned shopping cart.
Her skin was a pale green, and her hair and clothes a gun-metal gray. Though the top half of her face was covered in a white mask, Danny could tell she had strong features. She had a gun at each of her hips and a staff at her back.
Danny was sure that she’d probably been a formidable opponent at one point.
Now, however, her skin was dry and thin, like parchment. Her eyes were sunken and crusted. Her hair was unwashed and lanky. Worst was the collection of green sores on her neck and arms, slowly leaking small puddles of ectoplasm into the dirty alley.
Danny dropped to his knees in front of the woman, eyes widening in horror.
When Clockwork had told him someone’s life was at stake, he thought Clockwork meant that he would be fighting another ghost, just like in the good old days. He didn’t think he’d be expected to provide medical assistance. Danny barely knew anything about human first aid, let alone how to treat a dying ghost.
“Hey, hey. What happened? What do you need?” Danny gripped her gently by the shoulder. He didn’t want to cause any additional pain if she had more sores under her gray leather jacket.
The ghost smiled and tried to say something, but she couldn’t form any words. Instead, she began coughing up little specks of ectoplasm.
“We need to get you some medical attention.” Danny carefully scooped an arm under her back but paused when a gentle hand pushed him away.
The woman shook her head sadly and moved her hand to grab Danny’s weakly. “It’s too late for me. I wasn’t strong enough. I had a good run of it, though.”
“No, no, no, no.” Danny shook his head. Clockwork had sent him. That meant that the ghost knew Danny could do this. Danny could do this.
The woman squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. I knew this was coming. I’m just glad that I won’t be alone.”
Clockwork should have sent Frostbite. He should have sent anyone but Danny. However, Danny was all that this ghostly woman had.
She was dry, weak, and leaking ectoplasm. The only thing he had to offer was his own ectoplasm. Energy would have to be enough to save her. Danny was powerful, and he had plenty of excess strength to spare. Clockwork wouldn’t have sent him on a mission he couldn’t accomplish.
Danny gathered as much ectoplasm as he could into the hand that wasn’t holding hers, and he formed it into a ball before he shoved it into her chest.
She laughed, and for a moment, Danny thought he had succeeded.
Her sunken eyes sparkled with life, and her smile was genuine for a moment. She no longer looked to be in pain. “Look after my boys for me,” she said with a grin and patted his face with her free hand.
Then she disintegrated into ash in his arms.
Danny stared at the remainder of the woman in gob-smacked horror, even as the light evening breeze began to blow the ash away. The ectoplasm that had dripped from her sores sat unchanging in the alley, glowing a toxic green in the semi-darkness.
He had... failed?
Clockwork had only ever sent Danny on a half-dozen or so errands, but they always worked perfectly. Danny always improvised the correct solution; he always guessed right. Clockwork wouldn’t have sent him if it wouldn’t work out. Clockwork only sent Danny when he knew that he would get it right.
Yet, he had failed.
It wasn’t like Danny was unfamiliar with death. Hell, he had died himself when he was fourteen. And it wasn’t like Danny didn’t know that ghosts’ existences could end. After long enough, some spirits chose to move on. Danny had seen it himself once a couple of years back.
But he’d never seen a ghost end due to sickness.
He’d never seen a ghost cease to exist before they were ready.
He’d- Danny felt a sharp pain rip into his core, and he instinctively grasped at his chest.
He grabbed ahold of the dumpster and pulled himself upright. He needed to get to his feet. He needed to get back to the portal and get home. He had failed, and now something was wrong.
A new wave of pain rushed over him, dizzying and stronger than the first, and Danny fell back to his knees.
A couple of shades darted forwards, coming to soak up the spilled ectoplasm from the ghost that Danny had failed to save, and he waved them off with an angry growl.
Danny hadn’t even learned her name.
He tried to stand again, but a sharp burst of pain stabbed at his core, and he felt like he was splintering. Had Danny caught whatever the woman had? Could ghosts have contagious sicknesses?
Was Danny going to die a second time?
A final pain shot through Danny’s core, ripping his essence open. It was too much. Too raw. Too-
Danny felt pressure, pressure, pressure, wrapping around his insides, even as the pain became too much.
The last thing that Danny saw were two bright rings appearing around his waist before unconsciousness pulled him under.
Danny awoke with a pained groan, very surprised to have woken up at all.
He reached a hand up to rub it over his chest and froze when he looked down at his hand. His signature white hazmat gloves that he had worn for the last five years were gone, and in their place were gray, fingerless gloves.
His ghost form had always had tan skin- tanner than his human form. Yet now, Danny’s hands had an ashy gray undertone. His fingers were too long, and his nails were too sharp. His natural green glow had given way to a softer silver.
He stumbled back in surprise and saw that his suit was different. The materials, the colors, the fit. It was all different. He spun up into the air, wondering what the hell had happened to him, when he caught a hint of silver in the corner of his eye.
