Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Danny, to his credit, was certainly not freaking out nor flipping out nor any third thing he couldn't presently come up with to affirm his sanity.

But- But! He was going to cross a line soon! The back and forth was extremely annoying .

With a hiss like escaping steam Danny sighed and rubbed his eyes, trying to think up a response to this nonsense as Clockwork hovered above the table, candles below mysteriously not lighting them aflame.

"From the top, as someone with places to be and faces to punch. There was a separate timeline?"

"Correct," Clockwork confirmed, likely having seen bad paths start branching madly by the way they'd gone still.

"A timeline that has nothing to do with us even though it may well resemble the one we’re in?"he continued to press.

"Multiple timelines, but yes."

"And they... collided?" Danny prodded. He was pretty sure that was what Clockwork was getting at, but Clockwork’s typical poetic flow was making Danny anxious he was missing something.

"That is... Not an accurate assessment of the mechanics, but a fair reflection of the results, yes."

White wax popped ominously below them.

"But the situation is done and doesn't need me?"

He was pushing, he knew. That was the point.

"That part of it, yes."

Danny waited, clicks and pops sounding off both near and far as the mechanical clocks in the tower continued ticking, wax giving a well-timed pop as he gave up.

"Right then. I suppose I get to go home then, and catch up on sleep?" Danny offered.

seemed to pierce through, Clockwork shot him a flat look before floating upwards to a mirror.

"The threads of the worlds remain tangled, and many paths remain unclear even to my view. The weave as a whole can tolerate such stress for a while yet, but I worry for individual threads and their viability for replacement if they were to snap."

A moment of dead silence hovered, the gears of the tower themselves seeming to have stopped over the sheer single-minded gall Clockwork must've possessed to believe for a second that that explanation was any clearer than the previous ones.

"What?"

Danny held firm in a brief staring contest, refusing to flinch first. He would not be accepting the implication that some clarification and a toning down of the poetry was too much to ask.

"Not everything from the other timeline left. Some objects are certainly in the wrong time or place for this world. Some people remain different in ways that indicate they'd be from a counterpart world, except for the fact it behaves more like a leftover superimposition from the event."

"So. Things have randomly changed around?"

Danny didn't know how else to process that information; it wasn’t like he could know what things had changed..

"Effectively." They nodded, tapping a mirror. The image flickered and cycled through objects and people at an alarming rate.

"Most things, like the odd card or misplaced remote, do not matter much. I will get to them in due time, and those in the most impacted areas will simply be left with a vague sense of deja vu.”

"Like that weird name conundrum," Danny said, nodding sagely as this bit of the puzzle clicked into place.

"But others, like certain kinds of heavy use objects or people, due to the fact the changes are not true materially, stand to cause harm if left unmanaged," Clockwork continued, brushing off Danny's brilliant deduction.

"I think this is the part where I ask if you are or aren't the world-assigned manager." Danny said, the question clear between them.

Danny was well aware timeline management was a complicated job with many possible pitfalls and failure points, but it was still Clockworks job.

"This is a fair jab, yes. But you remember my chains, no?"

The top of Clockwork's staff tapped the mirror again, the barest flashes of red and badly lit spaces, black and white, and so much else finally settled on an image of the Casper High football field.

"So the Observants have blocked you and one or multiple alterations are going to blow up profoundly. And I get to deal with it for you? Can't you just do it... later, on your own personal event line? Time travel is a thing."

"Ah, but there we come to your personal stake. The things that stand to collapse may well lead to your complete death, and while I am forced to halt my actions, your clock will run down. If that comes to pass I cannot promise the Observants will not simply make me keep the event.”

Few other statements could have made Danny's body run quite so cold as that.

It was a bone deep cold he hadn't managed to feel since the portal put him halfway under, cold permanently banished to something he’d had no business feeling since.

"If I fail, I die?"

"In essence.”

He'd never quite get how Clockwork could say things like that so casually. The expression visible beneath their hood remained blank, unchanging with every heavy word.

"Alright. Alright ."

He was definitely not gonna flip his lid on Clockwork. Totally. He was gonna stay calm and collected.

"But then, how exactly do you expect me to fix the timeline messes?"

Clockwork floated down silently towards the table, gesturing with their staff again.

"Look carefully. Do you remember much about the candles from when you entered?"

"Uhm. No?"

Danny thought he should get points for honesty; the contents of the table was the least concerning thing in this conversation.

He took stock of the red candles, lit and wavering as Clockwork waited for an answer they weren't going to get.

"Often things change just beyond mortals' notice, and the changes will appear retroactive through time too. Hold out your hands," Clockwork instructed. Danny obeyed, and suddenly Clockwork was a lot closer. In the span of a second his hands had been grabbed and left tingling, Clockwork reappeared over the table like they'd never left.

"Okay. Creepy. What now?"

"Pick up a candle."

The flames seemed to flicker in time to his thoughts, the fire flaring with his shock and dimming with his confusion and bewilderment.

"Just like, literally?"

"Sure."

Clockwork's plain tone grated at him. For them, that was an admission that the action wasn't the goal and that the real goal had eighty percent odds of not being explained until he figured it out himself.

Danny flew in close and took a candle, a bead of spent red wax making its way down to his gloved hand as he waited.

The waiting was admittedly for show. He could feel... threads in the candle. Tangled ones. And he'd have to be forgiven for not wanting to screw something up.

Clockwork smirked, and Danny knew they'd foreseen that anxiety getting explained from some errant timeline branch or another.

"Pull," they instructed.

The candle in his hand popped loudly as he blinked up at Clockwork. It felt too easy. Pull which thread? From what angle?

Just pull?

Danny didn't outlast Clockwork's patience: he knew he’d have to figure out the specifics on his own, flame hissing  as he carefully phased his hand partway through the wax and picked a thread.

He elected for gusto and slight violence. He was rewarded for his enthusiasm with the candle breaking in half not from the stress of the thread pulling but from his other hand tightening in response. The thread he’d pulled snapped in one hand as he fumbled with the two pieces in the other.

Where there had been a red candle before, it was now white. And it had never been anything but white in their whole conversation, but most certainly been red just five seconds before.

There was a table of red candles in front of him, that he only remembered having one white candle, and he suspected the uncertain dread boiling beneath his forced calm was part of a lesson Clockwork was trying to impart.

"The action itself is easy, but most things affected are more complicated than what wax color I ordered for this example. Some things may be obviously changed, but tied to something else being different. You'll have to follow what you can to find the true offenders, and remember that people can be changed as well."

‘Following what he could’ was much too vague of a mission for Danny's tastes.

"What, no hints about the important things to find?" he asked.

"You've more time than you'd assume, but less than you want."

"Do you have anything helpful ?" he asked again. He sighed as Clockwork shook their head, and the candle in his hand flared and popped in response.

The fire startled him being so close, the candle getting dropped in reflexive panic. The flame remained lit shockingly enough, already melting some wax to morph into the tiling grout.

"Could you warn a guy next time we're playing with fire? I swear it's had an attitude with me since I walked i-"

Danny woke up in bed at home with a tingling in his hands and resentment in his heart. As he got out out of bed he could see the wax stuck to his nails, and he could just imagine Clockwork hitting a timer button.

Chapter Text

"Hi," Danny said to the random store employee, phasing in from the candy bar rack behind them. He was careful to keep intangible as he tried to give off the impression that he knew  what he was looking for, as opposed to his true plan: mucking about until something helpful happened.

Or possibly something blew up. One could never predict when it came to him.

With a sweep of his hands through the racks and the conveyor belts, he finally got a horrible pop in the strings for his effort as he reached through the poor employee, their name tag changed from a masculine name to the feminine version.

Danny was suddenly incredibly aware he may have just given someone an existential crisis to last a lifetime.

He would be refusing to think about that further, thanks. He had possibly lethal consequences to try and find.

"Bye?" he said awkwardly, popping back out and moving on to the rest of the store.

Attempting to talk to Sam and Tucker over the phone had been unhelpful, both of them coming together in a rare moment of agreement that his best option was to personally lay hands on every person, object, and concept he could stick them to without destroying anything in his wake.

He maintained that the destruction in his wake was rarely ever his fault, not that such a pitiful legal defense would hold in the court of his friends.

He was tempted to make other calls, and probably should, but he was busy and anyone waiting for him would simply have to wait their turn.

Still, touching things in the store. Many things. Things he had no interest in or need for, nor could he particularly remember why he'd picked a grocery(?) store.

He had a hunch based on the fact he kept expecting to find random electronics despite all evidence that this was a normal grocery store that this was not in fact a normal grocery store, but he wasn't sure how to pull the threads for that. Did he just fly up and rip at the sign on the building?

What even was this place's name, actually...?

Bonuses upon bonuses though, the store seemed to have zero objects left that he could pull the strings for. Or perhaps, all of them being "stuck" so to speak was a fantastic hint he should try that sign thing.

But somewhere in the chip aisle, he was interrupted.

Interruptions usually meant a fight, and he couldn't stop himself from going ramrod straight as he coughed out his warning sign.

But it tasted familiar on the back of his tongue, so why did he...

"Heya!" his interruption greeted, sticking her head through the ceiling.

The peripheral feeling of warning didn't leave, but he couldn't say the paranoia ever left him alone to begin with.

"Ember," he sighed.

Her hair flickered against gravity as she frowned at his sour tone.

"Don't be like that. Rumor says you're harassing places at random, and I want in."

He shouldn't really be grinding teeth already, but maybe the existential threat to his life was setting in.

"Ember, there's nothing to be in on! I've been cursed with an ominous warning-"

"And I want in!" she finished.

She truly wasn't a bad person to hang out with, or even consider a friend. Always glad to be along for the ride, whatever that ride may bring.

Unfortunately, rides including Ember were subject to Ember's boredom. If they didn't start sufficiently chaotic they would be made sufficiently chaotic.

"Still nothing to be in on! I get to hunt down alternate dimension inconsistencies and fix them, which so far is very boring," he tried, bordering on begging already.

Usually he'd be more excited at the guarantee his day would be entertaining, but he could feel it in his shoulders that he super did not need the chaos today.

"Sounds like a plan!" Ember grinned, inviting herself anyway. The neck of her guitar lowered through the roof, and he could just picture her hands moving to strum at the guitar as she threw her head back.

Straight into a sprinkler, which fire hair was very good at setting off. There was a beat where neither of them moved, the store's alarms screaming away as the customers rushed to find the exits.

"Oops?"

"Bail!" he hissed, darting upwards and past the ceiling.

Ember was in no such rush, smirking as she floated upwards at a leisurely pace.

She didn't even bother to flip rightside-up as she floated to meet his eyes twenty feet above the store, picking out bars he didn't know..

"Pulled a you! Anyways... weird time shit from the clock guy?" she asked.

Danny held his hands up in surrender, refusing to huff at the shot taken.

"Relaaax, we're gonna have a blast," Ember reassured him, striking a few strings in emphasis.

Danny could only shake his head at her in faux horror. Why was he so stressed anyways? Two was better than one, even if the other one was Ember.

"Let's rock, poptart."

"Wait. I have to try something first."

He was only being modestly stupid when he floated down to the grocery store's sign, examining it thoroughly as Ember huffed at him from above.

The world shifted from individual strings in the cores of objects separated out by pathetic little things like atomic make-up , to strings that were more concepts as he considered the raw idea of a store.

He got a very tangled view for his perspective shift.

Yikes.

With a grimace he grabbed around the threads, and having not learned his lesson from the candles went full steam ahead.

A letter the size of him ripped off the building as the world shimmered like a mirage, and he suspected he had given a very disgruntled employee an even worse day,

As the letter dropped some he was left wrestling with a letter different than what he thought he’d pulled..

"Dude. What the fuck?" Ember called, staring at him in disbelief.

"Bail!" Danny shouted, already on the move away from his crime as he hucked the letter onto the roof .

Today would be something. Maybe many things

Probably just chaotic.

Chapter Text

"Okay pop-rock, we've left your vandalism in the dust! The hell was that?" Ember asked a beat after Danny sat in the rafters of the empty movie theater.

"That's my goal for today! Apparently a different timeline is sitting on top of ours and I get to find and fix it all."

Ember's look was distracted as she shifted away from the south hole in the ceiling, straight to the north one like it was somehow better .

"I get to do this by feeling for random strings nobody else can feel and pulling them if they're tangled," he added. Danny usually found it was better to not be picky about completely unrelated whims.

"Why you, though?" Ember asked, scanning him up and down.

He shrugged, aware his next statement would not be accepted with grace.

"'Cause apparently if I don't then one of the things that are different might kill me."

Ember’s drifting stopped on a  dime as she made an expression Tucker would describe as taking a mental screenshot.

"What, like, dead-er than you already are?"

He couldn't hide his grimace, lips ever so slightly parting over teeth as he gave her a look .

She did seem modestly embarrassed about her flippancy, flashing a tight lipped frown back at him.

Danny absently broke eye contact and shook his head, wispy bits of hair stinging as they flew back and forth.

"If you're inviting yourself along, cool I guess. But I need to hop to it; I'd like to live."

"Schrodinger's cat has formed an opinion, I see! We're gonna roll, 'cause I've got nothing else to do either way, but what's your plan of attack?"

Ember flamboyantly posed as she declared her loyalty to the task, but her look back at him was notably more solemn.

"You saw it live: touch things until something happens."

"I don't think me happening counts, popsicle."

She seemed proud of her latest nickname before looking horribly confused, eyes narrowing as she mouthed ‘popsicle’ to herself, and Danny could only ignore the oddness of the response.

"Yeah, well, Tucker and Sam didn't have anything better either, so we're all stupid."

Ember snapped out of trying to comprehend her mental snag and stuck her tongue out at him.

"Why's the whole party a bunch of high INT low WIS fools?" she teased, shaking off the last of whatever had caught her mind.  Too fast for Danny to interject she added “Maybe Plasmius knows more, or has whatever it is you need to find. He’s a regular for being one of your problems,”

"I regret letting Tucker introduce you to Dungeons $ Dragons," Danny sighed, ignoring the Vlad suggestion. He didn’t really want to end up punching the man out of frustration today.

"Too late! If not Plasmius, then have you tried following any of the broken strings?"

" Tangled , and no. Strings are contained within their object."

"A store’s an object?" Ember asked, sounding dead serious even while mischief glinted in her eyes.

"Well, I guess it's-"

"Look," Ember started, cutting him off. "Love heckling you, but if your afterlife is on the line then maybe I should speed this one up and suggest you've got an interpretation issue? Like, time's supposed to be super complicated. What if you're just stupid, this time, and just convinced yourself it’s self contained ‘cause it would be easier on you?"

Danny resisted the urge to get defensive, as it never seemed to work out in his favor. And Clockwork had said something about following.

"Okay, I see you'd like to be a test subject then!" he decided. If he couldn’t defend his honor he could drag her down with him into idiocy.

Ember wasn't fast enough to back away before he had a hand through her, a stunt even other ghosts would call freakish given phasing through another ghost wasn't really supposed to be a thing.

At her yelp, though, Danny remembered abruptly that Clockwork had also said people were a lot more complicated.

The framing was probably why the store clerk had been different to him, but there were strings upon strings in Ember, extending out in all directions, and a lot of them seemed stuck the way everything inside the store had been.

