Chapter Text
All he had was his backpack.
He hadn't even stopped long enough to take his homework out of it.
Until now, anyway.
Danny scrubbed at the tears on his face and wiped his running nose with a handful of leaves that had fallen from the oak above him. He had to move quickly. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't curl up into a ball and sob until the tears wouldn't come anymore.
If he did that, they'd catch him.
He couldn't—
He didn't want to see what they'd do if they caught him.
He'd taken the battery out of his phone, for all the good that would do him. It lay on the fallen log in front of him. Beside it was the stack of papers that was his math and English homework, complete with Jazz's copy of The Chrysalids he'd borrowed for his book report. The book report he'd never finish.
The mutant rooster (chicken?) on the cover was attacking the normal one.
That was what they thought he'd do. Eventually. He'd heard them talking about it. He'd—
Danny flipped the book over. It was easier to stare at the summary than to think about that two-headed rooster.
He had his wallet with him but not much in it. Ten dollars and change plus his student card, bus pass, and reward punch card for the Nasty Burger wouldn't get him very far.
As far as food went, he only had the (bruised) apple that Dash had thrown at his head during lunch yesterday. It was just as well he felt too sick to be hungry. Water, though…. He was growing painfully aware that he didn't have any water, and he wasn't sure he wanted to bet that any natural source he found was safe to drink.
If he stayed in ghost mode as much as possible, he'd last longer, but….
But that was a moot point when he was too tired to change back now. Besides, staying as Phantom when he wasn't flying would up the chances that someone would see him and report it, even if it was only to some fringe forum on the internet. Then again, they could track him easily enough without it—he couldn't outfly the Booo-merang forever, and their ghost trackers would pick him up regardless. And if they went to Vlad for help without telling him the whole truth—
Vlad might help them if he only knew they were searching for their son and not for a ghost.
Well.
Jazz would figure it out. Faster than Sam or Tucker, probably, because she'd be the first one to realize he was missing and that their parents—
Danny started to take slow, deliberate breaths, but he couldn't stop his entire body from trembling.
Jazz would figure it out. She'd tell the others. She'd even warn Vlad, if only to stop him from helping and convince him to start sabotaging. If he even thought about doing otherwise, all she'd need to do was reveal his secret.
Would Jazz do that, condemning Vlad if she didn't know it would save Danny? He thought she would if she had some assurance of the outcome. He wanted to say she would even if she didn't, since neither of them were exactly Vlad's biggest fans, but he didn't think she'd be able to sleep knowing what she'd doom him to if they caught him.
He had a thermos with him, at least.
No one had shown up to make his life miserable in the last two days, not after keeping up him most of the night before that, but he'd let everyone out before school yesterday, so the thermos was empty.
He almost wouldn't have minded the company.
The front pocket of his backpack revealed a laser lipstick he didn't remember putting in there, along with a few pencils (two with broken points), a pen he'd had to carefully reassemble from its parts, a pack of tissues he'd already nearly used in its entirety, and a tiny wire-ringed notebook that only had a few pages left.
That was it.
That—and the clothes on his back—was the sum total of his belongings.
If they could track him, if Jazz couldn't destroy things as fast as they could build them, he would die on the dissection table unless someone could rescue him first. Danny knew that with a bleak sort of certainty. He wasn't their little Danny boy anymore. He wasn't even a proper ghost. He was an aberration.
What are you? A ghost trying to fit in with humans? Or some creepy little boy with creepy little powers?
Danny pushed the echo of Spectra's voice away. He wasn't going to think about that. He had other things to worry about. Like the fact that it was starting to rain—though, maybe that would solve his water problem in the short term—and he was going to be hungry and wet and miserable and terrified of what was coming if he didn't do something.
Thunder rumbled overhead as he repacked his backpack. He was too tired to continue as a ghost. He'd flown for— He wasn't even sure how long he'd flown for. Too long. His stops had been few and far between and entirely too short.
He had to get up.
He couldn't just sit here.