One of the windows of the apartment building was mostly intact, with a plyboard covering attached from inside of the building, leaving the glass to act as a mirror.
Danny gasped at the sight.
A gray mask covered Danny’s eyes and nose, leaving his mouth, now complete with a set of fangs, on display.
The rubber suit was replaced with a rougher, stiffer fabric, and padding had been added to some of the more vulnerable areas. His white rubber shoes were replaced with thick, dark-gray boots. They felt reinforced. Sturdy.
He looked less like a guy who had died in a lab accident and more like a knockoff Marvel movie character.
His signature stylized ‘D’ that Sam had added to his suit was gone. In its place was a large, bold ‘G.’ But why? ‘G' for 'Ghost?'
“What the Hell?” Danny whispered to himself, running his hand over the suit. What had happened? His core felt odd. Sore, like after an exercise that went a little too far.
There was no use sitting around and wondering.
Danny needed to talk to Clockwork. He had almost forgotten about his mission in the mystery of his new appearance. Danny flinched and looked back down to where he had found the ghostly woman.
He had failed, and he needed to talk to Clockwork.
Maybe the older ghost would rewind the clock. If he would just give Danny more information, Danny could do it over. He could get it right.
Danny flew back to the basement he’d been in when he arrived in the city, sinking through layers of the crumbling building to the natural portal below.
Danny flew straight into it and promptly smacked his face as if he’d run headfirst into concrete.
He jerked back, rubbing at his nose before he tentatively reached out a hand to touch the portal.
His hand could not pass through.
Danny tried making his hand intangible. He tried punching his way through the invisible shield. He tried entering it from the other side, but nothing he did made any difference.
He screamed into the void, hoping that someone, anyone, would hear him and come to help, but no one answered.
Danny was trapped.
Danny was not in Chicago. In fact, Danny was reasonably sure that he wasn’t even on his own Earth.
The local library was closed for the night, but Danny had phased himself through the walls to use the computer. He thought he'd just needed a general idea of where he was so he could figure out how to fly home.
A brief Google Maps search had left him confused and more than a little scared. There was no Amity Park, Illinois. A bit more digging showed that there were no Drs. Fenton, nothing about Phantom, nothing about ghosts, and nothing to return to.
Instead of ghosts, he found a world where heroes were everywhere. They had confirmation of alien life forms. The constellations of this dimension were all wrong, and NASA's space missions were all wrong.
Danny was no geography expert, but he was pretty sure that the city he found himself in, Gotham, didn't exist in his universe. If there was a city that large in New Jersey, he was sure he would have heard about it at some point.
After a half-hour of frantic searching through the web, Danny gave up. He wouldn't find anything online. He needed to fly to Amity Park himself. Even if it wasn't on his earth, and even if Amity Park didn't exist in this universe, the veil was thin there. It was why his parents had chosen the spot to build their portal.
If Danny flew there, he'd have the best chance of finding another natural portal.
Danny wrapped his invisibility around himself like a cloak and flew through the library wall, aiming himself due west.
Danny wove through the city at a break-neck speed, going around buildings he could avoid and intangibly through those that he couldn't.
Gotham was a busy city, and outside of the rundown slums in the north end of town, Danny could see how it might be beautiful. He just wanted to leave it behind.
He flew a dozen or so minutes before making it to the city's edge. He could see the bay and the next city, Blüdhaven, Danny thought, on the other side.
Danny continued at full speed.
He smacked headfirst into an invisible barrier.
He jerked back, rubbing his hands against his face to make sure the impact hadn't done any serious damage, before reaching back to touch the very solid wall that he couldn’t see.
Danny looked down at the busy interstate below. A large, six-lane bridge sat directly underneath him, a walkway for pedestrians to cross on either side of the bridge. Cars drove back and forth across as if there was no problem, unbothered by the invisible line that stopped Danny.
He flew lower, tightening his grip on his invisibility as he moved. He prayed to any power that might be listening and willing to help him that the blockade only went through the air. If he could just get to the level of the cars, then he would be underneath the shield. Then, maybe, Danny could go through it as well.
He dropped to the walkway and leaned forwards carefully, extending his hand to check for invisible objects.
Danny's hand hit a solid wall.
Was it a ghost shield? Danny's quick internet research hadn't turned up anything on ghosts, but maybe there were shields that shorted out the powers of the superheroes in this world.
Danny looked around and waited until no one was looking his way before shifting back to human form.
He reached out a hand and felt the same wall, as solid and unmoving as it had been before.
Even when Danny had been hiding his identity from his parents back in the day, the shields specifically designed to hold ghosts in place couldn't hold him back if he was in his human form.
But this- whatever this was- effectively trapped him. He was boxed in. No hope for escape. No way home.