Conveniently the rest of the Clockwork’s advice came to mind, specifically the part where a change could be from something else that'd have to be fixed first.

Danny only got the briefest sense of directions the stuck strings were going towards on their way out from Ember before there was a guitar power-striking him out of the air.

It wasn't the first time Danny had been forced to consider if guitars could actually do that without shattering like on TV, or if Ember's instrument was simply built different.

He came back to awareness with Ember pouring a bottle of water onto his face, and he was distantly glad breathing was optional for him.

"Hhheeeey... Don't make me use anotherrrr," she whined, continuing to waterboard him with the last of the bottle.

With a glare he sat up, and Ember tossed the plastic to the side with no further thought.

"No destroying the buildings in a fight today?" he huffed.

"Nah. You like this one too much to set it on fire. And I think it'd make a great stage whenever we're in the mood to throw a rager, so I'd like it to keep standing too."

"I don't think anyone calls them ragers anymore. I think that died like a decade ago."

"I'm allowed to be a little old, shrimp popper. Figure anything out before I whacked you?"

Danny was tempted to lay back down, but wasn't enthused about the idea of getting waterboarded again. He settled for floating up six inches off the floor and laying flat in midair, dramatically draped over an imaginary fainting couch.

"I do believe I may have had my mind whacked out my skull.."

"I'll beat you to your second death."

He sighed and shifted to his side in the air, looking up in thought.

"Lots of strings in you; a lot of them are stuck like the groceries in the store was though, which I think means that whatever's changed is dependent on something that isn't you ."

Ember seemed to consider from her place above him, glaring at the south hole in the roof like the sunlight was ruining her grunge vibes, as opposed to the north one that was letting in sunlight.

"Did you see what direction they were going in?" she asked.

"Better question; how'd you guess it was an interpretation thing?"

"I dunno, it's almost like my thing is music? Something incredibly complicated with multiple interpretations that can conflict but still all be correct? Not completely unlike debating over time travel."

"Ooo rub in your B-average against the plebian," Danny huffed, dipping back towards the floor as he tipped his head back.

"Mock all you want, I studied for it when I was still kicking. Where to, loser?"

"Uhhh well the threads seemed to go towards me, so how were we floating?"

He squinted at the ceiling as if the scene would play again.

"With our heads way too close to the ceiling and a second death wish?" Ember informed him semi-innocently, slowly returning her guitar to her back.

"Har har," Danny sighed, trying to reconstruct their positions in his head.

"Thhhhat way?" he pointed cautiously, trying to remember what had been behind him that could be of interest.

"The fuckin... Walmart? We're going to Walmart?" Ember asked, and Danny didn't have any better suggestions for landmarks to the south of them, short of the GameStop.

"I guess? Unless you want me to check your threads again-"

"If you put your hands in me a second time then next we speak it will be from the second afterlife."

Danny finally floated higher up and rotated to stand, holding his hands up.

"I guess we're haunting the Walmart, then. Unless you wanna haunt the GameStop?"

Ember crinkled her nose at the suggestion, and a couple of flames popped in sync with her mood shift.

"Nerd shit, so hard pass. At least until we can get the whole gang of nerds in on it."

Haunting the Walmart it was. Danny made a vague jerky motion upwards, and Ember knew the drill as they both lifted out of the theater.

"So who gets to wear the fake mustache this time?" Ember asked, already going through the pouches in her bag.

Chapter Text

Ember wore the fake mustache and a dark sweatshirt with the hood up as Danny touched random cards in the greeting card aisle, having shifted to his human form sometime before daring to enter.

Fenton getting harassed by a badly disguised ghost was nothing new, while Phantom rummaging through a store's wares with another ghost in tow was going to get his parents called.

"Well pop-up, I don't think it's gonna be here. Whatever it is."

"You couldn't tell that the moment we said Walmart ?" he asked, holding a birthday card up to the light. Belle was displayed on the cover while wishing him a happy sixth birthday, and with the most bewildering thread pull yet it changed to Cinderella.

Ember didn't miss the change, squinting at the minor difference.

Danny decided not to think about it too hard.

"Ember, this one was always gonna be boring. It's playing Where’s Waldo when he's allowed to dress like a normal person," Danny said

"Well-"

"Do not," he intoned, setting the card down and running his other hand over the tops of a different row.

"I didn't even-!"

"No."

He took a step to his left and started examining the cards further down, now proclaiming their support for the seven to eight range.

"This is boring," she whined.

Staff made their third pass by the end of the aisle in the las ten minutes, pretending not to stare at the poorly disguised Ember. Ember adjusted her mustache and stared back in direct challenge.

"Well, I'm stuck banking on the good faith of the town to not turn around and tell my parents about me dragging you through a store. Could you behave for once, or is this gonna end with something on fire?" he asked.

Ember puffed up to respond, only to deflate as he shot his worst glare at her.

"You're the cause too, half the time," she muttered, picking a new and more interesting fight as she shoved her fire-hair back into the hood from whence it came.

"Okay, well the other half of the cause is going to go harass the tupperware containers instead. At least if I use my twenty dollars on that I can pack my own lunches, or something."

"Twenty bucks?" Ember pressed, slightly incredulous at such a high number.

"It's not the eighties; it's going to cost money, Ember."

He shook his head and turned away. Ember not following was ominous enough, but he couldn't get hung up on her while trying to think of productive things to do.

Buying tupperware would at least be productive, because the ecto-weenies had chewed holes in the stuff at home. So he was actually going to do that and hide them under his bed before they could be used in the kitchen and the weenies were permitted to develop a taste for plastic.

Minutes later his riveting adventure in the kitchen containers aisle was unfolding without a hitch, and he was left wishing he'd let Ember light things on fire afterall.

This couldn't be what Clockwork had meant by tracking threads and finding what was going to kill him.

Unless the ecto-weenies were planning another revolution... It was entirely possible they were dissatisfied with the concession of the east counter as their territory and were planning to head north, now that he thought about it.

He was dragged out of his extremely normal concerns by a shriek and someone tackling onto him, and. Instantly he knew he should've made those phone calls when he'd had the chance.

"Where have you been!"

"Around. Why are you at Wal-"

Paulina's glare stopped him dead, and Star gave him a vaguely sympathetic look in the background.

"Don't get after me about being at Walmart; you know the uptown boutique got smashed by Hephaestus and I don't like Rosy ' s ."

"The staff are not out to get you, Paulie," Danny tried soothing, looking around to make sure Ember wasn't about to break down an aisle.

"Says you! Carmellia has it out for me, and I can't figure out why."

"She's right this time, I don't know what Camelia’s deal is,” Star said sagely,.

"This time?" Paulina pressed, side-eyeing Star.

"I refuse to believe you really think Anna cares."

"Right! Me and my girlfriend in a Walmart! I'm getting interrogated for being a bad boyfriend?" Danny reminded them. Trying to parse through random drama was inviting a headache he didn't want; he'd heard enough about Anna as it was.

"Two days!" Paulina wailed, ditching her plans to have it out with Star.

Behind her, Danny could see an invisible-to-humans Ember phase in through some random pans, her look of mischief quickly turning to a scowl.

Danny could feel pressure behind his eyes all of a sudden. Maybe if he could get stressed enough it'd release him from this mortal coil and he wouldn't have to do this.

Why was he even doing this, actually? He and Paulina weren't- well they were, but...

He scrubbed at his eyes and ignored Ember.

"Sorry, sorry! You know I get too busy for my own good, and this morning was a circus. Did you hear about the grocery store on-"

"I don't care about Phantom, dummy, I care about you!"

Okay, well, that was a yes, and Danny could feel himself reflexively tense. Usually he was better at handling her worse snits- Ember was good practice on her bad days- but the whole day just had him so off-kilter

Ember mimed something incomprehensible behind Paulina, and all Danny could do was squint at her.

"Is there something behind us?" Paulina asked, turning.

"A shade is trying to be a menace- look, I am sorry, it's just that my day keeps collapsing in on me at total random. Something’s got a vendetta, I think."

It wasn't a bad excuse given Danny was constantly targeted, and Paulina seemed to know as much as she pursed her lips. Ember meanwhile looked insulted at being called a shade and vanished to somewhere else.

"I don't know why everything always happens to you."

Star shot him a knowing look from behind Paulina even as Danny shrugged, and he had to remind himself that Star didn't know either. Being a Fenton was a fair assumption as to the cause, though.

Ember reappeared with a cone of twine in one hand, pointing at Paulina with the other, and Danny abruptly had a very good idea of her intentions as she tied a piece into a knot and gestured wildly.

He didn't pretend to hide his reaction this time, shaking his head no with a pointed look.

"Let's maybe ditch the kitchenware aisles- I can get tupperware another day. I don't have a ton of cash, but we can walk around the store for a bit?" he offered.

It'd give him an excuse to go touch other, different things. Mostly women's skincare products, but he wasn't going to be picky right at this second.

"Must be one annoying shade. Yeah, let's go, you can be our shampoo sniff tester. Serve your prison time for being a shit boyfriend," Paulina agreed, moving to grab him by the wrist.

Ember was positively steaming in response, and the world went in slow motion as she made eye contact and lunged for Paulina.

He knew the drill; Ember wouldn't stop until he tried out what she'd just suggested.

He wasn't fast enough to keep her from slamming Paulina backwards into the shelves, most of the pots and pans thankfully too heavy to be dislodged by the jolt.

His hand was already snapping out to Paulina as the two of them briefly thrashed.

"Jesus Christ what is WRONG with-"

He could feel his hand phase into Paulina, and with one slip-second panicked beat on his end he knew what he had to do with the threads.

The world realigned with an almost sickening crunch , and he abruptly remembered he was in fact single.

What a way to get implicitly dumped.

Ember shifted from stunned to vaguely smug as she came back into visibility, obviously proud of herself for the stunt.

Lifting a few more inches above Paulina, Ember sneered down as she readjusted her fake mustache.

"Well that settles it! Sorry hun, I've been helping Phantom find time anomalies allll day. Apparently you were one- Told you, Fenton. Now, shoo."

"What? Shoo?! Screw that, did I just get-" Paulina began, ready to lay into Ember.

She remembered who she was talking to as Ember made a vague but perfectly recognizable gesture of reaching past them, the one that happened when she was about to pull her guitar out of nowhere to ruin your day.

Paulina suddenly had a vested interest in power walking away, leaving Star bewildered in her wake.

"What the fuck?" Star asked, the simplicity hitting harder than any metaphor.

"I guess we weren't actually dating?" Danny offered, cringing in on himself as Ember rose another two inches in the air.

"That fucking sucks man, you were infinitely less shitty than her usual line-up."

"You can sell Fenton to her some other time. You go away too," Ember commanded.

Star rolled her eyes, but otherwise got out of sight quickly.

"Should I like... text her about this?" Danny asked blankly.

He could recall a fair number of dates,; they got on each others nerves plenty day in and day out, but Paulina had always been so shockingly tolerant of his cover story of seeing shades, and his constant vanishing, that it was only fair play for him to never press about all the ways the popular mask cracked.

"I think you should accept being single with grace. Now come on, tupperware's on me!" Ember hummed, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. With a smooth motion she flipped her hood back over her head, the mustache still affixed to her face.

"Ember, did you just steal cash from a register?" he asked reflexively.

"It's on me" was all she responded with as she guided him away from the kitchenware.

"Ember-"

"Free shit."

Danny quietly accepted the loss, faintly wondering how she planned to pay for tupperware he most certainly did not have in his hands.

"Okay. I've been dumped and am buying tupperware. Do you have a suggestion for what's next?" Danny asked, looking up at the fluorescents in unspoken prayer.

"Simple; it can't possibly be an object that's the problem. Or if it is, it's carried by a person. A person you can probably get your hands on!"

The cards flickered past again, birthdays of all sorts advertising themselves.

" Which person do you suggest, Ember?"

She gave an eyeroll to his question, like it was obvious. The checkout line came into view, followed by the self checkout terminals.

"Well I'm related to something else I guess, so not me; I'd say let's check home base first! Ya want some Nasty Burger? I'll have more cash to pay for tweedle-dum and tweedle-dumber."

She punctuated this by pulling out her wallet, now comically stuffed with cash, as they entered the self checkout bay.

"I want you to realize I don't have the tupperware with me."

She gave him a vacant look as she scanned him up and down.

He resigned himself to being silently dragged back to the kitchenware aisle, something about 'call Sam and Tucker anyways' being mumbled to him as they went.

Chapter Text

Tucker and Sam responded unfairly fast to Ember stealing Danny's phone and inviting them out herself, leaving Danny stuck going along with the plan out of obligation and fear of disappointing his friends.

Oh, and also, free food. Free food was nice

The vague pinch in his head hadn't subsided by the time they flew to Nasty Burger, and he was hoping it wasn't a real migraine trying to brew. He didn’t need one, to say the least.

Ember proudly adjusted her fake mustache as Sam and Tucker entered the restaurant, smoking from underneath her hood in over-burning pride.

To which he'd say he could steal things too, he just had standards .

Conveniently, those standards weren't high enough to forbid him from mooching off of her.

Sam raised a hand in greeting, power walking over. Tucker rolled his eyes and meandered at a pace most would ascribe to snails, eyeing the place's cleanliness somewhat critically.

"So! Help needed with-!"

"Sam! Restaurant! Ears!" Danny wailed.

Everyone's incapability to keep basic secrets wasn't new, just frustrating.

"Yeah yeah. So we're hunting down timeline differences in a modified fetch quest?" she asked, twice as blunt as she would've been before.

Valerie did not look up from her phone hidden slightly under the counter.

"Yup! Got any weird deja vu's to report?" Ember asked brightly, placing a hand on Danny's arm and steering him into some seating.

Sam slid in easily while Tucker hovered, eyeing some crumbs on the floor.

"They put the nasty in the burger, Tuck. Suck it up or stand," Sam said automatically as Danny and Ember frowned at him.

Tucker raised his hands in surrender, but didn't sit.

"Hand me the wallet, I know everyone's orders," he demanded.

Ember was unbothered as she fished it out of her pocket, the wallet readily given. Danny was left staring, trying to figure out how concerned he should be, because he had no clue why he was staring actually.

He could deal with whatever it was later, when he wouldn't have to launch across a table to touch people.

Ember elbowed him for staring, and got an elbow back, which got him a new elbow back, which as he raised his own elbow a second time got a flat look from Sam.

"She started it."

"What's the line? I don't care who started it, I'll finish it?"

Danny stuck out his tongue, which only prompted Sam to do the same.

Tucker quietly slipped into the booth seat, also sticking out his tongue.

"Cat got everyone's tongues or what?" Ember asked, blatantly complaining.

"Okay though, seriously. We were called for a reason. What's the deal?" Tucker asked.

"I mean, I was clear on the phone earlier about what I'm embroiled in," Danny said, frowning as he thought.

"Is it getting embroiled if Clockwork puts you up to it?" Sam asked, staring absently at the menu in the holder like it might hold an answer.

The pinch in his head pulsed briefly.

" Yes. It absolutely does, because this should not be my job."

Danny sighed and put his head on his closed fist, sending a pleading look towards them.

“Look, part of this is checking everything, even you guys. And having friends called up isn’t a bad thing either.”

"Definitions notwithstanding, I mean... Do you really think we're dangerous right now?" Tucker asked. Sam and Ember frowned at his tone.