He had to get up.
If he didn't get up, the next time his father held him in his arms, it wouldn't be for a hug.
Danny dragged himself to his feet and staggered, leaning on the trees for support as he stumbled over the uneven ground. He was in worse shape than he'd realized, but then again, he hadn't slept for—how long? Over a day. Nearly two. He'd gotten home from school, frozen when he'd overheard them talking in the kitchen, and…left. His last meal had been a rather questionable school lunch.
Had that only been yesterday?
Had it only been twenty-four hours?
He'd gone west, vaguely, following the sun and then the stars and then keeping the sun at his back and then following it again. He'd gone top speed at first, just to put some distance between them, just to give himself a chance, but he'd known that he'd have to slow down or he wouldn't make it. Even here, he'd transformed the moment he'd landed, and he'd only landed because he'd known he'd crash if he didn't.
It had still been a rough landing.
He definitely looked like he'd done a nose dive in the woods, mostly because he had.
There'd been a road somewhere around here, though.
He just needed to find the road.
"—can't afford to wait," Maddie had said. "It's gone on dangerously long as it is."
"I know." Jack's agreement had been quiet. He was almost never quiet. That was why Danny had started listening in the first place. "Makes me feel like a fool."
"You're no more a fool than I am. He tricked us both."
He'd thought, at the time, that maybe they were talking about Vlad. That they'd realized he wasn't the friend he pretended to be. Maddie had seen through it sometimes, briefly, but Vlad had always won her back over, but if he'd failed at that and lost Jack, too….
It could have been a conversation that had had nothing to do with ghosts.
It hadn't been.
The trees offered some cover from the rain, but the drops that made it through were larger. Heavier. Colder.
If it weren't for the lightning, he'd shelter out here, but he didn't want a lightning strike to be the way this ended, and he didn't…. He didn't want to go through something like the portal accident again.
He slogged forward, increasingly wet despite the wind that wrapped around him in an icy cloak. At least the rain smelled nice. At least the bit of rain he could catch in his hands and drink soothed his dry throat. At least he could still feel his toes, even if his socks and shoes were growing as sodden as the rest of him. At least he was still upright, still moving.
At least he wasn't strapped down, unable to phase himself free of his bindings or the nightmare in general, ethanol filling his nostrils and cold steel pressing into his back while a scalpel sterilized to the point of burning sliced into—
No.
No, he wasn't going to think about that.
He wasn't.
It started raining harder. That, or the trees were finally thinning. It was coming down in sheets. He could barely see.
He kept walking anyway.
"Holy hell!" Stiles slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel. Hard. The road had been clear, and then all of a sudden, out of the rain and the darkness, there had been something there, and he'd nearly hit it.
Frankly, he was lucky there hadn't been any oncoming traffic, or he'd have been the one getting hit.
That, or his jeep would've been introduced to a tree—none too gently.
"If this is a trick," he said to the universe at large as he backed up and angled his headlights onto the shape that had been on the road so he had a hope of seeing something through the downpour, "and I'm about to get eaten, some warning would be nice." He waited a beat, just to see if a flash of lightning would helpfully illuminate anything he'd missed.
Nothing happened, which either meant there was nothing to warn him about or—more likely—that the universe didn't feel like warning him about anything.
He got out of his jeep and into the pouring rain anyway.
The something resolved itself into a body wearing a backpack that had made it seem distinctly less body-shaped at first glance. Or, well, hopefully it was a person and not a body, but this was Beacon Hills. Bodies were disturbingly plentiful. Especially in his life. If this were a body, it would not be the first one he'd found, and with his abysmal luck, it wouldn't be the last.
"Hey!" Stiles still couldn't tell if the kid was sleeping or dead. Everything looked to be intact, and he couldn't see any gaping wounds, but pooling blood would've washed away in this rain. "Hey, do you need help?"
Nothing.
This was probably a trap, and he was really going to regret his life choices later.
