Chapter Text
Fionn Ainsley walked through the halls of the G.I.W. facility, trailing behind the agents that he hated dealing with on a general basis.
“Really, kid, I dunno why we need you to check the defenses,” Agent K complained. “We don’t need no magic.”
“Tech magic,” Fionn commented mildly as his eyes swept over the pristine halls of the basement. Shiny and white, just like their obnoxious uniforms. “And you’re lucky you have me.”
Ha. Seriously, he’d been such an idiot taking this contract. It should have been a red flag from the start, and he couldn’t even undo it. Well. He would blame his cursed bloodline, but if he was going to be honest, you could blame his own stupidity. He should have looked more into it before he took the contract. Shouldn’t have done a magic contract. Should have done, well, more due diligence.
Sue him, he had gone into this whole situation not wanting to deal with demons or ghosts or anything of the like. It was about survival at first. Making something new, something that could be sold, traded, what have you. Something that could keep him alive. So, really, it was his own fault he didn’t know about the Infinite Realms, didn’t know shit about ghosts, didn’t do his own research beyond learning the names of demons and learning how to recognize them and talk to them without getting himself into trouble.
Well, he was paying for it now, he thought grimly. He was dearly paying for it, but hopefully, he could resolve the situation before they reached critical mass and everything imploded.
“Right, well, here it is,” Agent K said. “Fentons caught it, had to take it away before Maddie lost her damn mind ripping it to shreds before we could get any info.”
He keyed open the door, and there was Danny Fenton, floating in a tank, caught in stasis, somewhere between shifts. Fionn’s eyes swept over him, and a smile touched his lips. He wasn’t too late. They were barely getting scans. The torture hadn’t started yet.
“Right, thanks, K,” Fionn said, and snapped his fingers.
Magic surged, a magical EMP, his specialty, and there were shouts as Fionn breathed out, letting a spell take hold that allowed him to see in the dark.
“Kid! Where are you!” K was shouting, and Fionn walked to the tank as K fumbled for his phone, failing to turn it on and get a flashlight. “Ainsley!”
Danny wouldn’t wake up for a bit. Fionn had time. His hand pressed to the cool glass tank, and he sent a shock through it. Physical magic wasn’t his forte, but once he figured out what he had gotten himself into, he had learned as much as he could in as little time as possible. He’d moved here somewhere between fourteen and fifteen, leaving behind Glasgow in the dust, mostly because he didn’t want to fucking deal with demons popping up all the time. He’d had to buy back his own soul three times, and it was getting old.
The glass cracked, and K let out a scream.
“IT’S GETTING OUT!” he screeched. “AINSLEY!”
The glass shattered, and the sludge, some kind of fucked up ectoplasm, splashed out, and Fionn caught Danny. The ectoplasm, or whatever the hell it was, didn’t feel like ectoplasm, had saved the collar on his throat from getting shorted out, but it was relatively easy to get in now. Fionn’s fingers sparked, shorting out the collar, and it fell apart with a clink.
“Well, it’s been fun, K,” he called through the sound of screams and people running into shit, in a mad scramble to find weapons that would work. None of them would. Fionn had shorted them all out, and the idiots were too stupid to realize they needed to carry around regular guns, too.
“Ainsley! What are you doing?” K snarled as the light switch he barely managed to find flicked up and down, not responding to his input.
“Hopefully preventing the complete and total destruction of this timeline,” Fionn drawled, and shifted Danny in his arms, now caught in his human form, thank gods. Fionn couldn’t deal with accidental intangibility right now. “See ya!”
He wasn’t great at teleportation. It was complicated, really complicated, and took a lot more practice than he’d had time for. But, he could do short distances. Very short distances.
He and Danny flickered out of existence, to where his car was parked outside of the G.I.W. outpost. Fionn wasn’t necessarily strong, but he was strong enough to heft Danny into the passenger seat and buckle him in. The boy was unconscious, and would be for some time. Fionn couldn’t worry about that right now. He climbed into the driver’s seat, turning the keys in the ignition, and flicked on the headlights. The yellow vintage VW beetle, tricked out with enough magic to easily evade APBs and maybe even avoid the Justice League, rumbled to life, and he peeled away. With a snap of his fingers, the goo, he was just going to call it goo, was cleaned off of them and vanished into the ether before it could ruin the leather seats. Once he got up to enough speed to take his hand off the clutch, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and pressed the button waiting on the screen once he checked to make sure Jack and Maddie were not in the house, because he didn’t want to explain that shit to Danny. Thank gods Jazz was at college now.
The explosion was cataclysmic. A green mushroom cloud reached up to the heavens in the rearview mirror, and he breathed out a sigh of relief. Portal was taken care of. He’d contact Tucker later to let him know Danny was safe, to not worry. Tucker didn’t know who the hell Fionn was, probably just seeing him as another faceless figure in the crowd, but. Well. Fionn was in a delicate position, okay? A very delicate position.
They would very quickly figure out it was Fionn and Danny missing from school tomorrow. Fionn was the weird one. He got good grades in class, kept his head down, and had no friends. The weird Scottish guy whose accent had only faded enough that people understood what he was saying that showed up freshman year and had a doctor’s note excusing him from gym class. He drove a vintage beetle, and was good in science and math and English, and that was all anyone knew. Magic was layered on him, making him faceless in a small town like Amity Park. People forgot he was even there. No one knew he lived alone. No one noticed the weirdness.
Without him there with the magic active, people would notice. People would know Fionn Ainsley was gone. And so was Danny Fenton.
Well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. He had already cleared out the apartment of any incriminating evidence. It was boring, bland, and had nothing they would be able to trace. Even his computer was gone, safely stored in the trunk, and his plethora of grimoires had either been sent away already or packed in boxes next to the computer. Large duffels in the backseat, stuffed with clothes and provisions.
It was going to be a long drive to New Jersey.
He would have to answer Danny’s questions when he woke up, but in the meantime.
A tap of his index finger on the steering wheel, hand back on the clutch, and the music started up, Sleep Token crooning over the speakers, low enough to listen to, not wake Danny up.
Yeah. He was going to be pissed when he woke up. Welp. Hopefully he wouldn’t be crazy enough to fly out of the car. It would take a bit for him to stabilize enough to control his abilities, much less go ghost form.
Gods, Fionn had really fucked up this time. Whoops.