Hmmm, that pinch again...

"It's not about possible danger, it could well be good intentions backfiring that you just wouldn't have done if it weren't for the timeline changes."

Tucker nodded in contemplation, and Danny leaned back as Sam decided to dissect ways anyone at the table could even do that.

“Look, it’s going to be a little weird, but could I-” Danny started to ask, putting his hands down and leaning forward.

"Table five!" Valerie called, not looking up. Tucker didn't even give him the chance to be productive, up to the counter in a flash.

"He's motivated today," Danny mused.

"What?" Ember asked, confused.

Danny would've followed up on that, but Tucker was already back with the trays and handing out food.

Danny was happy to focus on picking up his own food, only barely watching everyone else get their food and arrange themselves.

He had to stop as Tucker stabbed his salad violently, pointing at Danny with the fork still speared through a tomato.

"Your suspicion-"

Danny didn't wait this time, because while he still couldn't place what was bugging him something nagged at him.

Phasing at his waist to lean through the table and grab both Sam and Tucker earned him a dirty look from Sam as her burger paused in midair, but he was a man on a mission.

With a horrid snap in reality, both Sam and Tucker paused, looking at each other in bewilderment.

Sam quickly eyed her very meat-containing burger, and moved to swap it for the salad Tucker had been so eager to wave around just seconds before.

Tucker, after a few seconds of silence, suddenly bent double.

Danny would've panicked with everyone else, but Tucker was already up and out of his seat and heading toward the bathrooms.

Everyone sat in silence.

"So. Fifty bucks says he destroyed his guts with some veggie-laden breakfast," Sam mused, crunching on lettuce.

"I'm not crazy enough to take those odds, 'cause he totally did," Ember sighed, leaning back and fixing her gaze on the ceiling tiles.

"Is anyone else concerned about that, or is that just me?" Danny pressed.

"I mean, he got some vegetables in. Presumably ones that weren't lettuce. I call that a win," Sam said, continuing to crunch.

"You have to be clearer about what’s weird, poplar tree," Ember huffed, still staring at the ceiling as she spoke. The mustache casually detached from one side as she spoke, barely hanging on. Ember did not deign to fix it.

"That's worse than the rest of them today," he groaned.

"Words."

"Fine, fine! If he ate the salad, and assumedly ate some veggie breakfast, while he was, like, immune to vegetables or whatever, then why run to the bathroom all of a sudden now that I fixed it?"

Ember and Sam did seem contemplative about the discrepancy, but Sam shrugged.

"I don't think it's that deep. The food is probably still in his stomach either way, so now he has issues."

"Yeah but five seconds? I feel like that's a ten minute thing, at least."

"Let's play 'Did Clockwork say something that'd be helpful so we don't argue for ten minutes', where I ask you if they did that. So we don't argue. For ten minutes," Ember huffed in frustration, sitting straight suddenly. The mustache fell off at the disturbance, leaving Ember fumbling to get it back on.

Danny scrunched his face in contemplation as Sam stabbed a crouton with fervor.

"Mmmmaybe."

"’Maybe’ is not a good answer," Ember argued, trying to find the skin-safe glue in her bag.

"Look, they said something about the timelines being more of an imposition than true- so I guess he was just asymptomatic until I fixed it?"

Danny could practically feel the 'this action will be remembered' type notice appear as he said it, but he couldn't piece together what for .

"Okay, we've solved Tucker's digestive issues by verifying he is most certainly having them. Who else have you checked today?" Sam asked. By this point she was mostly rhythmically stabbing the greens with no higher purpose.

"Er. Paulina was one, and I got dumped. I think."

"Dumped, what do you mean-" Sam started, face scrunching as the conflict in memory caught up to her.

"I never liked her anyways," she declared.

"Thank god . I know my thing is music but holy shit- makeup, makeup, makeup, modeling- " Ember ranted.

"Let's not be mean to my ex-girlfriend who got dumped through no fault of her or my own, thanks!"

"Is it ex if you never dated?" Ember asked suspiciously.

"Focus. Other people."

"I guess I should've tapped Star but I was preoccupied with being single. There was the worker at the electronics store? Or uh, the grocery store at that-"

"You owe the jar five dollars," Sam declared, pointing at him with her fork. Danny pointed at Ember with extreme dignity and grace, definitely hiding his blatant indignation. Definitely.

"I don't care who set off the sprinklers, five bucks to the fire jar."

Ember smirked for a second, ready to tease Danny for her crime.

Sam pointed the fork at her in turn, killing whatever smart comment she’d had loaded.

“You are not free.”

"Hey, Ember, did Tucker even give your wallet back?" Danny asked, now distracted by the thought. It wasn’t his wallet, but it was definitely his free ride on cash for a bit.

"Ah- Bastard! Give me a minute, I can-"

Ember was already partially phased through the seats and fading out of sight, her hazy outline breaking up more and more as she moved.

"Do not pickpocket him while he's on the toilet! Basic privacy!" Danny shouted, whatever protest Sam was coming up with in tandem lost to him.

"Bold of you to assume he has shame and bold of you to assume I'd care anyway! I'm getting my-"

There was a slightly crunchy explosion from outside in the distance.

"We were never getting through today without a scrap, were we?" Ember mused, fading down to an outline.

Danny stared at her as she stood and turned to walk through the wall, Ember quickly glancing back towards Valerie at the register. The wall smouldered where Ember's hair had most certainly not been turned off or down, the mark joining more just like it.

No reaction from Valerie.

With a heavy sigh he stood and transformed, intangible from the waist down to just walk through the table.

Valerie lifted one single middle finger, not looking up from her phone.

"Yeah yeah, I'm out," he gruffed, ignoring Sam threatening to add ten extra dollars to the jar debt as he also walked through the wall.

Chapter Text

"I AM HEPHAESTUS, MASTER OF-"

"Shutting the hell up?" Ember suggested helpfully, causally lying back on a street lamp. Her guitar had returned, and Danny was pretty sure the song she was starting to play was Wonderwall.

Danny sort of wished she'd find a new meme song to make fun of people with as he sighed out his very late signal that someone was here. It tasted like sucking on a penny, ozone, and wasted time.

"NO SUCH THING! TREMBLE BEFORE MY WRATH!" Hephaestus shouted, the lamp underneath Ember melting as he spoke.

"Boooo. Hissss," Ember unenthusiastically jeered, not moving from her mostly upside-down pose.

"Am I getting help this time or are you here to be my standing ovation?" Danny hissed, flying up to position and shielding himself as molten metal splattered across the street.

"I should go get a pack of tomatoes actually-"

"Standing ovation then. Outta my way."

Hephaestus was already moving to other targets he could melt and use as material. The already-melted metal sat uncollected though, so whatever streetlamps were made of probably wasn't his goal right now.

Danny was ready for near anything, which was why getting nothing as he flew was shocking. No stop signs launched at him, no mostly melted cars, nothing.

"What's your deal today!?" he shouted, flying in front of Hephaestus.

"I, HEPHAESTUS, MASTER OF THE FORGE-"

"Answer the question succinctly for once! Will it Obliterate you to do that?!"

Hephaestus responded by throwing a car at him, which was much better.

Not that it was particularly effective: Hephaestus's telekinesis released before the car slammed into Danny, meaning he could just phase through it.

Hephaestus had already turned to a concrete building, fixated on it. Danny was pretty sure it was the abandoned butcher shop, which for all he knew had plenty of metal knives still in it.

"Hey!"

Danny did not get a response, and he was starting to get a bad feeling beyond the increased pinch in his skull.

"I got the tomatoes!" Ember shouted, waving from afar.

Hephaestus slowly moved his hand, an inferno wrapping around the building.

While definitely a poor response, Danny was sort of frozen in watching. What did Hephaestus want with concrete ?

Even Ember paused in palming tomatoes to throw, trying to parse out what was happening.

"Dude! What?" Danny asked, flying uncomfortably close just to yell, getting a melty lamppost splattered on him for the trouble. Hephaestus didn't respond otherwise as Danny sputtered, picking off droplets.

Ember threw a tomato, nailing Hephaestus and thankfully not Danny in one shot.

"I, HEPHAESTUS, DEMAND TO KNOW WHO HAD THE GALL TO-"

Ember launched another tomato.

Danny watched from the now slightly melted concrete, trying to remember if the melting point of concrete was a fact he knew as he tapped the cooling mess with his boot.

The rusted gear controlling thought in his head shook loose, and he was gratefully more concerned with what was going on than what temperature that had required.

Hephaestus should know who had the gall, but even now Danny could see his goggles turn in the light to look at something else.

Something else, something else, something else. His laser focus left a lot to be desired on a good day, but this was ridiculous.

Ember had stopped, likely on the same thought path as Danny. Simply having darted out of sight was enough, Hephaestus now barely seemed to register the splattered tomato slime.

They drifted towards each other as Hephaestus flew in a seemingly random direction, frankly looking more lost than anything.

"This isn't normal," Ember started.

"No way it's anywhere close, no. Did someone give him a concussion?" Danny asked.

"In what brain?"

"I don't know- can cores get bruises?"

"No."

Danny could suddenly taste electrical wires and gunpowder as air forced itself out from his lungs mid-breath.

Skulker pointing a gun at them both was just the cherry on top as he was busy wheezing.

Ember already had her hands on her guitar strings, to which Skulker held up one hand in extremely awkward parlay. Notably, he did not release the gun with the other.

Hephaestus was busy melting more streetlamps, some of which were even getting vacuumed into his spare metals pack. Some, not all, which was honestly more weird than him leaving them in puddles.

"Lucky you, you are not my target," Skulker confirmed, looking up at Hephaestus.

"We don't know either," Ember informed him curtly.

"It hardly matters if you can help with his condition, as first he must be restrained. While catch and release is not especially my style, we align for now," Skulker told them, his tone neutral.

"Ha! And what's the punchline?" Danny asked, trying to keep his eyes on both Hephaestus and Skulker. It wasn't working very well, the sun making brilliant green spots in his eyes as he stared.

Hephaestus was wandering back, a car getting lifted and melted. Molten metal rained down on all three of them, and Danny was left swatting stinging droplets out of his hair.

Skulker seemed more annoyed at the drops, moving back to avoid the downpour.

"No punchline, outside of whatever damage you see fit to be mad about."

Danny didn't have a good feeling about teaming up, but the whole thing was worrisome Skulker would know better than Danny if something was horribly wrong as opposed to casually off, and here he was openly trying to get help.

But -

"The hell is stopping you from doing it on your own? How did he even get through the portal if he's this spacey?" Ember asked, nodding upwards. She picked a splatter off her guitar strings, obviously more pissed by that than any of the drops now trying to form to her scalp.

Skulker sighed, aimed his gun upwards at Hephaestus, and shot.

The blast was shielded, splattering worse than the metal around the street. Acid drops of ectoplasm ate through a couple millimeters of asphalt, concrete, or metal and dissipated like they had never been there to begin with.

"He knows all of my kits, and despite his confusion his reaction time has not dropped."

Danny couldn't take standing around anymore, floating a couple inches higher.

"You know what, you two figure out how bad we all hate each other on your own. I need to do my job , not stand and chat."

"How lucky I am that my goal is your job, anyhow," Skulker intoned.

"Don't leave me with this freak-ass loser!" Ember screeched, launching upwards with him.

"Stop talking to the freak loser then!"

"Fifty bucks for you to say ass!"

"Tucker has your wallet??"

Their bickering didn't stop Danny from launching an ecto blast, catching Hephaestus' attention again.

Hephaestus went on his self-aggrandizing rant in the meantime, and Danny used it to try closing the distance.

He'd need to land at least one hit on Hephaestus for the thermos to work, and with how much Hephaestus loved throwing things he didn't trust his distance aiming to neither get blocked nor redirected in panic.

"Let's rock!" Ember shouted.

Explaining how the guitar worked was harder than ignoring it playing away as he flew; most of the buttons were the sort of tricks that only held power if you didn't know what they were doing.

Though, rapidly Ember's hands were not on the simple ones, which Danny was going to have to take offense to.

"Way to give a guy a worse migraine!" he shouted, his head starting to pulse in time with the notes.

It wasn't necessarily painful, but there was a yet that sat heavily in his mind.

His distraction led to getting concrete to the face, because Ember's MO was never especially subtle and even in a mysterious haze Hephaestus could work out that Danny didn't have good intentions either.

With his yet achieved and no small amount of grumpiness he watched on from the ground, trying to ignore the sting of pride.

For one second it was like watching Ember the first time, fingers going up and down the fret as she blasted whatever meme song was in her head, just in a more heavy metal or punk style.

It was still Wonderwall getting played, which sort of sucked some of the magic out, but whatever.

Hephaestus usually wouldn't pause at her beginning bars, but the cognitive dissonance in him was obvious after a few seconds.

If Hephaestus had been uncertain about where he was before, now he had no clue whatsoever. Danny couldn't be totally certain about what delusion he was getting fed, but it clearly had something to stare at in the sky.

Which was his cue to do something, even if he could still feel the music in his teeth. 

His core hummed in an off-tone as he willed power into his hands, making him change his mind slightly. It wasn't like he didn't have options.

Hephaestus, so thoroughly enraptured by whatever was happening in his mind, didn't see Danny come from behind, the effort Danny put in was disproportionate given the clear distraction.

Up down and to the side, around that car and behind that sign. Hide, dart, hide again.

Skulker was giving him an entirely unimpressed look for it, but that was besides the point.

The point was that he got hit with concrete again for passing the invisible threshold where Hephaestus could sense him. Burning concrete this time, and Danny wondered if there was anything in concrete to even burn like that or if this was more weird ghost stuff.

Hephaestus clearly couldn't actually see Danny, which would be a hypothetical advantage if he wasn't also capable of picking up everything metal and hurling it in Danny's general direction.

Still, the problem of him letting go before Danny would've been hit persisted. Danny grimaced as he watched the interior of a car catch fire for having the audacity to phase through him, the now-totaled hunk rolling off down the block with ear splitting crunches and shrieks. 

It's not five dollars to the jar if Hephaestus used it as a weapon to begin with, right?

As the car rolled straight into a building Danny was glad evacuation was the one thing he could give Amity credit for. Strangers from all around marveling about the pamphlets and asking why they'd need something that comprehensive...

The music pulsing in his teeth stopped briefly, Ember  having hit the end of the song.

Despite the pause hypothetically giving Hephaestus a break in whatever Ember was doing to his psyche, he seemed more confused than before. 

Not that it stopped him from throwing more things around as Ember started playing Sandstorm, a rouge trashcan lid slamming into Danny as the effects of the song continued to lag.

Even as the world tilted from that lid Danny knew a chance when it showed.

He was abruptly face to face with Hephaestus, and he just as abruptly realized that he'd done this with zero plan beyond getting there.

Why is there so much reinforced concrete around here ?   was his only coherent thought as the predictable happened.

"LOSER" was the only thing shouted at him from his position on the ground, and while he wouldn't put it past Skulker to outright call him that he was fairly certain the tone was feminine .

Such things weren't going to stop him, even as light bursts zigzagged in his vision.

He was cool and powerful and totally capable of coming up with something!

He shot upwards at blistering speeds and decided on the way that his something was crashing into Hephaestus full force, metal silverware thrown haphazardly as a deterrent.