He knelt down beside the kid—teen, from the looks of him, but smaller and scrawnier than Stiles himself was, which was saying something—and shook him. This, finally, elicited a response, and (maybe because the universe didn't hate him after all) did not result in him getting his face, hand, or other precious body parts bitten off.
Granted, the response was only a groan, but it was sign of life, so Stiles would take it.
Especially since the boy's lips were purplish, the skin around them noticeably blue even in the poor light. The rest of his face wasn't blue or greyish, but it was paler than Stiles's was, and it was a good bet than if he checked the boy's fingernails, they wouldn't look any better than his lips.
The boy was not dressed for the weather. He didn't even have a coat on. The backpack looked like it had been dragged through the mud—granted, all of him looked like it had been dragged through the mud—and his once-white shirt was pretty much see-through where it wasn't soiled. There was a hole in the right knee of his jeans—unintentional, judging by that skinned knee—and the hems were frayed, but his shoes weren't falling apart. They were either relatively new or well cared for, not a pair that had seen five hundred miles.
Stiles shook him again. In hindsight, he should've stuck with tapping the boy on the shoulders and clapping by his ear, but nothing looked broken, so he probably wasn't doing more damage. "Hey, are you okay? Can you get up?"
The boy cracked open his eyes. "Wha—?"
He was sitting upright and scooting away from Stiles far more quickly than he had any right to be, especially for someone Stiles had briefly thought might be dead.
"You were in the middle of the road," Stiles said. That was admittedly an exaggeration—the boy looked like he'd tripped over the ridge at the shoulder and fallen into one lane and not gotten up again—but still. Stiles held up his hands in what he hoped was a nonthreatening manner, but that wouldn't mean much if the boy had an inkling of what really ran through these woods. "I'm Stiles. I can give you a ride into town if you want it." That probably wouldn't get him murdered, right?
"I don't—" The boy's voice broke, and he cleared his throat. "You don't have to."
Yeah, he didn't have to, but that didn't mean the boy didn't look like he should be taken straight to the hospital. He wasn't shivering, which was a bad thing, right? Since he should be shivering? At least the fact that he could move meant he hadn't been hit by a car or anything before Stiles had come along, and now that he was awake, he seemed too coherent to be drunk or drugged out of his mind. His colour looked a little better, too.
"So long as you don't rip my throat out or, like, kill me in another awful way—or any way; I'm a big fan of not dying—I think I can handle it. I'm going there anyway." The fact that the out-of-town errand he'd run had started as an in-town errand via a trip to Derek's loft and had turned into a trek to the site of the old Hale house was completely beside the point. He hadn't found anything at either place—he'd known he wouldn't, especially at the site of the house, which was still under development; that was why he hadn't told Scott about going in the first place—but still. He'd looked. Just in case.
Not like he'd really expected to find some sign of Derek coming back. Not yet. Not without some kind of word. But that wasn't the point, either.
The point was that when Stiles straightened up and offered the boy a hand, the boy took it and let Stiles haul him up.
He didn't seem half-starved—didn't have that hollow-cheeked, drawn look—but he was lighter than Stiles had expected, and he swayed on his feet as if he might topple over again.
"Do you want me to—?"
"I'm fine," interrupted the boy. "I'm…. I'll be fine."
He didn't sound very convincing, but he got to the jeep, got the passenger door open, and climbed in without any trouble. He didn't produce a knife when Stiles got in the driver's side, either, so that was a win in Stiles's book.
"I'm Danny, by the way." The boy gave him a weak smile as he buckled up.
"Stiles." He wasn't sure if Danny had heard him the first time.
"Yeah, you said."
Or maybe he had.
Stiles killed the radio as he started driving, mostly because he was hoping to get some answers and didn't want the radio to be an excuse for Danny to ignore him. "So where're you headed?" That could sound nice and casual despite the fact that he was trying to drive through a storm so bad the wipers barely made a difference, right?