A dingy gray sign, just on the other side of the force field, was bolted to the metal of the bridge. "Thank You for Visiting Gotham."
Danny walked back to Gotham proper with a heavy heart.
He couldn't get home through the portal he'd used to enter, he couldn't leave Gotham, and he had a total of 57 dollars in his wallet. Eventually, someone from his home universe would come and find him. It might take a little while since he had the Infi-Map, but eventually, someone would come, and Danny would need to be ready when they did.
He was sure that he could find a place to squat near the portal. There were enough run-down, boarded-up buildings for him to have his pick. Maybe he could find odd jobs to earn a bit of money so he could afford to eat until he was found.
He trudged his way through the city, buildings getting shabbier and more run down as he got closer to the neighborhood he'd arrived in.
A hand reached out from a darkened alley, grabbing Danny by the shoulder and slamming him into a brick wall.
Danny glared up in annoyance. He was getting pretty tired of smacking into walls.
A man with dark eyes and a sharp grin held Danny in place with one arm, and he raised a large knife with the other. "Wallet. Now. No one has to get hurt."
Danny was so not in the mood for this.
Lightning-fast, Danny reached up to catch the man's wrist, yanking him face-first into the wall. As the man fell forward, doubling over, Danny smashed his knee up into the man's stomach, who gasped and dropped the knife as he raised his hand to ward off further retaliation.
"You suck at this, Dude. Maybe you should consider a career change." Danny kicked the knife down the alley and let go of the man.
Danny hated this stupid city.
You couldn’t even take a walk to clear your head without some asshole trying to rob you blind.
Danny left the alley and took a sharp left. He was going to find someplace to transform, and he was going to fly back to the portal and wait for his friends to pick him up.
Followed. A shade whispered from underneath a parked car.
Followed. Another agreed from the dark stoop of a door frame.
Followed.
Danny looked over his shoulder and saw a flash of green disappear.
He couldn’t even find someplace to transform because, apparently, this garbage world had weirdo stalkers in addition to inept muggers. Joy.
Danny picked up the pace, jogging to the end of the block and turning the corner quickly before slipping into an alley.
He waited in the dark and counted to one hundred. When nothing happened, he did so again. But his stalker didn’t pass by his alley.
Had they given up already?
Danny stepped out cautiously and took a look around. He couldn’t see anyone.
Watching. A voice whispered from the alley behind him. Up. Watching.
Danny’s eyes snapped up, and he met the surprised gaze of a woman with green skin and fiery red hair standing on a nearby fire escape.
The coloration wouldn’t be too out of place on a ghost, but Danny knew instantly that she was alive. She was too solid. Too real. Even if the shades around Danny weren’t strong enough to set off his ghost sense, any ghost that could form as fully as this woman would register.
“Why are you following me?” Danny asked, backing away from the woman.
“Well, color me impressed.” A small smile tugged at the woman’s mouth. “I was prepared to teach a kid new to town the ropes, but I don’t think it will be as hard as I thought.”
Danny frowned at the woman. “I’m not a kid. And who said that I’m new here?”
She snorted and looked him pointedly over from head to toe and cocked a single eyebrow. “You’re what, seventeen? And, of course, you’re new. Just look at you.”
“Nineteen!” Danny corrected automatically. He couldn’t help but look down at himself. He looked normal as far as he could tell. He wore loose, faded jeans and a white NASA hoodie. The sleeves and the hood were bright red.
The woman laughed. “Like I said, practically a baby! And for the record, people from Gotham know better than to wear so much white this close to Crime Alley. You’re like a bright, walking, talking target!”
Danny wrapped his arms around his chest, covering up as much white as he could. “I’ll be fine. I won’t be in Gotham for long anyway.”
At least. He hoped he wouldn’t be in Gotham for long.
Something must have shown on his face because the woman sighed deeply before dropping off the fire escape and landing lightly in front of Danny. “Do you have somewhere to go?”
Danny looked away. “I’ll find somewhere. It’s not like it’s hard to find someplace around here.”
The woman groaned. “Damnit. It’s Harley’s job to collect strays, not mine.”
“I’m sorry?” Danny blinked at the woman in confusion.
“My girlfriend, Harley,” the redhead explained. “She’d kill me if I left some poor new kid alone to squat. Especially wearing that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes.”
The woman continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “I can help you figure something out tomorrow, but for tonight, you’re coming with me.”
“Don’t I get a choice?” Danny squawked, even as the woman grabbed his arm and began pulling him down the street.
“Nope,” the woman deadpanned. “The name’s Ivy.”
“...Danny.”
“Nice to meet you, Danny.” Ivy gave him a tired smile. “Welcome to Gotham.”
I made a little Gotham Phantom Insignia! If you can see it, great! If someone's reading this and it isn't visible, please yell at me so I can figure out if I can fix it.