Chapter Text
He should have known something like this was going to happen eventually. Danny was a ghost, the King of Ghosts in fact, so he was rather familiar with cults trying to sacrifice people to him and take over the world and the occasional gaggle of college students or highschoolers (from outside Amity. Nobody who lived in Amity would try to summon a ghost. They knew better.). He wised up after the first few summons and now had a golden rule for them: don’t answer if you can help it. It worked well. Danny had gotten pretty good at ignoring summons, and it was even easier when the summons weren’t done properly or he was human.
And the whole ‘dealing with people close to you hating your ghostly half’? Danny had that bit down pat. His parents wanted to dissect him molecule by molecule, Val hated him with a burning passion, Jazz seemed cold and neutral but he was never really sure, and Sam and Tucker disliked him. Danny wouldn’t call it hate, but they certainly weren’t supporters.
Of course, he never got the chance to ask; they never really hung out anymore. Danny kept flaking on them due to ghost fights, and they eventually stopped texting him and asking to hang out, and eventually, Danny was eating lunch alone and they never answered his texts which was fair if he tought about it. He wasn’t the most reliable.
But he still knew them, and he knew his sister, and Val too. Which was why, when they started acting weird, he was worried. He coudln’t think too hard about it, of course, so many other things needed his attention, things that certainly took precedence over his friends(?) and sister acting weird. He should have known. When people around him acted weird, they were planning something, and that something was often vary, very bad fro him.
Danny had been caught off guard. He had just wrapped up a fight with Skulker (again, that was the fifth time this week alone) when he felt it in his core: a summoning. This was definitely not a proper summons: it didn’t use his true name, he could tell the salt was impure, and there were a couple of other tiny details that were off. It was still clearly a summons for him, though. He could resist it.
He could resist it.
He was weak and bleeding.
He could resist it.
Danny Phantom succumbed to the summoning.
The feeling of being teleported to where the summons were was not unlike being sucked into the Fenton Thermos. It sucked, to say the least (ha). He was glad it only took a few seconds. Heck, it took longer to get re-oriented when he appeared, floating, over the summoning circle.
Blinking, Danny watched as swirls of light and color snapped into white fluorescent lights, inventions strewn around haphazardly in various states of construction, and people. Hey wait, wasn’t this his parents’ lab? Yeah, it definitely was, he could that damned portal over on the other side of the (weirdly large) room.
Jazz.
What? Why was- why was Jazz summoning him? Yeah, sometimes people from school tried summoning him, but he knew Jazz wasn’t the type. He looked around.
Sam and Tucker.
Again, what? Sam was definitely the type to try summoning a ghost, but not since the portal opened. And she and Tucker had always seemed friendly to Danny Phantom in the past, even as their relationship with Danny Fenton slowly fell apart. They looked . . . angry.
He heard the signature whine of an ecto-gun. Danny turned and yep, there was Val, in full Red Huntress gear minus the helmet. She looked utterly furious, though that was more within the realm of normal. Or, whatever ‘normal’ was these days. Though, they were (last Danny checked) currently in a truce, so was that over now, or . . . ?
They were all glaring at him, so Danny decided to make the first move. That never went wrong, right?
“Soooooooo,” He dragged out the word. “Is summoning ghosts a new hobby? Or did something happen to the portal that spooked you guys so you decided to call in a spook to help?”
It was evident that his (objectively hilarious) puns did not land. That was okay, but unlike usual, they only seemed to inflame the anger he could see in them.
“What’s going on?” He asked.
“How dare you!” Val screamed. She let loose an ectoblast, which Danny barely dodged.
“What happened to the truce!?” Danny yelped. He spun around, taking a closer look at the other humans in the room. They all were angry at him, and they probably thought he knew what he did.
(That made Danny angry. Not the hot, righteous kind, but the bitter, sad kind. The kind of anger that stemmed from utter despair and nights spent thinking why won’t they listen to me and please just ask me what’s wrong instead of blaming me please and just please listen and you never listen. The kind that led to more nights spent as Phantom instead of sleeping. The kind that led to him canceling meetups and insisting he was fine when anyone could tell he was not.)
Danny slowly lowered himself to the floor, his tail splitting into legs. He poked the air in front of him, and while there was a gentle zap, it was nothing he couldn’t get out of. That made him feel safer, though he felt bad about it. He could leave if he wanted.
“What,” he said slowly, enunciating his words. “Do you think I did?”
He made eye contact with each of them. Tucker looked away, but Jazz, Sam and Val all held his ectoplasm-green gaze.
“Don’t act like you don’t know, Phantom,” Jazz said. Her tone was cold. Danny never thought she’d use that tone on him. “You possessed my brother. You used him as your puppet for years now, and you thought you got away with it.”
Danny racked his brain, begging it to work, goddamn it. Jazz (and Sam and Tucker and Val) apparently thought he was possessing himself? How would that work?
He entertained the idea of leaving for a brief second, but dismissed it. Leaving now after the bombshell they just dropped was as good as a signed testimony confirming their theories. And where would he go? They were after Phantom, they knew his identity (they were so right but so, so wrong) where he lived, his routines, everything.
Danny did the one thing that made sense when facing a threat that had power over him when he needed information and a plan: stall.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, his mind running at lightspeed, trying to find any way to get out of this with his secret and (after)life intact. He was zapped (literally) out of it by a sudden pain twisting in his core.