"I dunno." Danny wrapped his arms around himself and shivered violently enough that Stiles cranked the heat—for as much good as that would do them. At least he was shivering now, though. Getting out of the wind and rain had clearly helped. If Stiles's own jacket hadn't been soaked, he'd have offered it up, but as it was, he wasn't sure it would do much good. He really needed to get a blanket to keep in here.
Danny had kept his backpack on his lap instead of dumping it on the floor at his feet, one arm looped through the straps as if he were afraid Stiles would steal it the moment he looked away, and the fact that it was still dripping on him wouldn't be helping matters, either. "Anywhere, I guess. Away."
Right.
Should he ask?
Stiles wasn't convinced he'd get an answer if he asked.
He wasn't convinced he really wanted to know, either.
"You, uh, need me to take you to the hospital? The police station? I know how it sounds, but I know good people in both places—"
A quick glance revealed Danny's grimace. "I'll pass, thanks."
"They can keep secrets. If you need them to. Even ones they probably shouldn't."
"Yeah, still gonna pass."
"A shelter?" He kinda doubted it, but it was worth asking. If Danny had had friends in town, they wouldn't be having this conversation.
"Somewhere I can get a cheap cup of coffee is good. I'm just passing through anyway, and I'm not picky. I don't care if tastes like sludge as long as it's warm."
"Sounds like you're a real aficionado."
"Coffee'll be cheaper than hot chocolate." He slumped in his seat. "Tea's good, too, I guess. I'd say I want it for the caffeine boost, but it doesn't do much for me."
Well, that told him absolutely nothing useful. Stiles decided to just bite the bullet and go for it. "So, uh, what were you doing out on the road?"
A grunt. "Are you going to take me to the hospital if I say I don't remember?"
That was a perfectly normal statement. Lydia wouldn't freak out at all if she heard about that. "Probably should."
"I tripped. I think. I might've just fallen."
"Uh huh," Stiles said, like that was a totally normal thing for someone to have done. In the middle of the road. In a storm. At night.
"I'm better now. I think my body just decided I needed to sleep and wouldn't take no for an answer."
"So the last time you slept was—?"
"Five minutes ago?"
"Before that."
Danny made a noncommittal hum. "A normal amount of time."
"Meaning?"
"Sometime yesterday."
"Like yesterday yesterday, last night yesterday, or the night before last yesterday?"
"Yeah."
Right.
Well, maybe he couldn't in good conscience take Danny to the hospital, and he would probably freak if Stiles took him to the vet clinic, but since it looked like stabbing or otherwise being unsuspectingly jumped and murdered wasn't going to happen, there was a third option that looked to be far more appealing than dumping him in some crappy diner right now.
Namely, Scott's house.
Mrs. McCall would be off her shift at some point. Maybe even some point soon. Stiles couldn't remember. But even if Danny wasn't a supernatural stray, he was still a kid that needed help. Stiles would probably get a lecture from his dad and from Scott's mom if he ignored that little fact.
Stiles opened his mouth to keep talking—awkward silences weren't a thing when you were prone to nervous (or strategic; sometimes he could call it strategic) babbling instead—but hesitated at Danny's long, loud yawn.
He closed his mouth and readjusted his hands on the steering wheel, deliberately loosening his white-knuckled grip.
This was fine. This was perfectly fine. It wouldn't take him long to get to Scott's. He could do this without talking. He did it without talking plenty of times when he was by himself. Okay, so sometimes he sung along to the radio, but still.
Maybe he could turn the radio back on?
Danny's breathing had evened out, and another quick glance revealed that his eyes were closed, his head resting against the window. The jostling of the jeep didn't seem to bother him. He wasn't shivering anymore, but maybe that was a good thing this time, since it was warmer.
Had he really warmed up that fast? He must have if he was asleep now, right? They'd been talking; this probably wasn't a worrisome bout of unconsciousness. He hadn't had a seizure or anything as far as Stiles could tell. He'd just dropped off in the three seconds Stiles hadn't been talking.
Stiles wasn't sure he'd ever fallen asleep that fast in his life.