An ineffective one, Hephaestus too generally disorientated to really aim. Even before they were both careening through the air like planes with an engine on fire.

Danny could hear a shot from somewhere and Skulker cursing as he picked himself off the ground, and all around both him and Hephaestus was  the flash of a shield and another splattering of acid ecto.

Danny was starting to suspect Hephaestus knew Skulker better than either was willing to admit, because he was drawing a blank on how exactly he was getting tossed around but still winning while Skulker couldn’t get a real shot off.

Breaking from her determined meme playing, Ember struck a chord with one hand while the other fiddled with a knob on the body of her guitar, and around them turquoise flames soared high like discount hellfire.

Danny couldn't help his flinch backwards, though why he was startled at all was escaping him.

But then, maybe it had something to do with the majority of his left eye's sight being an offish neon green and yellow burst.

"Try out your new trick! See if we get something!" Ember shouted, and it took Danny a second to think through the tingling in his mouth and pain settling in a strip behind his eyes.

Skulker was huffing something about no tricks while Hephaestus was staring at the sky, likely fixated on some imaginary obelisk or something.

This distraction amidst already distracting blue fire did not mean Danny didn't get extremely punched, normal  style, for the crime of getting closer.

At this point, he was just hoping the bruises weren't going to be obvious.

Face to the ground he could see threads all around them both, and Hephaestus was a mess of knots that Danny couldn't say he particularly understood. But then, if he were meant to understand them, Clockwork would've been sure to make him suffer through the basic math on such things.

There were links everywhere though, and that was especially concerning as Danny ignored a pathetic ecto blast to his hand. How much was dependent on this?

Danny could feel Skulker shoot him from the side, but he was fixated now. Skulker shouting in the backdrop was meaningless to him.

He had to fix this, now, because this absolute mess just couldn't be good.

The mess didn't move at first, Hephaestus almost breathing in surprise as Danny's hand phased through him. He could hear Skulker's gun start charging in the background, an ominous warning as to his lack of amusement.

And then reality shifted, and Danny was holding Technus , instead.

Chapter Text

Nobody moved. Nobody flinched. Technus was kneeling in front of Danny and with only the barest movement he shifted his head, like he was processing the world for the first time that day.

The flames crackled ominously, and Technus slumped forward and kept going to the ground.

All the fire was put out almost instantaneously, both Ember and Skulker shouting at a speed Danny couldn't really process.

His brain was lagging behind on what it meant , but even blinking through the bright floaters in his eyes he could see Technus bleeding out onto the ground.

Or, bleeding wasn't right. Melting was better, it was just that the soft bits going first, which made the whole thing look alarmingly like bleeding what with it coming out his mouth and from underneath the goggle rims.

That was probably bad, and if he were in a better state he'd help, but Danny's spot on the ground was going to stay unmoving. His sense of balance had been taken with the trash can lid, and while he couldn't remember much else about the fight (except like, a car? somewhere?) he was pretty sure he'd taken his usual beating

He wondered if his memories of the fight had gotten addled by fixing Technus, given the fight style had to be different between worlds.

Just, nominally more ‘fire and metal themed’ than ‘electronics of the future’ themed.

Ember looked outright shaken as she looped her arms through Technus' and dragged him up to his feet, and right that second Danny was enamored with the question of if Technus has ever had feet specifically before.

He's pretty sure he has, but like, it's hard to think through the concussion.

"Perhaps the trick was for the best." Skulker finally spoke as he took Technus from Ember, bordering too quiet for Danny to hear.

Oh he was shaken shaken, huh?

"I'm missing something here. Not that he's obviously damaged, I'm pulling a D in my classes at least, but I'm missing the ‘how’."

Danny specifically didn't move up from the ground still, trying to shift his head to look over at Skulker.

Skulker was unreadable.

Skulker was unreadable a lot of the time anyway, the metal helmet programmed to show exactly what he let and nothing else. This time Danny was getting the feeling the carefully schooled expression was entirely natural, Skulker looking Technus up and down with care.

"I don't know, but we can't do this here," he declared.

Ember and Danny gave each other a wary look, the feeling clearly mutual. Skulker might not be wrong, but where exactly were they going to hold an impromptu parley?

~

"I don't want either of them here," Danny huffed for the third time.

"Stop being territorial" was Ember's rebuke.

Sam and Tucker trailed in through the abandoned theater's doors, awkwardly refusing to make eye contact with Skulker as Technus remained slumped.

"Isn't he going to be better off healing in the zone anyway?"

"Territorial. Knock it off."

"Explain your trick, now," Skulker growled.

Danny flipped upside-down in the air and held his hands up in semi-mockery, only barely going intangible for Ember's guitar whizzing through his midsection.

"Okay, look, even if I didn't want to screw with you, the whole situation is like drowning in an inch of water. There's a lot about the multiverses and time travel, and I guess Technus was overtaken by one of the other universes. They apparently lay on top instead of replacing, not that I know what that means."

Ember seemed to have something of a lightbulb moment.

"It means it almost Obliterated him."

"Ember. How did it almost Obliterate him?" Danny asked, already exasperated.

Ember waved her hand in the air with no connection to her stilted stammering, clearly trying to conduct her own thoughts more than communicate.

She stilled after a few seconds, tilting her head to look at the roof cave-ins like they held answers.

"It's like Tucker and the vegetables. He ate them, so it fucked him up. If I locked you in a box of like, ecto charged dirt, would you do good either? His core sure as fuck didn't."

"That sucked by the way," Tucker pipped up.

"You're lucky Ember didn't harass you for her wallet back," Danny snipped, trying to think. He could see cyan spots dancing dead-center of his vision, and he truly hoped the concussion would heal up fast and get rid of the things.

"Speaking of-"

Ember didn't get to get through her haughty demand before Tucker had it held out.

"Aha, I've got you well trained!"

"And I greatly dislike getting woken up at six am by whatever song you've decided you like now," Tucker agreed, nodding.

"Okay, so dimwit got murked by something other than Danny. Why do we care enough that he's here ?" Sam pressed, speaking Danny's mind.

"The portal's availability is unpredictable, as the Fentons do enjoy playing guard. Doesn’t matter if the Ghost Zone’s better. Besides, with him dripping..." Skulker said, like it was obvious.

Danny could admit he didn't need much imagination. The trail of evidence would be obvious, and send his parents into a fury that something had the audacity to be in their house.

“Have to admit, I wouldn’t have suggested it if I’d known this idiot was going to get this territorial.”

“I am not territorial,” Danny huffed.

Danny knew all hope was lost when it was Tucker who turned his head, looked him in the eye, and proclaimed “Bullshit!”

Danny could only roll his eyes at them and pretend the group opinion didn’t matter, turning away somewhat dramatically.

“It scans, somewhat. His best match for species is frequently territorial over the volcanic-” Skulker started.

“Ohhh we did NOT ask, thanks!” Sam huffed. The second Skulker opened his mouth to shoot back, Danny had tuned out.

It wasn’t worth the time or the headspace, given he could still feel his pulse way too much in his skull.

What was worth his time was looking Technus over again, the ghost slumped into a chair the lot of them had dragged to the center.

It was hard to explain the ways Technus looked off, but it was most certainly prevalent.

It was in the way his skin was a little too dull, the way his clothes hadn’t self-healed yet, the crack in his goggles that Danny had the horrible sense went deeper than surface…

Though, the greatest worry was that Technus hadn’t woken up yet.

Danny had an idea, and not necessarily a good one, but maybe he did know the problem.

Maybe it was drop dead easy for him to find out.

Nobody was focused on him as he crept forward, breathing slowly in and out.

Ghost detection wasn’t much of a misnomer, but the skill could be more useful than that if he tried.

The copper taste of pennies wasn’t gone, but the wasted time and ozone hadn’t gone away. The ‘licking a nine volt battery’ taste was back, at least.

The copper-penny part was just strange now that the whole alternate timeline thing had been solved, because it wasn’t really pennies he didn’t think.

He was pretty sure Technus loved copper in both forms, but for different reasons. Technus loved wires, and efficiency. Hephaestus loved the beauty, and what strength it had. Loved to work with it directly, as a forge master instead.

And, extremely noticeably, compared to memory it was new . Unusual.

He moved to shift closer, but his investigation time ran out as he was noticed.

“Fucker, knock it off! I’m not kidding, what the fuck’s your problem?” Ember barked, whacking him upside the head.

“I wasn’t doing anything!” he protested.

That was the exact point he realized the air was insanely hazy, both Sam and Tucker crouched down with their shirts over their noses to protect them  from the pointedly not-air.

“Bullshit! Some people in this room need to breathe y’know!”

Skulker, meanwhile, blatantly had a panel on his arm open, finger hovering over a button as he waited for this all to go slightly souther. His expression was begging for the entertainment.

Danny gave one last very-not-air exhale, ignoring the haze, and shook his head as the copper taste haunted him.

“I was just trying to check his health- he still tastes like fire. Or at least, adjacent to it? Hard to explain.”

The room was dead silent for a beat.

“Tastes?” Skulker asked, his helmet having gone dead still. Danny wondered if the button to turn expressions off was conveniently placed or if it was like, a giant red emergency button he’d have to lean to hit.

“I think the way it works is less important than the fact it does. Like, is contamination a problem here? Seems like the sort of thing that would be a problem here,” Danny insisted.

Even Ember was giving him an off look, though at his words she gave a slight headshake and refocused.

“It would totally be a problem here,” Ember admitted, turning slightly to Skulker.

In the background Sam and Tucker stood up slowly, the largely open theater airing out quickly.

“I… would wish it wasn’t a problem. Viable options for purification are limited, and risk time sensitivity,” Skulker admitted.

Danny considered Skulker lucky he’d already turned expressions off, the air vibrating like Skulker was crushed .

It was probably really bad then, though…

“Visit the Yetis, then? That’s their whole mandate- doctors and the hippocratic oath and shit,” Ember suggested, seeming unpressed by the problems this posed.

Skulker didn’t move for a half beat as his helmet shifted back into motion.

“I must admit they were not a consideration. Do you know if-” Skulker started, his tone almost pleading.

“I would have no idea, man. Fire and ice don’t mix,” Ember said, cutting Skulker off and shutting him down quickly.

Danny could venture a guess Skulker would’ve asked about how trustworthy the Yetis were or weren’t- it wasn’t like caution wasn’t generally warranted in the Ghost Zone.

Skulker gave a quick look to Danny, who could only shrug unhelpfully in response.

“I… will take this suggestion into consideration, then. Given his state, I think we should leave. Consequences are irrelevant, at the moment,” Skulker decided.

Skulker carefully picked up Technus, nodding to Danny and Ember in the sole iota of respect Danny had ever seen from him.

Sam and Tucker were not included; Danny had long suspected the only reason they made it onto Skulker's threat list was  that Danny and Ember would gladly go after him if he attacked them.

Skulker didn’t waste time floating upwards into the air, generally aimed towards one of the existing holes in the ceiling. With a telling clunk there was a lot of dust dropped and a pause in his ascent as he hit the hole, quickly flying through regardless of physical limitations.

Danny grit his teeth and refused to be mad that Skulker definitely did that on purpose, looking away as sunlight returned to blasting his retinas with green spots.

“So,” Sam started. Everyone waited in silence, watching the dust filter down. “What now?”

“Honestly, I say party time. It’s been forever, and today’s been eventful I’m sure.,” Tucker said, clearly rushing to get the words out.

“Now do we mean party, or PART -” Ember started, moving her guitar into position to shake the walls with noise.

“ Don’t you dare, ” Danny hissed.

Her smug smirk froze in place, hand hovering over the fret as she contemplated whether or not she dared.

“Dude” was all Tucker said.

Danny could only pinch the bridge of his nose and let out a whistling hiss, Sam and Tucker grimacing as the sound hit their human ears wrong.

Ember frowned and slowly let her grip relax from its’ ready stance, looking him over.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m very concussed and unhappy. And we still need to solve the multiverse thread stuff.”

"Have you checked with Vlad? It feels like something that should be done," Sam asked somewhat critically, shifting from foot to foot as she considered Danny's plight.

"No," Danny not-so-carefully admitted, not terribly enthused to go pester the man for his quest.

"I totally don’t want to go over there either, but if someone’s going to manage to blow you up…" Ember added, unhelpful to Danny’s desire to not go to Vlad’s.

“Bad part is I can see it too,” he mumbled, mostly to himself.

"Well, are you going to check?" Tucker asked, the look in his eyes indicating he knew the answer.

"Can't a guy not really wanna ring up his old enemy and defeated future self and go ‘by the way there's multiverse stuff neither of you understand; yeah anyways heading out now, don't think about that too hard’," Danny huffed, miming walking out through a door 

"Well, then I reserve the right to devote tonight to party night," Tucker declared, unshakably confidently.

"And what is your definition of party?" Sam asked, dooming them all.

Chapter Text

Tucker had to be not-so-gently reminded that everyone was presently banned from Sam's place after Danny had managed to melt a TV, but that hardly stopped him from saying they could just bring the party to the theater with some elbow grease.

Whose elbow grease seemed to surprise only him; Danny was injured, Ember's definition of help was no such thing (likely on purpose), and Sam wasn't very amused with this nonsense to begin with.

Ember was at least nominally pretending to help as Tucker was hoisted by his own petard with the whole thing, hand against the large speaker for balance as Tucker huffed and puffed while carrying it.

Sam hadn't not been roped into helping, but instead of hard labor she was prioritizing looking busy with untangling cables by the TV Tucker had already brought in.

"Is it me, or do I not recognize this stuff?" Danny asked, going cross-eyed just looking at the nest of wires Sam was handling.

"I can't even pretend; I don't think this stuff was even my backup stuff," Sam admitted, trying to pry a braided cable out of the knot to end all knots.

Danny didn't know much about electronic brands, but he could've guessed as such by the look and shape of most of it.

"Where did you two get this stuff?" Danny asked, projecting his voice slightly. Ember gave a displeased look at the power usage while Tucker continued to play electronic tetris.

"None ya!" Ember shouted, grinning.

Danny let himself pretend for one second, but not a moment longer, that maybe it wasn't stolen.

It totally was though, and he could only be glad that they had done the unpacking either out of sight or Ember hadn't even bothered to steal the boxes, just yoinked the stuff through with her intangibility.

"Gift horses man, gift horses!" Tucker shouted as he dropped a speaker.

"Cops, one of these days!" he gruffed back

"They pay for ghost insurance I'm sure. Besides, what are they going to do, raid teenagers in a dead theater?"

"I think you're underestimating the vindictiveness of the cops, Sam,” Danny argued back.

Wires were shoved into his hands as a response, and he glared down at the knot. If they were new then how on earth had this happened?

"I think you're underestimating their fear of ghosts. Besides, you're lucky if they aren't convinced we’re screwing in here,” Ember declared, slapping the top of the speaker theatrically.

Danny shook his head and gave a pointed ew in response, trying to parse out why Ember would bring sex into the mix.

"What do you mean ew. Are we not good enough for you?" Tucker asked, almost convincingly insulted .

"Yeah, aren't we?" Sam deadpanned, still working at her wires. A few of them had even managed to get plugged in.

"I'm more concerned with getting asbestos in awful places than anything else," Danny sighed, refusing to rise to their heckling.

Tucker paused, thinking as he examined the wire ports on the speaker.

