Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The shelves were lined with specimens,

Evidence amassed in over twenty years of research, collected and catalogued.

Some of the jars had a fine layer of dust, others were newer and had locks to keep their findings safe inside. Each acquisition was different, some glowed in the dark while others shone in the light like gold dust. If you listened carefully, some moaned or even spoke words like whispers.

Some were impossibly old, while others brand new and hard won.

Their newest findings hadn’t actually made the shelf yet, the careful process of cataloguing and studying not yet complete, so six airtight specimen jars of different sizes sat on the bench, right next to the operating table which still needed a good clean from the lashings of green ectoplasm mingled with red blood (that had been a real surprise).

The ghost child was an enigma alright, it was a shame it got away.

But, with some careful preservation, they could keep what they harvested from turning into ectoplasm.

Their treasures included a gallbladder, a lung (the left one), a heart, the voice box, one glowing green eye that seemed to follow you around the room with it’s luminescent gaze, and a sample of white hair that still glowed and rippled in the fluorescent lights of the lab, it moved like it was underwater even in the jar. 

It was all just so fascinating. 

This would be Maddie and Jack Fenton’s magnum opus.

Johnny Thirteen revved his engine.

Tearing a path through the Ghost Zone, the roar of his Harley reverberated across the impossibly vast space, bouncing against the ripples and pools at the edges of the Ghost Zone and making their way back to him.

The roar of the engine did nothing to stir his passenger.

He chanced a glance as he steered one handed, the other bracing the ridiculously light and worrying limp ghost boy draped across the front of his bike. The kid was a mess.

He was naked, wrapped only in Johnny’s duster jacket - and it would be quicker to try and rattle off a list of what wasn’t injured. One eye was missing, it looked like it had been torn out with the jagged gash on his cheek, but with the surgical precision his captors showed everywhere else, it’s probably more likely that the kid just squirmed. 

His chest was in ribbons, held together with stitches in a startlingly painful looking vivisection wound and stitches across his throat like it had been slashed. He was also missing a decent patch of hair on the side of his head, the soft white locks had been shorn away to the scalp on the same side his eye was missing. 

‘Hold on kid, we’re nearly there.’

“There” in this case, was the lair of Clockwork. In general, Johnny avoided that place like the plague, which was easier said than done given that it moved around the way it did, but when Clockworks wants you, Clockwork finds you. 

There’s something poetic in that, Johnny’s sure of it, but for now he was more preoccupied on the way the wounds on this kid seemed to pour blood as well as ectoplasm.

The biker shook his head, he didn’t actually care about this kid - surely the fuck not, right?

The old geezer gave him a job, and in exchange, Kitty would be stabilised finally. She was waiting for him in that castle, the thought of her there all alone was enough for Johnny to open the throttle, hurtling through the Ghost Zone at speeds he’d never reached before.

Clockwork clearly cared about this kid, and that settled something in Johnny’s mind; he’d seen the people he called family, or more specifically, he’d seen their instruments in that lab - he’d actually warned the kid more than once about trusting them. 

Once, during a fight in the junkyard, the ghost boy was wincing and holding his ribs before Johnny had even hit him, making the biker back off. 

‘The fuck’s wrong with you?’ 

‘What are you talking about? You’re what’s wrong!’ The ghost kid spat, rounding up for another punch that Johnny ducked away from.

‘No - I mean, you’re already hurt aren’t you? Your rib?’

‘It’s nothing’ he snipped.

Sore spot, noted.

Johnny flew down and landed by a couch with its cushions missing, sat down and lit up a cigarette, ‘want one?’

The kid look confused, ‘is this some kind of trick?’

‘Nope, I’m just not interested in fighting you anymore, looks like someone already did a number on you anyway,’ he took a drag as the kid plopped down by him, wordlessly, he passed the smoke.

‘You know what you’re doin?’ Johnny laughed

‘Do you?’ his white hair bristled as he took a long drag and sat down on the couch.

It was easy to forget that the Ghost Kid was a kid, and not just that, he was alive. He wasn’t old like that pirate ghost or Poindexter and just looked young, this was an actual child who’d been tossed into the afterlife before he’d let go of the land of the living. 

The kid had died and lived to tell about it, and it showed.

He looked exhausted.