Still, since he'd roused Danny before, that probably meant it was okay for him to fall asleep again.
Right?
Tap tap tap went the pen against the paper. It was an old, familiar sound, and one that never used to cause this much dread.
But his parents' plans weren't theoretical anymore, and every invention seemed to affect him in some way, even if the effect wasn't necessarily the intended one.
"I don't know. Parasitism?" It was his mother's voice. "Mutualism? Neither seems to fit."
"Could be puppetry," said his dad. "Or mimicry. He sets everything off."
"He would in all those cases. We'd need to run some tests to know for sure."
"I can fix up the Fenton Ecto-Stoppo-Power-Erfier. I haven't taken too much off of it for parts, and he might've sabotaged it in the first place if he— If this has been going on that long."
"Longer, probably." Danny could barely hear the resigned murmur of his mother's voice, but he wasn't about to move closer and risk stepping into their line of sight. It was safest right where he was, right by the front door. If they had weapons with them in the kitchen, which they almost certainly did, invisibility would be a risk he didn't want to take right now; depending on what those weapons were, invisibility wouldn't be enough to spare him. "The fusion could've happened at any point. When was the last time you can remember seeing them together?"
Silence shouldn't have claws. It shouldn't be able to dig into his chest and grip his heart. It shouldn't be able to steal the breath from his lungs.
"Back when we invented the Fenton Ghost Catcher." There was a funny note in his father's voice that Danny couldn't quite place. "Do you think it was then? If that ghost scum took him through the 'merge' side—"
"It never merged anything that wasn't compatible during our preliminary testing."
The silence that followed Maddie's words thickened like taffy.
Danny wasn't sure if he was still breathing.
"They wouldn't be compatible unless their connection was established earlier," she finally added. "I know we dismissed it at first, but how long have our inventions identified him as a ghost?"
There was a heavy sigh. "The Fenton Ghost Gabber wasn't the first, but everything else was an earlier prototype, wasn't it? That wasn't long after we got the Fenton Ghost Portal up and running. Phantom was barely around back then. He didn't even call himself Phantom, let alone Danny Phantom."
A sharp intake of breath. "What if that connection is the reason he chose his name? What if he—?"
"Hey." An unfamiliar voice, accompanied by a touch on his arm. "We're—"
Danny moved before he was entirely awake, which was probably why he tangled himself in the undone seatbelt, but he didn't have time to sort that out, so he just phased through it and pushed the door to the vehicle open and stumbling out.
The rain woke him up properly, and he found himself staring back at the wide eyes of the boy who'd offered him a ride into town. Stiles, a distant part of his brain supplied. Danny blinked and wiped the rain from his eyes. "Sorry." He was still panting like he'd run the Presidential Fitness Test again. "I guess I'm a bit jumpy."
"Yeah," Stiles agreed as he slowly reached to undo his own seatbelt, as if he were afraid any sudden movement might set Danny off again. "I gathered that. But, um, we're here. House behind you." He nodded towards it.
Danny spun, taking in his surroundings for the first time, and turned back to face Stiles as the other boy moved around the jeep to join him. "This isn't somewhere I can buy coffee." The observation was almost nonsensical, but something didn't quite compute; he didn't know where Stiles had taken him. Or why.
"No, it's somewhere you can get one for the cheap, cheap price of free. Come on." Stiles clapped him on the back but immediately withdrew his hand when Danny stiffened. "Sorry. Scott's not gonna bite you, though. Promise. He hardly bites anyone."
Danny couldn't muster up a smile at the joke, but he did get his feet to follow Stiles up the drive.
The teenager (presumably Scott) opened the door quickly enough that Danny wondered if his house had been Stiles's destination all along. He'd assumed the other boy had been heading home, but maybe he'd just been going to crash at a friend's.
It was, in hindsight, the weekend. Friday night.