"This place was built after asbestos was banned, right?"

He received silence in return.

"Maybe?" Ember offered, sounding like it was more out of pity than anything else.

"Lung cancer later. Game night now," Sam declared, rapidly plugging things in. There were still some knots left, though Danny doubted that would stop her for long.

"Where are we stealing the electricity from?" Danny asked, eyeing the daisy chain of extension cords.

"Worry not! For we have electricity," Tucker offered. His everything indicated he wasn't answering on purpose.

Danny gave another suspicious squint to the mess before turning back to the one in his hands.

He was still going very cross-eyed looking at it.

"What am I even holding the wires to?" he asked, trying to power through the way his eyes varied between not responding and slipping off of their own will.

"I think it's the spares?" Sam answered as she plugged another cord in.

Danny let the knot hit the ground, floating just above to discourage a mad dash from Sam, and crossed his arms.

"Har har, very funny to give it to the guy fresh out of a fight."

"You've had so much worse than being punched!" Sam defended, leaving the wire hookup in the dust as she stood to go face to face with him.

The distance, or lack thereof, didn't help his focus.

"Punched? Try getting hit with concrete! Multiple times! And a trash can lid!"

Sam huffed and shoved him, Danny making a snap decision to be as dramatic as possible and spinning backwards in the air for the sheer drama.

His gravity defying backflips had the downside of making all the blood in his head slosh around like that one old Nightmare On Elm Street scene though, and after a couple he was left blinking away cyan.

He wondered why he’d thought that was a good idea to begin with.

Sam for her part was busy laughing at him, as Ember and Tucker seemed to finally decide on the last speaker’s position.

Danny gave a high-pitched whistle of distress, Sam and Tucker cringing again in what was not-very-affectionately called the kettle from hell noise.

"Fuck man, think he actually cracked your skull open this time?"

Ember was near him now and he didn't remember her getting from point A to point B in the slightest.

Her being near was the least of his concerns though, the strings of time laid on top of her also barely processing.

It was like seeing double, but the top transparent layer was different. Her casual clothes didn't hang as she floated upside-down to meet his eyes, instead her rockstar outfit clung as tight as always. The full makeup sat loud and proud on a modestly confused blank expression, overtop her solid-looking concern.

The strings were going everywhere in the background of his mind, so many seeming to reach towards-

"Hhheeeey?" Tucker pressed, carefully waving his hand. No afterimage was laid on top, and looking to Ember again revealed that it was gone entirely already.

"I think he cracked my skull this time," Danny informed them, tripping over already slowly said words.

Nobody seemed pleased, but there wasn't much to be done about it. Danny would heal in a matter of hours compared to the normal person's weeks, so the only thing to do about it was to carry on and refuse to sleep for some time.

"Okay, well, maybe we should go over heeereish instead?" Sam asked, not really suggesting as she grabbed his ankles and used his natural float to steer him out of the way.

He was hard pressed to be pissed about it as he was moved away from anything they desperately needed to stay intact for their night, the fear of something getting destroyed because he lost it ever present.

He ended up with a view of the TV at least, absently watching the room as Sam pulled him up from the ground another few inches and left him there.

"Well, now even if you'd wanted to, that Plasmius visit is gonna go nowhere," Ember hummed, sliding up towards him in an attempt at comfort. He was pretty sure it was comfort, anyhow.

"Didn't wanna... but like, probably would've been productive," he admitted.

With most of the bright floaters gone he was left examining her face, watching her hair flicker like it always did. He saw nothing strange, though was tempted to try squinting for strings.

And then his eyes unfocused and proved why that was a dumb idea.

"Christ, man, I can see you lose reality," Ember complained.

Danny only shrugged, looking back to Sam and Tucker. The two were busy trying to hook up the ancient PS2 to the TV, and were having a spirited argument about what everyone should play.

Danny wasn't sure who was winning or what the games were, but they were both very devoted to their own sides.

"I should break that up," Ember remarked absently as Tucker seemed to pass the barrier between good natured and genuinely frustrated.

"Probably," Danny agreed as Sam's hackles seemed to raise.

With a sigh she re-equipped her guitar and hit a C, the sound reverberating through the room.

Both of them seemed slightly ashamed as she glared, and the argument went silent overall as Sam pulled a third game from the pile and offered it.

Tucker grimaced, but nodded.

"Hell yeah, what are we playing?" Ember asked.

Danny closed his eyes and tuned the whole thing out, having zero intention to move from his position to try playing with anyone.

He could feel the pulse in his skull to say the least, and was probably lucky that even his hair follicles didn't hurt somehow.

Though that part might have more to do with his ghost form. He wasn't sure how his biology would achieve that.

"Hey, you playing Kingdom Hearts with us?" Ember asked.

"That's single player?" he responded, the question unspoken.

"Half hour timer," Sam and Tucker informed him in sync.

"Okay, well, still no. I'm gonna watch the ants on the floor and wonder how I got here."

Everyone rolled their eyes at him, otherwise taking his refusal at face value and turning away.

Familiar music played, and he closed his eyes and tried clearing his mind.

Everything would be fine, and there definitely wasn't a ticking clock in the back of his mind about the whole thing. He had more time than expected, if less than he wanted. He wouldn't have expected to have more than twenty four hours, so it would all be alright.

There was a muzzy blackspace in his mind, and suddenly he was being waterboarded.

"Get your head away from that floor. It's fucked up enough as it is," Sam demanded.

Shifting up a couple inches in the air as he sputtered, he also glared.

"I told you not to waterboard the invalid," Ember defended dully, not looking away from a gummi mission in Kingdom Hearts 2.

"The invalid can de-transform and space out on a beanbag chair instead," Sam snarked back.

"How long was I zoned for? Because by my count, like two minutes," Danny pressed, slowly shifting to be parallel to the ground.

It was a fantastic time to notice the theater had gotten pretty dark, a late dusk present in the spots of sky they could see.

"Like, two or three hours, man. Are you doing okay?" Tucker asked.

Danny had to consider, and it was maybe yes to him. The movement hadn't been awful, and his eyes weren't freaking out.

"So far so good. When the hell did we get bean bag chairs?"

"An hour ago. Keep up now," Sam joked, leaving him to start going right-side up at a snail’s pace.

Slowly and with caution he put his feet to the ground, white light fizzing in the dark.

He could've guessed he'd get another head-rush from it, but his left knee trying to buckle under him was new.

So not completely healed yet. He could work with that.

Ember didn't look away from the weird pirate level of Olympus coliseum’s gummi mission as he carefully shuffled over, the empty chair shoved into position by Tucker's foot as he played some app or another on his unholy abomination of a custom PDA.

With care he sank in, the pellets unpleasantly noisy as they shifted.

Ember swore at the TV as a giant heartless with drills for hands killed her, and Danny absently realized she had to be on one of the second or third tier levels. He suspected third.

He leaned back, and once again the world faded out somewhat.

"Should we let him sleep with a cracked skull?" he heard distantly.

"I mean, no, but it's also Danny. It's already been a few hours, and he was definitely mostly asleep before if he doesn't remember anything. Leave him alone," someone justified.

He didn't hear anything else afterwards.

Chapter Text

(It's the same.)

(They are not supposed to be here, not really. But they're curious and stupid)

(It's the same as he puts his boots on)

(The portal’s something of a joke, a bad punchline that'll never get a laugh. His parents are so obviously miserable over it and he just doesn't know what they thought was going to happen)

(It's the same)

(Sam eggs him forward, holding the camera up and grinning. Tucker’s equally amused)

(The footsteps echo all the same)

(The inside of the machine is a different metal to the plating outside, and while Danny's picked up a fair amount of metallurgy he's not sure what kind it is)

(But it's the same clangs every time)

(There are wires that he doesn't know enough about to say what they do. Sam is trying to tease him into saying something cool, but he's genuinely more focused on the machinery now.)

(He trips all the same.)

(He traces the event back over and over in a different, waking time. This isn't that time. He wishes he could say he remembered much, actually. To have a definite point.)

(Same as always, it's a blank spot)

(The human brain is not built to process something like a portal opening on top of its body. There's a flash, and nothing. He does his best to not resent that. Dying does not sound fun. It most definitely wasn't.)

(There's a mysterious point where he goes backwards in the tube. Maybe he stumbled back, maybe it was willful. Maybe the electricity flung him.)

(He can't see, and somehow the world tilts. He can't feel enough to say in the moment, but knows in retrospect he fell to the ground)

(He was half on concrete and half on metal plating. Both were cold, but not in the way where they were sapping his heat)

(No, all of that was already gone. Cold in the way that touching ice with numb fingers was cold. A sensation beyond one's range that processes as not helping at best, and painful at worst.)

(He is just as cold as the floor. The heat exchange is entirely neutral. He does his best to not wish it maybe hurt enough to shake him back to life.

(Then there's burning warmth around his wrists, and senses he's not sure he'll ever have again process it as life.)

(Life hurts, but he's awake, and now there's arms around him and that's burning warm too. Hot, even)

(That's different, somehow)

~

He'd say he woke up with a pounding head that overwrote the confusion of the dream but that wouldn't be quite right for expressing the sheer awareness of Wrong he woke up with.

He woke up capable of feeling every hair follicle on his head right down to which ones had two hairs and which had three. He woke up aware that his teeth had blood vessels somewhere in them. He woke up aware of exactly what that one anatomy lesson was going for when it asked kids to break down a simple motion into individual steps divided out somewhat by what muscles you were using or what bone was getting moved.

Despite moving a leg being a twelve step process, he was in the bathroom. Somehow. He was looking himself in the face in the mirror but he wasn't really sure it was him and wasn't sure how to make it become him again.

He could hear mocking voices, though he couldn't explain who they sounded like. They were asking how exactly he was pretty sure it wasn't him.

The reflection was unblinking at him as he stared, left knee trying to buckle while he was only vaguely aware of his grip tightening on the sink.

He was pretty sure, just pretty sure, that it was everything that tipped him off. Something subtle in the way his jawline was angled, something in the color of his eyes, something something something that was all delineating into the horrid strings.

He was staring at the sink basin and was pretty sure he’d stopped looking at the mirror because if he did he'd try and hit it, the fight response too well ingrained in him now to fully kill when he was far too out of the situation to stop.

The door clicked open, and for a second he could see Ember in her rockstar outfit, bored and confused.

Within a blink he was back in his own head. It was his own hands on the sink. He could still feel his teeth pulse but the hair thing had tapered off. He was just back and Ember was seeming pleased she hadn't interrupted anything more private.

"Ember, how the hell did I get home." he asked, his awareness of where he was actually following the beat after he said it, so maybe he wasn't as in his head as he wanted to be.

Her smile went to frown in short order. Danny didn't swear much, and while the group consensus was that ‘hell’ didn't count that didn't mean it was a common word out of Danny's mouth.

"SLinged 'ya over my shoulder and carried you, like the last five times this happened."

He was pretty sure in any other situation her tone would be clipped and pissy, but he was also pretty sure there was a cold sweat sheen to him by the way he was suddenly incredibly aware he was sticky and cold. It was probably extremely obvious he wasn't having a good time, so Ember seemed confused at worst.

"Right, right.." he sighed, trying to shift his feet back to a steady position underneath him. He was doing great outside of the possibly debilitating migraine, nothing at all to worry about.

"Hey, wait, why are you here? And didn't the shield…" Danny started. peetering off as information came back to him. Even if a lot of it felt like it didn't actually fit.

Above all else, Ember usually bailed by morning, chasing after something new and loud.

"Jesus, chill. One text is all it takes to get the thing switched off. And I'm here because we didn't solve the case, and lemme just say this shit’s straight up weird."

It took Danny a couple seconds of blinking to accept that his day would simply be this strange and continue on as such.

"Weird in what way? My life is pretty weird no matter what we do,”.

"Weird as in the way everything just fixes itself once you put your hands on it is freaky. I mean, cool, totally rad even, but this whole thing’s a total circus."

Danny would have argued, but Ember was back to being somewhat fussy and easily bored so there was a hand already around his wrist, pulling him forward.

With a yelp he went intangible instead of trying to catch himself as he simply tipped over, Ember letting out a noise of equal surprise as he dragged her down with him.

"Man, you cannot still be this damaged from Technus," she growled, pulling him up through the floor with a sharp ascent and carefully placing him back onto the tiles like he might slip straight through again.

He didn't really get the chance to say maybe he was before she threw a peace sign and started descending through the floor.

"Whatever your damage is isn't my problem; I'll be raiding the fridge," she dismissed, gone the beat after.

He was tempted to swipe at the empty air in some misaimed revenge but it wouldn't matter and wouldn't make him feel better.

The awful wake-up aside it wasn't the first time he'd woken up still destroyed from a fight, so getting different pants on and debating if anyone would notice the shirt being the same wasn't a novel routine.

He assured himself it'd pass soon enough; if he could die from post-battle stuff he'd be the rest of the way dead already. It would be fine, and he just needed to get the day over and done with and find the missing information to make the lunacy all click together in one really stupidly obvious ending.

How it would be stupidly obvious was something to be revealed in post only, hindsight and all that.

He wasn't quiet about his walk down the stairs, still gripping rails a little too tight but convincing himself the pain was already subsiding. He wasn't even dizzy.

"It's been the better part of a year and you still don't love me?" Ember pleaded jokingly, tossing herself over the couch with the drama of faux-fainting in shock.

"Nope, demon spawn or some shit still," Flynn answered, not looking away from the morning news as he ate a spoonful of something.

"And here I thought doctors were supposed to be kind."

"Lucky us you're not a patient. And even if it's shooting myself in the foot, maybe I should finish my degree before you toss that one around. I haven't even done my residency or anything, not that you know what that is."

"I think some of it counts, like if-"

"Nope," he informed, eating more of his mystery spoonful.

Ember wasn't taking the reciprocal heckling to heart, spinning in place over the couch back as she bemoaned her woes.

"Oh, doctor refuses to take patients! I'm too complicated of a case!" she cried, trying to subtly shove Flynn. It didn't work as he shifted away.

"Sorry to crash the party, I think," Danny informed.,"but what’s up that the news is interesting? And what are you eating?"

"The news is interesting because like hell I'm watching disney channel or old simpsons reruns," Flynn answered, eating another spoonful while not answering what it was.

Still, Danny finally caught the color and consistency as it went by.

"Is that the hazelnut spread?"

"Kitchen’s a warzone. I can find where your mom put her card and we can run to the gas station if you want for something real, but if that's out of the question to you then I'm not helping. This is your job," Flynn answered, watching the weatherman continue to lose the spark in his eye as he read off a series of alliterations.

"Warzone, if it's a warzone this has gotta be good," Danny huffed> He turned his head sharply as he shifted to leave and having to take a second to let the ensuing muzziness pass.

"-'s great, you should totally run in screaming," Ember said, voice fading in as he came back to.

"Superb."

He didn't waste more time trying to get to the bottom of the living room, the kitchen only a couple of steps away once he was so determined to make it there.

On the east counter sat a weenie-sized throne, a few inches taller than its much wider companion. To the north was a weenie drill sergent with a mix of weenies and hamburger buns doing push-ups.

Danny took a couple of steps back, straight into earshot of Ember and Flynn again.

"Huh" was all he said.