“Your mistake, Phantom,” Sam growled, “Was picking a person we care about. You’re a decent actor, I admit, but that won’t matter. After this, you won’t be able to touch any human ever again, and that’s if you don’t die.”
“Wait wait wait,” Danny gasped through the growing pain that spread out from his core. It crept through his veins, infectiong him, and he could feel it invading each cell. He doubled over, then looked up at the humans, who had gathered in front of him. He tried to reach out to them, but his fingers spasmed the moment they tried to cross the circle. Okay, maybe the summoning barrier was a bigger problem than he’d thought. “I didn’t do anything! What are you doing to me?”
He fell to his knees. The pain was - it blurred his vision. It felt like dying all over again, but this time it was drawn out and slower. More . . . sadistic.
“Blood blossoms and a handy exorcism spell,” Tucker said. Danny looked up to see his best friend glaring down at him. “Blood blossms are deadly to ghosts, and this exorcism spell? It uses more than double what anything else uses and has a higher chance of death for the ghost than any other spell. It’s perfect. Of course, you have a greater chance of survival if you leave my best friend’s body and stop controlling him, but after two years of using him as a puppet? I doubt you will.”
Sam crouched down to be eye level with Danny, whose muscle spasms were getting worse and worse. She made sure they had eye contact before speaking. “You deserve this. It doesn’t matter if you pretend to be a hero, you are just as destructive as every other ghost, no, you are worse, because you took Danny and you pretended to be him. You ruined everything.”
Danny opened his mouth - to protest? To agree? - but something worked its way up his throat and he pressed his hands to his mouth to cover the cough, but the ectoplasm still leaked through his fingers what was happening to him -
“It’s not fun, is it,” Jazz said without sympathy. “Your ectoplasm is being forcibly separated from Danny’s body. Must be painful.”
Oh, you have no idea, Danny thought. He was literally being split in half, and there was nothing he could do but curl up on the floor and try to use his powers to leave to no avail. Did they have a ghost shield in place?
He couldn’t continue like this. If this kept up, he’d be a pile of Danny-shaped goo. Trying to get out of the summoning circle and trying to use his powers only made the pain worse. Danny gave up trying to keep the hacking coughs down, instead clamping his hands over his ears in an attempt to keep the chatter of his friends and sister at bay. To keep his own screams out. At this point, he wasn’t sure if this was a nightmare, but the pain was so real, but it hurt to think that the people closest to him thought he was possessed.
“I just hope Danny’s okay in there.”
“Yeah, who knows what Phantom did to him.”
Them thinking that implied that, on some level, they didn’t recognise him. Or, he had changed and they didn’t like it. Or they figured that he couldn’t possibly be pulling away or failing or skipping of his own volition. It implied that they cared, but it also said that they thought all of his struggles stemmed from Phantom controlling him. And they weren’t wrong, if he thought about it. His accident caused ghosts to invade Amity and then he had to go out as Phantom to stop them because it was clear that nobody else could and then his life as Fenton suffered for it.
“Even just taking his body must have messed him up, I mean, imagine being in your mind but your body is doing stuff without your permission. That must be the worst.”
“When’s it gonna finish?”
“I don’t know, the book never mentioned how long it would take.”
It was . . . a lot to handle on his own, but he managed. He enjoyed it, protecting people, even if those people hated him. He desperately wanted to tell people the truth, but it was clear that his paranoia and fear were right; he was being exorcised from his own body for fuck’s sake. Danny just wished that he could leave.
“Come on, just leave him alone already!”
“I’m just glad Mayor Masters was able to give us the name of the ghost possessing Danny.”
“Yeah, the guy’s super shady, but hey, even he must have a heart somewhere in there.”
The pain hadn’t stopped, and Danny thought that he could still hear himself screaming. He felt recent injuries re-blossom (ha) on his skin and ectoplasm bleed from them. He was practically drenched in the stuff now. Not only was it streaming from his wounds (there were so many), but it also spilled from his mouth and eyes. Like he was crying. Was he still screaming? He must not be, because he could hear the people he loved talking about him.
“Oh god, what happens to Danny’s body while Phantom fights other ghosts?”
“Doesn’t he get hurt a lot? How did he keep everyone from noticing that?”
Injuries . . . for some reason, Danny thought of his healing factor. It was slower as a human, but . . . blood blossms didn’t affect him as much when he was a human. Wait. If Danny could transform back into a human, he could pass that off as Phantom leaving his body, and the blood blossoms would react slower to his human biology! Heck, he might manage to flush them out of his system before the next ghost fight! Danny felt bad about all the extra lying he was going to have to do, but it wasn’t that different from what he normally did. Besides, he was extra justified now that he knew for a fact that they wouldn’t accept him.
It was hard to force the transformation with the blood blossoms and the summoning circle, but he was able to do it. Immediately, the pain drew back like ocean tides, still there and inevitably returning, but low-level for now. Danny gasped for air, but was interrupted by another cough. Wow, that was a . . . sizable chunk of ectoplasm. It was a semi-solid goop and swirled with blood at the edges. That was probably not a good sign.
Danny slumped over, hitting the edge of the summoning circle. He leaned against the border like it was a brick wall and not thin air. There were uncomfortable pins and needles where the magical border touched his skin, but for the most part, it seemed that he was human enough not to get hurt by it.
Something that felt like a tight rib cage around him loosened, and the summoning circle was broken. Danny collapsed to the cold metal floor of the lab/basement. The last thing he saw before his blurred vision turned black was his sister reaching out to him.
He flinched back.