‘Didja parents do that to you?’ Johnny lit up another smoke, pointedly ignoring the way his new smoking buddy’s eyes glowed a deeper, more acidic green at the question. 

‘No need to freak out, bud, I’m just askin’ he was sporting a helluva shiner.

‘They didn’t mean to’ the kid sighed, ‘they don’t know it’s me.’

‘You think if they did it’d make a difference?’

‘I don’t know? I hope it would but…’ he trailed off.

‘But you aren’t sure, so you don’t tell them just in case?’

‘Yeah, if they found out and still thought I was some horrible thing, or something they needed to study - I don’t know if I could protect myself from them, or if I’d even try.’

Their smoke mingled in the air, and they sat together til their cigarettes were burnt down to the butts and the air turned cold, it was time for Johnny to go.

‘If you ever feel like you can’t protect yourself, I want you to call me.’ 

‘I don’t want them hurt, Johnny’ the kid warned.

‘I don’t want you hurt,’ he shot back easily, ignoring the shock on the kids face, ‘they’re your parents and this is your home, I get that - but I think you should think of moving on.’

In hindsight, Johnny wished he hadn’t have rode off after that, or that he had have checked in more - maybe even spoken to Jazzy about it, but he hoped his warning would be enough to make the kid leave.

It wasn’t. 

As they approached the castle, the air seemed to still - time was firmly in the master of the house’s control here, Johnny rode right up to the door before kicking the stand on his bike down and jogging through the grand entry with the kid in his arms, head lolling against his shoulder.

‘Clockwork! I’ve got him - where are you?’

The man in question, except now he looked like a kid as he cycled through forms, appeared right the fuck behind Johnny making him jump. 

‘Jesus please-us, can you not just answer your door?’

Now a grown man, Clockwork scooped the ghost kid up in his arms, in what felt like less than a second, he appeared behind Johnny and the kid was gone, he held out the duster the boy had been wrapped in - all clean with no blood or ectoplasm to be found. 

‘Thank you Johnny,’ Clockwork chimed, ‘I’ll take it from here, Kitty is waiting for you by your bike.’

Johnny hesitated.

It felt wrong to leave the kid here, it ALL felt wrong - the hallways that connected the opulent foyer he stood in seemed to twist at odd angles, the ambient ticking seemed to pervade Johnny’s core, like it was trying to tell it something. Every fibre of his being was telling him to find the kid, to not just pick him up from one fucked household to drop him off at a fucked and weird castle. As if reading his mind, Clockwork spoke up.

‘I sent you to retrieve Daniel for his own safety, if you wish - you can visit him here, but for now he needs medical attention and you need to go.’

With a tick and a whoosh, Johnny Thirteen was outside the castle doors, shut firmly behind him, Kitty - stable and shiny and not see-through at all, threw her arms around him.

‘Let’s go home, baby’ she beamed.

‘Yeah,’ he held her tight around the waist, ‘let’s go home.’

He hoped that the ghost kid was able to find somewhere he could feel safe enough to call home again, so like he did in the junkyard, Johnny ignored that voice in the back of his head that told him to help the kid, to do more.

He ignored the thought that he’d never seen him again.

In that castle where time seemed to still, in a room you can’t get to without a guide, the ghost boy - held together with safety pins and stitches was with the master of the house. With a deft hand (and not for the first time today) he was being taken apart.

Only this time, he was going to be put back together.

Chapter Text

Ghosts aren’t born, but made. 

It takes more than the collection of experiences a person collects from birth to death to make a ghost, it takes a reason - some formative, often tragic, experience that makes a human soul stick around past its departure date. Casper the Friendly Ghost called it unfinished business, but it can be anything, if the emotion is strong enough.

To Ember, it was anger that made her hair turn to fire and her spirit stay put. 

For Sydney, it was a life cut short and a score to settle. 

For Johnny, it was love. 

Of course, natural ghosts exist too, but they’re made as well. 

The Far Frozen for example has its own eco system, all built around a snowflake falling through a rift in space and time, an entire civilisation forming around one drop of frozen water.

Pariah Dark was crowned King of the Dead against his will, and so his anger has echoed through the universe and restless spirits have collected around it for eons like moths to a flame.

No, Ghosts are made.

Daniel Fenton was no different. 