"There's a union between the weenies and the buns. I think the bun is regarded as the queen?" Flynn offered, eating more spread.

Danny's migraine was actually officially tapering off, but he was definitely too out of it to be dealing with this.

"Why do the weenies have enough of an understanding of gender and sex to crown a queen, as opposed to some sort of status marriage?" he asked.

"Who the hell knows" was all he got back.

Okay, super, fantastic. Absolutely besides the point of anything he needed to do today.

"Okay, while I'd totally steal mom's card and go get gas station burritos, I'm kind of strapped for time," Danny excused.

"Nope. You see the army drills. We are not having a second May Fifth in this household, and you're the one with the skill," Flynn unpleasantly informed.

Danny could only groan; it was hard to argue against Flynn above all else. He definitely needed to put the hammer down sooner rather than later.

"Eat anything we kill?" Ember offered, like it wasn't somewhat messed up to consume the corpses of their victims.

"Weenies and hamburger buns? You know, I think I'll pass," Danny coldly informed, stepping back into the kitchen.

"Hey, it's a waste otherwise!" Ember shouted, flying to his side at unprecedented rates.

"I am at least getting the orange juice and drinking it first. Like, sue me. They're not hostile right now," Danny huffed, walking to the fridge. The weenies and buns continued their drills, running laps around the L counter as the sergeant held up an egg timer.

The barren shelves implied a lot more than buns had hit the sentience threshold overnight, the containers largely the only things left.

So he was definitely going to have to track down the ham slices as well as the mashed potatoes...

With a sigh he pulled the juice out, cringing as he successfully predicted the next event.

With a twist of the cap, a vibrantly orange blob ghost and ghostlets poured out.

"Cool. Great," he sighed.

Ember seemed to be contemplating the viability of a straw as she eyed the blobs, the lot of them lazily floating past her face.

"You know what? Screw it, this is already old," Ember declared, pulling her guitar out of thin air.

Danny did his best not to flinch at the noise as the weenies and buns went still, and with a couple more strums there were a lot more coming from the cabinets and vents.

A weenie and bun with paper crowns fell from the ceiling onto the kitchen island, and Ember seemed satisfied with the mess as Danny tried to puzzle out how they got up there.

Danny didn't look, but there was rummaging that sounded like silverware and a loud metal against granite type sound, additionally accompanied by a pained weenie cry, all as he kept pretending to be focused on the light fixture.

"Bon appetit!" Ember declared, holding out a dazed weenie. Danny knew the game well enough to know that this was a demand, not an offer.

"I don't trust where that thing’s been," he answered, dutifully aiming a finger gun towards the queen hamburger bun.

Pain zinged behind his eye as a hole was blasted through the bun, it’s face melting off even as the contamination remained.

"Non optional. Something something most important meal of the day, or whatever."

"How very convincing, or whatever," Danny snipped back, zapping the sergeant.

"Look, the hypnosis shit lasts like three minutes. Eat it or starve, because we do need to harass Vlad and dipstick version two."

Zap, zap, zap, zap. Obliterated.

"We will not be leaving this house otherwise and you know damn well I can make that happen," Ember simmered. He could hear her hair crackle at his side, the dutiful puffing up in full force.

Too fast for most people to track Danny's hand closed around the fork’s stem and took the obligatory bite out of the god forsaken weenie.

Ember watched him very carefully as his face froze half a chew in, considering how likely ecto-animated food was to give someone food poisoning just by the taste.

"Spit it out if it's that bad, we've got the sergeant still," she conceded, pinching the bridge of her nose for the drama.

Danny didn't hesitate, zapping more food as he zoomed to spit it out into the trash. Despite the way pain hammered behind his eye, he was dead set on killing this particular infestation. If he was going to do it he was going to do it right, as the weenies were vindictive as all get out.

He was tempted to rinse his mouth out with water, but making use of Ember's hypnosis was more important. Zap, zap, zap, zap.

With smoke coming from a few different cabinets, now with additional burn marks, he was shortly freed from the job. For now.

Ember stabbed the remains of the sergeant and held it out to him.

"Kitchen’s basically clear!" Danny shouted into the living room.

"The hells basically mean?" Flynn shouted back.

Ember barred her teeth in a blatantly fake grin, the lighting shifting in impossible ways as her teeth sharpened. Danny once again elegantly took the fork.

"Same as it always does! They're gonna be back, but even if I'd hunted them all down it's just another lost civilization for the next set of animated food to find!" Danny shouted at an unpleasant volume, biting down on the weenie shortly after.

The sergeant wasn't great but wasn't nearly as rancid as the king, and Danny would take that over forgetting to eat for eighteen hours again and wondering why he was dizzy.

Ember had gone back to looking perfectly pleasant, like Danny hadn’t just been begging for a fight in her eyes.

Flynn appeared in the doorway, eyeing the sergeant on Danny’s fork with great caution as he took in the state of the kitchen.

Danny shrugged and took another bite.

"I don't get why you insist on eating those things," Flynn said, side-eyeing Ember.

Ember only shrugged, biting into a bun as the queen’s paper crown fluttered away from it. Her face froze.

"I have no idea what the royalty got into this time but obviously it was something," Danny observed.

Ember calmly went to focus on spitting it out and washing the taste away, leaving Danny and Flynn to double check the kitchen.

"Do you think they'll buy infighting again?" Flynn asked absently, itching at stubble.

"They always do. When haven't they?" Danny asked back.

"I mean, we did pull the ceiling fan down once. Your mom was pretty obviously not sure about it, though your dad took our word and steamrolled her."

"We seriously gonna debate this?" Ember called from the sink.

Flynn seemed vaguely insulted, but didn't argue about it with Ember. Flynn's pointed side-eye indicated he regarded Ember as Danny's problem.

"Wash the taste out your mouth before you pick a fight," Danny huffed.

"I'm already done with that. Don't we need to harass Vlad? I seem to remember I'm not the one in a hurry."

"I never said Vlad, I just said I've got things to do," Danny denied. He couldn't remember if he had actually said Vlad at any point, but he was pretty sure Ember didn't know either.

"Sucks to be you! If there's anyone we know that's gonna blow up something spectacularly enough to Obliterate, it's those two."

Danny groaned in response, trying to back out through the doorway. Flynn blocked his way.

"Well, little man, I cannot remark on your state of affairs but it seems like you two are on a quest. One that seems deeply unpleasant but better to be over with quickly."

"Don't take her side!" Danny whined.

"Dude, whatever's going on I doubt she'd bluff you about Vlad," Flynn said pointedly.

"That doesn't mean I have to like it!" Danny argued.

"Literally just come with to make me shut up. You know you want me to shut up," Ember bargained, sliding over to his side and lacing an arm through his.

"Your problem. Eat something other than weenies before lunch," Flynn dismissed him. Instead of retreating to the living room Flynn swiped the spread jar off the table and meandered upstairs, leaving Danny with no recourse to shake Ember off.

"Let's go! I've been on you about it since yesterday, and we can finally just get it done," Ember hummed, gripping his arm tighter. 

Great.

Chapter Text

Vlad's mansion had gotten better hidden from the average person since everything to do with his future-past self had happened, but that wasn't really an issue for Danny or Ember.

That did not mean they enjoyed the addition of angry bushes, vines of unidentifiable genus reaching pulsing with frost as vines whipped out to hit them with thorns.

Danny was honestly wondering how Vlad had gotten them on the property, since any plant seemed to gain sentience just to eat Vlad last he’d ever checked.

Plants also gained sentience just to eat Danny in his experience, so he wasn't sure his future-past self made any more sense as the culprit.

Cold tingling radiated out from the puncture points, frankly less annoying than he’d expected. He’d been getting sweaty under the sun anyway, though that was weird enough on its own.

Ember on the other hand seemed miserable as the entry points started to welt by the time they were through the wall.

They'd have gone over, but one defense system Vlad had taken the time to warn them about were the lasers. The bushes were better.

Much better.

Their slow crawl onto the property was finally past the miserable part, the two of them darting to and from cover as if it would genuinely stop either inhabitant from shooting if they were annoyed.

Danny eyed the welts suspiciously on Ember, her eyes turning a veiny-green and puffy in as he looked her over.

"Do you wanna spend like five minutes sitting on their patio, or..."

"No, no, I'm doing great," she denied, lids squinted as she couldn't especially focus on him through the forming tears.

Ember gained a moment of visual clarity, gaze raking him over.

"And you?" she asked, clearly envious. Danny only shrugged. He'd say the cold was nice at this point, one mark on the side of his head honestly soothing the occasional lacing pain.

Danny continued to not answer by bolting for the patio, hitting the chair at inhuman speeds and sitting.

"I don't care how bad I look, we're not doing this!" Ember shouted, flying past straight into the mansion.

Danny sighed, mentally noting that he'd tried.

The challenge after the bushes was parsing out where the hell either of them would be in the mansion; it wasn't like Sam's where he was over regularly to know the layout

Granted, Danny could make an educated guess about a certain moody now-teenage, and he wasn't especially excited to be stopping by.

It was a good enough excuse to take longer and check the the unlikely areas as some of Ember's swelling went down, the cold on his arms waning as they went.

"Can you see straight now?" he asked as they scanned the mini-library.

He did in fact get smacked upside the head for his concern, but he'd expected that. On reaction power pooled into his hand, his arm snapping out and catching her wrist.

He didn't remember the next couple of seconds.

There weren't really black spots on his vision at first; his vision was black and spots of sight were blooming back into view as Ember rolled her eyes and examined her wrist.

"-taff, fucker. Think you got rid of one of the marks though," she observed, squinting at a less green and puffy spot than what the rest were further up her arm.

"Good, I guess?" Danny mumbled.

"Since we're done stalling," Ember started, grabbing his wrist before he could ask how him reducing the swelling would've worked. She was burning hot compared to him, likely her core trying to flush the ice out.

Danny shook himself to sense, pointing in the general direction of the right room. There was an extra beat as Ember waited and Danny dimly remembered that he should probably guide the way.

The walls on this level weren't built to stop anyone, really, so it wasn't difficult to cut straight through everything and stick their heads through the floor somewhere on the second story.

A TV screen flashed brightly, a game Danny didn't recognize off the top of his head colorfully informing viewers of the incredible damage numbers being achieved.

"What do you want." Was asked immediately.

Danny closed his eyes against the flashes, head pulsing in time with the light.

And here he'd thought he was past the migraine.

"Clockwork’s given me a task, so I get to go around trying to find multiversal timeline anomalies. Anything weird happening?"

Danny could see a set of animations keep playing as feet hit the floor, a tower of characters having thrown from the bottom to put most of it somewhere else.

Red eyes looked down at them, and Danny absently observed that he didn't even look mad this time.

"You should probably check on Vlad if that's your goal. Anything about me I'm pinning on the new body," he huffed, not moving back to the bed to dismiss the interaction.

"How'd the first one even melt?" Ember asked.

He scowled, waiting.

"And where exactly is Vlad?" Danny asked.

"Fruit jerky is in his bedroom, wasting away like an anemic Victorian. Don’t burn my floor on your way out."

The conversation was still not dismissed, and even through the haziness in his head Danny could put together that he was genuinely concerned.

Danny slowly sank through the floor, followed by Ember and him.

"You figure out a name yet?" Ember asked, innocently by her standards.

"If people keep asking I am straight-up going to steal a name and make someone share." He snapped.

"Fine, fine!"

It didn't take long to get into the distastefully ornate master bedroom, Danny zeroing in on the suspiciously person-sized lump atop the Alaskan king bed.

"Wakey wakey, fruit loop, someone’s worried about you!" Danny announced, pushing through the world tilting as he touched down on the mattress to grab the sheets and pull while he made them intangible.

Danny regretted being mean instantly.

"Curds, he got worse" sounded off behind him.

Vlad just looked... bad. By any standard. The already-pale man now bordered on translucent, sweat slicking down every inch of mangy hair as he was curled in assumedly-pain.

His breathing was shallow as he shifted, and even for a halfa it was way too shallow to be good. Danny wasn't even sure Vlad had woken up at his shouting, the absent twitch just as likely a reflex as a response.

He reached, strings differentiating themselves from the background and foreground. Vlad had a knot right where his core ought to be, broken strings shifting slowly in what Danny suspected was a violent flail for stability.

He kind of resented not getting to look at Technus much, as the memory might have provided a hint or three.

He pulled gently, trying not to bruise the already-damaged man.

Slowly the knots stalled, and abruptly gave sometime after he put enough pressure to bruise a rib.

Vlad shot straight up in bed, headbutting Danny as a result.

Danny, who was not ready for that to happen, lost another several seconds of awareness.

Danny suspected he'd been hastily shoved off Vlad and pulled upwards as he came to, in an awkward position on the mattress away from Vlad instead of on or still floating over him.

"I think we should all just be glad we stopped by, honestly," Ember was arguing, not looking at Danny as her death-grip on his suit  to keep him upright shifted. Vlad seemed frustrated, sweat not anywhere near gone as he instead breathed heavily, bordering on gasping.

"I missed something here," Danny murmured, shifting to hold his own weight. His future-past self had only barely gotten started though as Ember let go.

"Oh, child, it’s just a little silent migraine, nothing of concern! Oh, child, I suppose it's not so silent but ah, what would I be to be brought down by a measly headache," he mocked.

"And I suppose you've got a recommendation for the future?" Vlad fumed, still breathing too heavily.

"Not continue the spar, idiot! Now we have to see if the fire giants will go anywhere near your effed-up biology, because someone couldn't resist flooding his body with the wrong element!"

Ember raised a casual eyebrow at Danny as not-him specifically avoided swearing; Danny was pretty sure his look back would've been killer if he weren’t still blinking light bursts out of his vision.

Even as he turned his head he noticed the cold pulses had swapped to hot, making his already-sweaty self even more outright displeased with the heat. Why this felt off on many levels continued to elude him, the pain pulsing any time he got close to a tier-two thought.

"You have no empirical evidence that that progressed the ordeal any faster!"

"Bullpuffs, Vlad! You were doing fine until the moment you started trying to pick fights and then you weren't and resting didn't help!"

"I think you should just swear, honestly," Danny muttered.

Despite his soft tone the room went silent, all eyes turning to him.

"Oh, real cute. Real organized. Look, I don't really want to be in the middle of... whatever this is? I'm on this mission because apparently something that's changed risks killing me."

Vlad was immediately frowning, leaning forward to examine Danny carefully. Ember closed her eyes and leaned back as she mouthed something, a silent prayer for this to not drag everyone off course.

"The hell are you doing looking at him, you're the one I'm going to have to fly to a hospital!" he huffed, whipping out a hand to smack Vlad upside the back of his head.

Vlad failed to dodge, forced to take it and turn a wrathful eye to his charge.

"Oh, and I suppose you're going to look him up and down yourself?" Vlad mocked.

"Christ alive, no, we need to get you examined."

"Brooding chicken of a child-" Vlad cursed. He was hit a second time for the audacity.

"Right... well, I think we should check him for abnormalities and then leave," Danny suggested politely.

"Didn't you just fix the abnormalities?" the him in question huffed as Vlad made the same mistake, shifting away in wariness.

"Wrong ‘him’, idiot. This is why you need a name, by the way," Ember sighed.

The nameless He threw his hands up in the air in mock defeat.

Danny didn't waste time when his head turned towards Ember, a smart comment likely lined up as Danny interrupted the banter by coming uncomfortably close.