Danny had had plans to go to Tucker's tonight. Sam had had something on with her family she couldn't get out of—or rather, a commitment she'd promised her grandma that she would attend, which might mean it was in exchange for the two of them to go to a concert later—so the plan had been to play video games and eat junk food till they practically puked (or a ghost interrupted, whichever came first).
That wasn't going to happen now.
It probably wasn't going to happen ever again.
"It must have started with the portal. Nothing else would contain the amount of ecto-energy needed for so clean a fusion of two completely different states of matter."
"I don't know, Mads. Wouldn't we have seen him around before if it had been that long?"
"Danny did have that accident—"
"So did good ol' Vladdy if you count that incident with the proto-portal, but Danny was out of the hospital after a day of observation since the test results came back normal; nothing like Vlad."
"The proto-portal would've been more concentrated—"
"Vladdy got a face full of ecto-radiation. Danny tripped on a couple of cables and fell and banged his arm on the inside of the portal with enough force to get it to turn on. Of course Vlad got the worst of it. Danny didn't even break his arm."
"Unless the kids lied to us."
"About his arm? You think Tucker can hack an x-ray machine?"
"About how the portal turned on. About what the accident really was. I'm pretty sure Tucker could hack our security cameras. Along with whatever computers all the medical reports were going through. Oh, Jack, what if he—?"
"—coming?"
Danny blinked.
Stiles and Scott were both standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he was still dripping on the stoop.
There were probably only a couple of years between them, if that, but Danny somehow felt very small all of a sudden.
"Yeah, sorry," he muttered, stepping inside as Stiles backed up to give him room to drip on the rug instead.
"I'll get you a towel," offered Scott. "The kitchen's just through there; you can take a seat at the table. Stiles, can I talk to you for a minute?"
He probably wanted to know what Stiles had been thinking, bringing a complete stranger into his house.
Danny nodded mutely and let the two slip away as he peeled off his shoes and socks. No one was looking, so he stuck them both outside and turned them intangible, letting the water that had been in them fall to join the puddle where he'd been standing before. He was still putting dry socks on wet feet once he was finished, but he didn't think they'd notice as long as the rest of him was still dripping.
He trudged to the kitchen table and sat in a sopping heap on the chair, wondering why he'd thought he'd be able to escape. He was just prolonging the inevitable, wasn't he? They'd find him. They wouldn't stop looking until they did. Short of finding a portal and going to the ghosts for help—
No.
That wouldn't work out the way he'd want it to.
Clockwork was the only one who might not screw him over—even if ghosts like Desiree or the Ghostwriter didn't have reason to hold a grudge against him, he didn't exactly want to hand over control of his life to them and give them more power in the process, especially if they might write the portal accident out of existence to be rid of him and solve their problems and his in one fell swoop—but Clockwork was also the least likely to help.
Interference 'n' all.
Danny didn't want to think that this was the way it was supposed to go, though. As much as he'd dreaded his parents finding out, as much as he'd feared telling them or having them put the pieces together on their own, he'd always held out hope that it would go over better than he'd imagined.
He'd wanted Jazz to be right.
Why did this have to be the one time she was wrong and he was right?
"They're always going to put you over ghosts, Danny. We're a family. Family always comes first."
"That's rich considering how many times you've attempted to make supper because they forgot and we've had to order in instead."
"You know what I mean! If it's a choice between us or ghosts and they know that's the choice? They're going to choose us. We're their kids."
"You're their kid. They won't know what I am anymore."
"Don't talk like that. You're still my brother and you're still their son. You're still yourself. Phantom's just a part of you now. They'll accept that."
"But what if they don't?"
"They will."
"You can't know that."
"I do. I promise."
It had never been a promise she could have kept.
She'd made it anyway, and now it was broken.
Because he wasn't their son anymore, not now that they knew Phantom—
Danny scrunched up his nose and tried (and failed) to breathe slowly and steadily through his mouth. He wasn't going to cry again. He should've cried all his tears out already. He shouldn't have any tears left in him.
It was hard to tell himself that when the water running down his face was saltier than it would be if it were only rainwater dripping from his hair, though.