The boy had been made, and unmade a thousand times - torn apart and stuck back together with bolts of electricity and a prayer. Trying desperately to be something he was not, and could never be again, of course he’d started noticing things weren’t okay for a while.

Like the fact he wasn’t getting older, even two years after his accident he looked exactly the same, frozen in time as his friends grew up without him,

There was also the issue with his memory; more and more he would lose time or forget things, it was small at first, he and his friends even laughed about it. But then he forgot Tucker Foley’s Birthday, an occasion he’d celebrated as long as he could remember. 

After he discovered his Ghostly Wail, he’d forgotten English for a whole week, hearing it sounded like gibberish and every time he opened his mouth, it came out like TV static.

The boy didn’t know it, but every time he transformed; he lost a bit more of his humanity.

And now, through no fault of his own, he’d lost it completely.

It took time, and care, but Clockwork took apart the layers of his body and soul, leaving only an ice cold core burning the palm of his hand. 

The body in this case, was too far gone.

It would be used, of course, but it would need to be reformed - rebuilt into something that would suit what the core was becoming.

The possibilities were endless, but the materials were not infinite. Clockwork had hoped that when Daniel did cross over properly, he’d have more of his pieces with him - and while this was not the kindest timeline, it certainly wasn’t the worst. So the ghost made do.

The first thing he did was house the core, in this case, he placed it deep inside the cogs and springs of his own ghostly centre, allowing the small and frightened thing to feed on his energy and sleep, it didn’t take long for the little ball of ice to cease its struggles and fall in line with the ticks and tocks of the Master of Time. When it did fall asleep, it began to dream. 

Clockwork saw it all in his mind’s eye, a little boy with black hair who was so afraid of the thing under his bed - and yet, didn’t call for his mum and dad. Because he was more scared of what they might do to it. Instead, he left something for it each night, like a peace offering or a prize for not hurting him. 

Some nights it was animal crackers, one night it was a drumstick from the fridge - and in the morning? There was nothing but a stripped chicken bone under the bed. 

Other memories flitted across his brain, a girl with black hair and a sadness that this little core wouldn’t see her again. A family meal with his parents that felt so nice and warm and safe… right up until the roofies kicked in and he was hauled down to the lab. 

The boy had struggled, even tried to scream and wail when his mother began to slice into his skin. They took his voice and didn’t stop there. 

The damage was deep, the core would need work and time, which Clockwork had in spades - he could pause and stretch and skip and fast forward the events of the world all he wanted. In this case, he stretched the seconds out, to him and his little ice core, years would pass.

This kind of delicate work took years.

The problem was the body, the human part was gone - his parents had seen to that, which left a ghostly form to be created, but with the bits missing and the trauma the core had gone through, the parts that were taken would never come back. 

The eye, the heart, the voice, all things Daniel wouldn’t need, and all things that’s absence promised the universe that “Dan” would never happen - a sacrifice for the greater good. A perk of this particular timeline that allowed Clockwork to do what he’s doing, no one would challenge him for custody of the ghost child, not when he wasn’t a threat anymore.

Clockwork, over the seconds and the years, tended to the breaks and the cracks in the core, filling in spaces with his own energy and smoothing the edges that could hurt.

When he did retrieve the little cold thing from inside his chest, it was bigger - it filled the palm of his hand and shone like a star, it hung on, like it didn’t want to be alone.

‘Now, now’ Clockwork shushed, ‘I’m still here.’

The ghost placed the core into the remains, carefully laid out and neatly sectioned off - organs to the right and skin folded neatly to the left, bones piled up and washed with rosemary water, hair preserved and kept in a hessian bag. The one remaining eye sat at the top, alongside the teeth - all laid out in a circle. As is the way.

The core shone brighter, the the remains seemed to be stirred like an elaborate soup, whirling through the air until they seemed to whip the air itself into a silken thread. Wrapping and weaving, looping through the air until all that was left was a cocoon that shone in the light, opalescent and delicate, silk tenuously keeping the parts together that used to be called Daniel Fenton.

The end of Jazz’s hair was soft and silky. 

It should be, because she’d been playing with it obsessively for the last hour and a half. Danny had been gone for days, which in itself wasn’t cause for too much alarm - he did that. But this was different. This time, he wasn’t coming back.