Danny's hands closed around a knot of strings in his counterpart, and he immediately knew was dependent on something else. Half of it seemed freshly shifted, like fixing Vlad had already done something.

It almost certainly had done something actually, given that he was half Vlad and half Danny.

Danny didn't get to keep following that thought, a fist connecting just underneath his eye as he examined where the threads were exiting towards.

"Jesus cheezus, never do that again," he hissed, breathing heavily as Danny lost vision (again).

The seconds dragged as Danny stared into nothing, the interior of his mind something akin to examining the glitter of shattered glass on the floor.

"Earth to dipstick?" Ember tried cautiously, waving a hand in front of his eyes.

"Hrn- right. Alive, nominally. There's definitely something still off but it's not about him," Danny informed, enunciating carefully as his mind went twenty miles per hour in a body that needed to be doing sixty.

"His change is dependent too?" Ember asked, considering.

"Too?" Vlad asked as "Dependent?" Was simultaneously asked.

"Some stuff depends on other stuff. Like, the half of his core that was Vlad probably just turned back to fire," Danny informed, largely not moving on the bed still.

It was nice. Soft and cushy. Maybe he should blackmail Vlad into buying him a full-size one in the same style.

Or maybe not. Danny wouldn’t know what to do with one like it..

"No empirical evidence! If it was dependent on me, then why didn't you go down too!?" Vlad accused.

A finger whipped out to Danny, and everyone went silent as confusion took hold.

The one in question, to his credit, seemed to be in deep thought about it as Danny went back to trying to ignore the world.

It was a nice mattress, sue him.

"Well, that aside, now the part that was cold gets to be hot in a way that feels better," he informed flatly.

"Are you doing alright?" Vlad asked bluntly, shifting back towards Danny.

"Noooopee, we're not doing the concern thing from you two. Begone, mind ya business, and good day! Turn the lasers off while we're at it!" Ember shouted, grabbing Danny by the wrist and dragging.

On reflex he floated up to aid with the dragging, and as his mind spun to catch up he frowned at her for it.

The both of them were examined from top to bottom, red eyes doing their best to not be a look that could kill as arms were crossed and opinions clearly kept to himself.

"...Yeah, I'm not helping with this. I'll turn the lasers off and start getting the elder idiot to a hospital."

"You-" Vlad started, seeming briefly inspired to be enraged.

With a glance back to Danny it seemed to drain from him, the broken pre-rant ending with a sigh.

"They are like cockroaches," Vlad muttered, looking away from them.

The statement itched at Danny's syrup brain, Vlad clearly having put something together that neither Danny nor Ember had considered.

Ember on the other hand was busy trying to abscond, grip around his wrist tightening. Danny would deign to be more bothered, but it wasn't painful yet so it wasn't a functional kick to his psychology.

"Honestly, speaking of dependencies, maybe we should get the hell out of here and go back to figuring mine out," she declared, starting to drag Danny again.

"Didn't you threaten to kill me the rest of the way if I put my hands in you again?" Danny asked dully.

"Yeah, well, I'm out of other leads," she admitted, like she hadn't been serious about the lethality bit before.

He could respect that. It was necessary now, so it would be done.

"Let's get out of here. Have fun with the hospital trip," he dismissed Vlad and his counterpart.

His counterpart glared from where he was trying to hoist Vlad bridal-style, Vlad equally unhappy.

"I can almost certainly fly," Vlad said, defending his honor.

"The whole way?" Got sniped back, ending the argument before it started.

Rings sparked, and his counterpart was suddenly a mirror image. It felt wrong looking at him, the details clearly belonging to the body and not the person as the whole thing threatened to give Danny vertigo.

"Look, let me know later if you idiots managed to not die,” he dismissed.

Technically speaking he blinked out of existence with Vlad, though to Danny and Ember's special eyes, their vague silhouettes started rising upwards through the ceiling.

"And get the lasers!" Ember shouted after them.

The silhouette looked suspiciously like a middle finger was being held up.

Ember sighed and shook her head as Danny stared after them.

"We should go."

"The lasers aren’t off," he pointed out.

"The bushes changed, I think."

Danny paused as he remembered the bushes, the memory of frost now hot embers instead.

"I think I’d rather take the underground system," he argued back.

The netting wasn't exactly fun but if they found the power box and hit the timer they could fly faster than the netting would go back up.

"You can do that, I-"

There was an ominous click, and an absence of noise like a lot of electricity had just turned off.

"I think we got our lasers off."

Danny was promptly dragged without further word, the argument ending from almost getting his hand ripped off.

Chapter Text

He only barely convinced Ember to slow down enough for shouting to work about halfway between Vlad's mansion and anywhere sane to be.

"Not that I don't want to track down whatever your change is dependent on," he started once they were finally going somewhere under sixty over the roads.

"But," Ember prompted, rolling her eyes.

"I kind of need to check where your strings are actually going first."

Ember didn't answer, the main part of town already coming into view.

The rare person person they passed on their trip, be they by car or on foot, broadly refused to acknowledge their presence. A few pointed, but the raised hands were quickly put down by people with more sense.

"I think they’re are starting to get nervous about our obvious presence," he informed Ember dully.

"They're always nervous about me, the losers."

"Well, see, you've got this nasty habit of mind controlling people you think are annoying. Which is like, cool when you tell them to walk a block away, and not so cool when you get any other ideas."

"Yeah, losers. You're getting it," Ember nodded..

"Sure. Look,”Danny sighed, the conversation not worth the fight, “I'm trying to point out we should maybe try and be on the down-low today," 

He kept his eyes to the ground, less out of a desire to observe bystanders’ reactions and more because playing eyeball chicken with the sunlight felt like he had bad odds of winning.

"Us, subtle? The world will implode around us for trying," Ember dismissed him. The worst part was that she was right

"And-" Danny continued, "- there's the part where I need to check your strings."

They stopped on a dime in the air, and Danny could swear he felt the blood sloosh in his head again, 

As it would be a very bad time to black out he did his best to keep processing the world, mostly succeeding.

"We could probably logic it out, right? LIke some of the timeline stuff is just so weirdly obvious-"

The split image was back, but Danny had to ignore it to engage with Ember's attempts to weasel out of this.

"Ember, if it was obvious we would've found it already."

Abruptly he remembered the people scattered below, and suddenly he was further on edge. Even if nothing actually sketchy was going on, the crowd didn't need to see this.

The double on top of Ember just seemed distantly confused, dully looking at him with no meaningful will of its own.

"I'm just saying, we’ve probably got options, y’know?" she tried.

She turned her head as she spoke, the real Ember underneath trying to flash a sly grin to tempt him into eschewing their responsibilities in the name of promised fun.

The conflicting image only seemed to narrow its eyes and frown.

"Ember, no. Quit it. I'm running out of time, I know I am. Something's-" Danny tried.

Admitting he was doing bad sat wrong to him. He was supposed to pick straight back up, and never let anyone worry about the bruises. But the doubled image almost looked sad in time with Ember looking confused.

Danny didn't get to finish. The sky's blue changed to dusky purple, a tower of boxes flying high in the east as screams echoed across the town. Danny was left gawking as more towers burst upwards, his brain quietly loading in the background.

"We can get to this later," Ember finished, pulling her guitar out and moving to ready stance.

He felt like he could just grind teeth, but even looking back at her her double was gone and the moment was lost.

"We're kind of having an important conversation," he pleaded.

"We kind of have The Box Ghost on the loose? And besides, it can't hurt to check. We're like, what, two for two on our encounters meaning someone needs to go to a hospital because of this shit?" Ember pointed out, raising an eyebrow expectantly.

Danny would have to go on the record as being mad that she was right. The argument needed to wait. It was just that maybe he was going to be a lot meaner about it to The Box Ghost.

Obviously it was in bad taste, but on the days he was willing to throw himself around The Box Ghost made a fantastic punching bag.

"Let's go, then," he ground out, not waiting as his body protested moving again.

"Hell yeah! That’s the kind of wrath where we get to toss him around!" Ember cheered.

"Do not."

"Lame."

"Don't care," he bickered. ‘Monkey see but not do’ was the philosophy in play, given Ember's tendency to go too far before anyone had a chance to stop her.

"It's still lame. Like, of everyone what's he got to prove?" she asked, flying with him over the panicked crowds. She seemed amused about it.

"Same thing everyone else does," Danny answered, weary already.

He could feel his pulse in his head again and he wasn't happy about it; he had been hoping that it would simply burn itself out.

Danny clipped a stack of boxes as he went, earning a tight look from Ember as boxes suddenly swarmed around them.

"AHA! MY REGULAR FOES MAKE THEIR APPEARANCE TO FACE MY STACKS OF DOOOOOOM!" The Box Ghost shouted from further off, a wave of boxes hiding him from view.

Danny ignored the whine in his core as a wave of green flamed forward to the boxes. it felt like the sweat hadn't so much cleared yet from his back as doubled, and he wondered if he’d be able see his breath steaming if he could just focus his eyes, it definitely felt like his core was trying to vent off power.

"YOU WILL REGRET THIS BLATANT DISREGARD!! FACE MY WRATH- OF DOOOOOM!" The Box Ghost continued shouting as cardboard turned black and shrank to reveal him.

Danny lost a second as a box hit him upside the head, and that second meant there were suddenly a lot more boxes around him than he should've allowed.

It was fine, it would be fine. Danny took one breath in, let one breath out, and felt power pool in his head right behind his eyes.

He was losing more than just a couple of seconds for that, he thought, frozen in the air as muscle memory kept him floating surrounded in a maelstrom of cardboard, the ash thick and heavy.

"Fuck, talk to me here!" Ember swore, playing a song Danny didn't know to keep a barrier between her and boxes.

He thought, therefore he was. His mental grip on reality tightened the best it could.

"Having a pulsing migraine doesn't tend to help fights, Ember!" Danny yelled, lifting his hands again.

Boxes upon boxes shriveled in emerald flame, sparks of white lacing through the color.

"You could've mentioned that sooner, fuckface!" Ember sniped back, shredding the fret in a fluid motion. Boxes burst into turquoise flame in waves around her, and she swore as more took their place.

"Screw this, cover me when I black out!" Danny shouted, curling into the fetal position in preparation.

"I am not your-" Ember started, not getting the time to finish.

Danny could feel it pool in every limb, the power. Every joint locked on him, but he could feel the power regardless, building to a tipping point he could only barely control.

And then something hurt. Everything hurt, really, as the air filled with the ash of cardboard. 

The way the air sat on his skin hurt. He was pretty sure he was breathing a lot of ash too, which he wasn’t convinced his biology was immune to that breathing ash in was bad.

He'd drifted downwards most likely, and his hips hurt as the resident area of most of his aerial control.

He was tipped upwards to face the sky, at least by the way his neck had gone limp. The ash and boxes blocked too much to see any blue, the boxes glowing with green energy as they swarmed towards him. The light hurt.

He felt even more sweat form as he lifted his head, Ember floating right in front of him and playing for her un-life to keep the shield up. Her double was back, the panic clear on both of their faces.

Breathing in, breathing out. He could see something, feel something beyond the pain.

He could... he could do... something.

"Fuck," he mumbled, trying to turn his head to find the Box Ghost. That wasn't the important part, he knew, but he had to keep track of his enemies or they were both dead.

Ember missed a few notes at his noise, and he lost whatever he was thinking as she partly turned towards him.

"What," she ground out, trying to keep the shield still.

"Huh?" he asked, mind still lagging behind.

"The fight, The Box Ghost. Swearing?" she hissed, looking back and forth between him and the onslaught of boxes.

"Right," he said, feeling like the echo and not the call as he forced himself to uncurl.

He raised a hand, moving his other arm to go around Ember's waist.

She could probably guess his next trick, leaning into him as he wrapped his arm firmly around her and started counting.

"Three, two, go," he breathed.

Autopilot wasn't doing his head any favors, but the shield dropped on ‘go’ and Danny had his full half-second to start blasting as he spun.

Another wave of boxes burnt in emerald, the ash even thicker in the air. Danny was pushing how long he could hold his breath for, the fact he didn’t need to breathe something his nervous system didn’t like taking a memo on.

He couldn't even focus on the bright floaters in his vision and think about where they were in relation to his field of view, arm still locked around Ember as she was shouting.

The boxes had thinned out immensely, and The Box Ghost floated a lot higher in the air than they were even if Ember had rotated so they were angled in a straight shot to him.

The Box Ghost seemed nervous even in Danny's fits of being able to see, most of the boxes floating in a ring around their impromptu arena.

Breathe in, breathe out. Continue.

Danny straightened up from his slight curl over Ember's shoulder, and immediately she knocked it back into him surprisingly gently while her hands were busy with knobs of the guitar.

"Speak to me here."

"Mm" was all Danny managed, trying to squint back up to The Box Ghost despite how the light was effectively making him black out again.

"Anything, man."

"Triskadekaphobia," he muttered mutinously as his teeth pulsed in his mouth. He got a shoulder more pointedly thrown into him for it.

"First of all, fuck you. Secondly, let's get this done with if you're going to sweat all over me. Like, fuck, how are you both this cold and this sweaty?" Ember complained.

"Cold...?" Danny asked slowly.

Ember wasn't waiting though; the fight couldn't really afford it.

The music got significantly louder as his vision faded, more boxes vanishing in turquoise all the while

A blue shield appeared around The Box Ghost, and THe Box Ghost’s face fell as he realized this time Ember was serious about helping Danny out.

"Go, loser. Slam his bitch ass into soup jail," Ember demanded, as their own barrier fell again.

The few boxes trapped inside with The Box Ghost slammed against the interior of the shield, the ones on the exterior drooping in the air as his hold on them slipped.

Danny didn't respond as he finally let go of Ember, drifting upwards towards The Box Ghost.

He could feel Ember hover close, assumedly annoyed with how slow he was going, not that he was inclined to push his bodies limits.

His slow ascent had her following behind, playing the song still as The Box Ghost continued to panic.

The boxes were rhythmic by the time Danny got close, going in a thump thump thump pattern with only a brief pause between waves.

Cracks webbed along the outside, Ember too busy keeping the shield up and not blowing straight past Danny in keeping pace to be especially concerned.

Danny was, but that just meant that he needed to go faster.

Danny and Ember could physically pass through the shield, just not their powers once they'd disconnected from their bodies. Ember was clearly expecting this to be taken advantage of.

Danny paused just outside, preparing to dash at The Box Ghost with hands outstretched.

But nothing was different as The Box Ghost panicked in the bubble, boxes drawing close to him as he seemed to gain enough life to almost hyperventilate.

But that, that was fine, because Danny could just palm the thermos from his ribcage and stick it into the shield.

It was a fantastic plan right up until the boxes flew out, the last push needed for the shield to burst.

"Fuck," Ember swore as Danny lurched forward to chase.

The Box Ghost was already fleeing, and later Danny would remember that it was a very human instinct to simply chase when something someone was locked onto started running. Humans were predators, after all.

Chapter Text

Danny didn't need to have a "later" to reflect on his idiocy, as his swimming vision barely identifying where cardboard was coming from was proof enough that he should've let Ember solve the whole thing herself.

It would've been so easy to let it happen. He could've looked the other way while she beat The Box Ghost to a pulp and that would’ve been it.

But someone had to keep trailing The Box Ghost just so they could toss him back into the Infinite Realms and keep the town nuisance free(er) for a week, instead of an outright beatdown.

"I, THE BOX GHOOOOST, DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU KEEP FOLLOWING," the Box Ghost shouted, and with a sharp raise of his arm a wave of cardboard descended towards Danny.

"Or what, you'll send more boxes of doom?" Danny asked.

Danny was dodging the boxes as opposed to destroying them, and it didn't escape him that none of the boxes were coming back for him on the back-swing but small mercies summed up the capacity of his thoughts.

"IT LOOKS LIKE A SUFFICIENT BREEZE WOULD BE YOUR DOOM!" he shouted back, bolting again.

Danny could curse under his breath all he wanted (not that he was), but it wouldn't change the fact that his control in flight was lacking to follow. 

He'd usually keep a distance in case anyone thought they were funny enough to try something, stopping on a dime at an imaginary line, but right now he'd never stopped to begin with because who knew if he'd start again.

In essence, The Box Ghost wasn't getting let out of his sight even as its clarity ebbed in and out.

Even with his watery vision, he could see The Box Ghost hated that. Or, well, he could see it whenever there wasn't a box trying to cut his eyes out.

Ember swore from behind as they burst through another office building, and Danny could only reflexively dim his powers in an attempt to keep the place in one piece as papers burst into the air around them.

"This is getting ridiculous!" she shouted.

Danny didn't answer, shrugging in midair in a gesture that was likely missed given their own movements and the surrounding chaos.

Everyone burst through the wall and Danny had to squint to spot, or more sense like a cardboard tasting radar, that The Box Ghost was trying to ascend in the air like the clouds were appropriate cover.

They weren't.

"Phantom, this is getting insane!" Ember pleaded, desperately trying to catch up to Danny.

The Box Ghost wasn't going completely upwards so much as generally going diagonal from the ground and heading to what Danny would assume was north. He couldn't presently put together if north was somewhere specific or not, The Box Ghost blinking out of his view on occasion like turning invisible for a hundred yards would make Danny lose him.

Danny didn't think he spaced out, but suddenly The box Ghost had stopped and suddenly they were over Casper High's football field with The Box Ghost turned to face them.

Equipment boxes were flooding in from god knew where as The Box Ghost tried to conduct them like music, clearly desperate in the face of Danny's pursuit.

Danny slowed a bit in response, trying not to overshoot The Box Ghost and failing as he went wide.

"Okay, final stand! I can work with that!" Ember screeched, stopping a whole lot faster than Danny and sliding her guitar into position.

Danny would've shouted, would've screamed if he'd had the extra few seconds. But he wouldn't have known what to yell anyways, Ember was nothing if not efficient when determined.

The chords were struck again and Danny was mentally even further gone, the only notable thing he could parse equating to something around "Is this Wonderwall again?"

He sank to the ground from the air, he knew that part. Slow and steady.

He could feel the rhythm, which at this point wasn't an indication of returning awareness. He could swear the blue spot in his vision jumped to the beat.

There was speaking of some sort, probably screaming knowing Ember, and something somewhere exploded a bit. Probably not a severe explosion, given the music didn't stop.

And then she was standing over him, teeth gritted in a fake smile. Teeth too sharp to be friendly.

The overlay had come back once more. The differences at this point were negligible while both loomed over him.

Her lips moved and Danny was suddenly aware he wasn't comprehending her, at all. But the parts of his mind in charge of that were still fifty miles behind.

The world threaded for a lack of better word, the strings in Ember still tied into impenetrable knots as he regarded her. She came closer, closer, but the knot didn't change with the distance. Strings exited from her in all sorts of directions, several coming towards-

Danny desperately rubbed at his face, hands sliding back into his hair, trying to process the implications.

With hishands still in his hair, the world tipped sideways a little and he could hear again.

"- this isn't funny, and I'm about to see if I can get you to mentally land by ripping out hair," Ember warned him. Ghosts couldn't really hyperventilate, but between Ember's open mouth, shaking shoulders, and wavering tone, Danny had a suspicion.

"Please don't," he murmured.

He was kneeling, the grass around them slightly singed and brown from whatever Ember and The Box Ghost had done.

"How does one rip out this kind of hair? I feel like that'd be hard," he muttered, not at all on topic as the final brain cell drowned in his mental pool.

He was shoved for this transgression, and he didn't resist just falling over onto the ground. Ember flinched and went to lift him, but stopped and threw her hands up as automatic reaction was past.

Grass browned and blackened in his periphery, and he absently thought to himself that he should get back up.

He did not.

There was a hand around his jumpsuit collar, pulling the loose fabric around his neck into a handle as he was hoisted up.

"If I put you on your feet, are you gonna stay standing?"

He shrugged, and floated instead. Ember was silent for a beat as she concluded he was aware enough to be sarcastic and willfully obtuse.

The brown and black had already stopped on the ground, the football field sprinkler system leaving the grass wet saving the day.

"Dude, what the fuck is wrong?" she finally asked.

Danny could only stare in bewilderment despite the total comprehension of what she asked.

He was acutely aware the question was about... the everything. But this wasn't how either of them treated injury. Danny was always alright at the very least. So was Ember. Stopping the chaos to check everyone over was a sarcastic offer for others’ benefit, not a callout.

"I'd hit you for giving me that stupid look if I didn’t think it would be the thing to Obliterate you,” Ember fumed.

Danny lowered back to the ground as he considered, the grass giving a squeaky squish as he just barely clipped the edge of brown.

"Well, I have no earthly idea," he said, entirely too pleasantly.

Ember hit him.

Thankfully he didn't collapse at the love-tap pressure, but he did flinch, which clearly unnerved Ember.

Even the superimposed image of her twitched unpleasantly, the underneath clearly going through several emotions at once.

Suddenly an arm was wrapped around his shoulders, and he suspected he was in for an extremely over-casual rant even as the world went dim for no good reason.

"Hey, hey man, come on! I can't drag you on a world tour if you manage to croak for a second time, right? Sooo.." Ember started, slowly rotating him towards her even as she put distance between them.

"For the future twin flames act, right? What the hell is getting you?"

Danny didn't answer, because this wasn't that kind of rant. He absently fixed his gaze on the brown patch again, the crunchy grass beyond rescue. Unsheltered ants scuttled on bare dirt in the most scorched parts.

"'Cause I swear if it's Plasmius's fucking bushes I'm gonna kill 'em both. I just know Advanced Dipshit was in charge of that, and of course Plasmius signed off on it."

"The bushes changed from ice to fire once we'd left, Ember," he reminded her. Even through the mental haze he knew they'd seen it themselves on their way out, and he remembered the icy feeling swapping to just more sweaty heat. 

A line of ants was forming, going nowhere Danny could discern.

"Lotta shit's changing. Honestly, I don’t trust things to not just keep changing anymore. And I know we were supposed to look for a you-relevant change but I think we missed it. Do you think the fire giants would take you, actually? Because like, if we’re going this far for this long maybe you need a room right next to Vlad in their hospital" Ember asked, dragging him back up with a loose grip.

The grass remained brown. The static in his head formed a coherent image for just long enough for him to have an idea.

He could see the threads of the grass. He could see the tiny pinprick threads of the ants. Ember's arm was in unpleasant detail, leading away and down to her core whereabout the knot sat.

The overimage waited for him while he couldn't hear a single thing she was saying.

"A me-relevant change" was the only thing he could echo.

"Yeah," Ember affirmed, not paying attention to him as she started pulling him upwards, likely in a badly planned bid to start towards the fire giants.

"No. A me-relevant change. I’ve been checking everyone but me. I am included in everyone, though," he grit out.

The world was realigning in a bad way. The green was bright against the brown on the ground, the sunlight beating down like he was encased in fluorescence. Out of the corner of his eye Ember's hair flared, the teal too bright to have distinction in depth to him.

He could sense Ember pause, the way she hesitated. But he wasn't waiting for her to figure herself out on this one.

He could see his own threads in his hands. He could see them in his arms.

His chest came into view, and he was faster than his ability to see if he was right.

He could see ants on the ground, marching straight through the grass. THe grass itself was still brown, but like it had been burned a long time ago. He'd never had flame hair to burn it with, in this timeline, the marks of his fire hair now startling.

He heard Ember scream, and everything went black.

Chapter Text

There was a penlight in his eyes; Danny's only response was to go back to sleep.

Presumably some time later, there was another penlight, and this time he paid attention.

The early parts of his stay were a blur no matter what he did or thought though he suspected that most of it wasn’t worth remembering. A lot of "hello dear" and "move this way" from the staff while Frostbite attended to other patients.

Danny felt extra bad for Technus now. He wondered if Technus was comatose in his own room, or if Skulker had even made it to the Yetis.

Danny didn;t ask because that was not his business, and if Skulker was here it was the most truce-like thing to happen between him and Skulker in a long time, so he'd have to take what he could get.

Eventually, one time he woke up again and Sam and Tucker were waiting.

The lighting was dim but clear as he looked away to the mirror on the other side of the room.

It was him, and he hadn't forgotten how in his own bathroom that had been severely in doubt. But he thought it had been hard to look at the red flags when your entire world had been drenched in crimson.

Nobody said anything for a while.  He would have opened his mouth to assure them they hadn’t failed any more than he had but he was pretty sure that'd ring hollow when he could apparently figure out the dietary swap between them in five minutes flat at the Nasty Burger.

It all made his brain buzz in ways he was trying to mute.

"You scared us," Tucker finally offered.

"I don't know that there was a better way to do it, besides someone being smarter faster," Danny replied without thinking, not moving his view from the mirror. He could see Tucker mime punching him at the edge.

"No, no. He's right. We... kinda blew this one off," Sam muttered. Danny couldn't see her in the mirror, but she sounded pretty dejected.

"I... yeah, yet if an average person can be weirded out by normal shit and call it deja vu how'd we miss him? How'd we miss Ember?" Tucker asked.

Ember was a mystery piece in his head, full of sharp edges when he tried to hold it down. They were friends, they weren't friends. They were going to go on tour together, they frankly shouldn't be left alone in a room even when playing nice because someone would get Obliterated.

"Same way most people don't notice anything up with me, I guess. Nobody was looking," Danny answered instead of pressing about Ember.

"Well... For all the missed signs, you get to sit here under medical supervision. And I guess if there's anything else changed it gets to wait for either you or Clockwork," Sam sighed, moving closer.

Danny finally broke his staring contest with the mirror, turning towards his friends.

"I don't know that I get to keep this ability. But honestly speaking of medicine, I’m probably going to be in here a while. How is everyone else doing?"

They both frowned at his topic change, but they couldn’t really tell him not to ask about home.

Tucker was the one to speak.

"Alright, who's first?".

"Flynn. I bet he's having an aneurysm while refusing to admit it."

Sam laughed near silently, shoulders shaking with the movement.

"Oh man, is he ever."

Information was gifted to him in bits, slowly washing into his still-fuzzy head and washing out in almost equal measure.

Eventually, they had to go. It was a hospital, not his bedroom. And he was sure the Yetis were enthused to keep them both distracted with lessons of their culture, the way that if Danny showed any interest he'd be treated to a day tour of whatever he'd asked about.

Nurses came in, nurses went out. Frostbite eventually personally came to explain the situation better at some point, Danny being woken up to finally do this..

"Your system’s struggling to flush out the fire, not to mention the damage taken by producing fire at all" was the cliff-notes version once Danny processed it enough to ask again later. Apparently the fact they’d gotten him to stop sweating was a blessing achieved by being heavily medicated.

Frostbite was in and out, but always leaving eventually. He obviously hadn't wanted to in any case, but he had so many things to run it wasn't funny.

Danny was left in silence, with a mirror and questions.

And a memory, that he couldn't help but wonder why it was so clear in his head. 

He was left pointedly ignoring the analogue clock ticking getting much louder behind him- he knew it was there, thanks.

The Yetis weren't ones to strip patients of their clothes unless completely necessary, as most ghosts were liable to lose their minds if their stuff was touched. So if it could fit in his pockets, Danny had it right now.

He carefully fished in his pants pocket around the IV wires and pulled out his phone. She wasn't a contact anymore in one of the few consequence reversals he’d seen, but one of his most useless skills was knowing people's numbers off the top of his head; it was very impressive to anyone over thirty five.

It didn't even get to ring.

"What the fuck are you calling for, idiot?" she asked him, tone indecipherable.

"Ember, don't do this to me right now.  Why wouldn't I call at least once? You've got an entire alternate history to know why I'd call."

There was wheezy laughter on the other end.

"Shit, kid, tell me right off, yeah?"

"Nobody said who got me to the hospital, but you're the last person to be anywhere near me before... that. Plus, I didn't and couldn't have gotten my hands on you afterwards, and every time I think about us being friends it’s that murky changed-in-post haze that we kept getting after we did anything meaningful. So when I went, so did your history with me. It has to have."

Ember was silent.

"Anyone ever give you the credit you need for deductive reasoning? Seriously, I know you need tutoring in-"

"Focus."

Danny was doing good. Clear-headed after his nap. Though that was probably the meds supporting him more than anything. Still, in the face of that, he wasn't very amused about her avoidance.

"Right. I uh. Kinda dumped Skulker today?"

Danny didn’t know what to say in response badly enough he forgot to be mad she was still avoiding his question.

"Huh?"

"I mean, it's probably not for good. Like the rest of our spats. But oh my god the way he went on about it you'd've thought I set this whole ‘friends with you in another timeline’ bullshit all up myself, right? And I finally just start throwing shit at him and of course he's like, classic faux-gentleman-in-the-seventies and is wailing that he simply can't go toe-to-toe with a lady. The sensibilities, you know?"

Danny had to take a few seconds just to let the words process.

"That doesn't sound like him."

"Okay, look, I know it doesn't, but he gets weird about fighting people if he considers you one of his own. And there's reasons I date the hawked snot ball. He's nice if you can actually hammer through to sense. And like, it's really hard to pretend the fridge doesn't stay pretty fucking full, right?"

 Danny admittedly had a pretty good idea of why that last bit was a strong temptation, given how frequently his own emptied by virtue of the food reanimating.

"I gotta admit that last part might get me too."

"Right! But like, I keep thinking about the past day and I guess it's more than the day because the past wasn't fake but also not not real, and I really wanna know how the hell you got away with ‘maybe we could do it legitimately some day’ to get me to lay off the mind control takeover plan."

He could almost remember it.

"I mean, I'm still right. If you have to mind control your audience into liking you, you don't actually have an audience. Or fame."

He could hear something hiss violently in the static, likely Ember's hair.

"I despise that you're correct."

"Obliterate mad about it, I guess."

The microphone audibly peaked as laughter escaped her, quickly suppressed.

The silence hung for a few moments as nobody knew what to say.

"Okay, so I know the deal was always the twin flames show but that's not really an option now unless future-past you thinks he's sly, so hear me out; fire and ice is always in vogue."

Danny hummed an affirmative noise and let Ember go on, even as his focus drifted.

If the whole thing were held up to aggressive dissection later this would all, from top to bottom, be labeled one of the worst incidents he'd had in a long time.

But Ember kept speaking, and Danny didn't have it in him to regret the ordeal. He could live with this, and like every other time something messed up happened the ending would simply be living on.