Jazz came home from the party late, she hadn’t wanted to go - it was Danny who convinced her, even sat on her bed as she did her makeup keeping her from changing her mind ‘You deserve to have fun, Jazz.’

The truth was, she didn’t like to leave her brother alone, it wasn’t because of anything he said - he would never - but she could never shake the feeling that she’d come home one day and he’d be gone, torn apart by a ghost he was no match for - or worse, picked apart and catalogued by their parents down in the lab. When she left, Danny told her she looked beautiful.

Danny had been afraid of their parents for too long. 

She had talked him down more than once, picked broken glass out of his hair when his runaway powers blew up the lightbulb in his bedroom as he sobbed, scared that they’d realise who he is, what he is, and what they’d do then.

‘They love you’ she soothed, ’It doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters who you are, and you’re their baby boy. You’re my brother, and I won’t let anything happen to you.’

Looking back, that felt like empty words.

She stumbled into the house, holding her breath and trying to stifle her tipsy little noises as she weaved through the lounge room and made her clumsy way up the stairs. 

Her parents were down in the lab, she knew because the light in the kitchen was still on - Jack had a habit of kicking his toe on the dining room table when he’d emerge from the lab to find a dark house, so Maddie kept the lights on. 

It wasn’t until she got to Danny’s room that she realised something was wrong. 

The process of discovery went something like this:

Danny’s bedroom door framed an empty, dark room - not so weird, maybe he’s in her room, he did that sometimes when the nightmares got too rough. Nope, he’s not there either. Maybe he’s on patrol or going for a flight, so she texted him, “Home safe, be careful out there.”

Then she heard his phone vibrate from its spot on Jazz’s side table, right where he left it when she was getting ready for the party.

She took a breath checked the rest of the house, tried to keep calm. Then she checked the house again, a little less calm. 

He wasn’t home, and he wouldn’t leave his phone behind if he went out (they’d had that argument) - he was either pulled into the ghost zone, or he was in the lab. 

She really hoped he wasn’t in the lab. 

Jazz would never forget, however long she lives, what she saw in the lab. 

The stairs felt impossibly long and all too short, but in the same way you’d jump into cold water, she made her way down into the tiled room - it was better to get it over with.

The first thing she noticed was the blood, the second thing was her parents. 

Evasive and covered in ectoplasm and red smears, unable to look at her, busy pouring over their latest find, working hard to avoid her questions.

‘What happened down here?’ 

‘What’s in the jars?’

‘Where is Danny?’

It was then she saw the specimens. 

The white hair, the glowing green eye, the organs harvested and the instruments that harvested them. The parts of her little brother, and the people who hurt him. 

Jazz had wondered more than once how it felt when Danny had his accident. In shock and sick at the thought of her little brother being torn apart and mashed back together with the bits that died. He hated the scars the accident left him with - but he hated talking about it even more. She pushed once, like really pushed, instantly regretting it when he caught her in his acid green stare - ‘It feels like falling, like falling right out of your own body. Like you just dropped through the floor and out of the world’ he swallowed thickly, ‘it feels like that every time I change.’

Jazz could imagine, but she couldn’t really empathise - she couldn’t put herself there and feel it, but she could feel it now. She felt like she dropped right through the floor, down to hell. 

The fight was epic, the fallout major. When she ran out of the house, she rang Vlad. 

He should know, this concerns him too. He cared about Danny, in his own fucked up way. Things blew up from there, apparently her parents had alerted the ghost media about their findings prematurely, and, upon finding out that it was their son they’d taken apart, the Guys In White, Police and Child Services descended. 

It took three days for Jazz to be the only person living in her house. 

Which led her to now, playing with her hair and biting her lip. 

It was time to tell Sam and Tucker. 

There they were, the two people besides her who loved Danny most in the world, she watched as the words that came out of her mouth landed directly in their hearts like bullets, she watched the shock, anger, hurt, and crushing sadness hit them in waves, the lab had been emptied, there was nothing down there but disinfected walls and empty shelves - but it didn’t stop Sam from sprinting down, dropping to her knees and screeching. Wailing so loud and with such a broken heart that it reverberated through the gaps in the universe, the sound travelling, travelling, travelling until it hit a cocoon deep inside the ghost zone. 

And a soul who’d been torn apart and put back together, began to wake up.