Chapter Text
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It wasn’t supposed to all go so wrong.
Danny Fenton lay on the ground. Unmoving: dead. His body scorched and charred black beyond recognition. Any part not burned to a toasty crisp was red and angry from third-degree burns that would never heal. Because the body was dead. Skin around the hands and feet split open in an explosive array from the volts of electricity trying to exit the body in some manner. Sizzling blood seemed to seep out of every other orifice: eyes, ears, nose…
Danny Fenton lay dead on the ground of the Fenton Works labs in the basement. And yet, Danny Fenton also hovered over said body. Aware of the world around him and staring at his own body down below.
Ghost, in a word, is what comes to mind. He had heard his parents say the word countless times growing up. A word he had never put much prior thought into, dismissed in obsessive theory. Even as he came down here to fix their Ghost Portal, Danny didn’t quite think about what comes next.
Sure enough, his parents seemed to have the correct answer to such a query. For here he was, a ghost, in front of the now working and glowing Ghost Portal. Who would have thought? Certainly, none of the other townspeople.
Then, it hit Danny like a truck. He was dead. He was dead. He was dead.
Oh shit, oh no, what was he supposed to do now? No one gives you a manual on what to do after you’re fucking dead! He has a test in Mr. Lancer’s class tomorrow. Had a test tomorrow? Ghosts don’t go to school, do they?
He began to hyperventilate. Could he even breathe anymore? He seemed to be, or, at least, attempted to. Whether or not any air was actually circulating through his supposed lungs remains to be seen.
As Danny tried and tried to fill his useless - possibly non-existent - lungs with oxygen, a sudden flash filled his vision. The bright white blinded him as gravity took back control over his body. He crashed down to the floor, igniting his muscles into a sore ache.
A soreness he hadn’t been feeling for the past few minutes. That he shouldn’t be feeling; because he was dead. But… as he looked back upon himself, he seemed rather alive. More so than he had been just a second ago. Flush, blood-filled flesh that was no longer transparent. Physics acting like normal. That shock of white hair that had fallen in front of his eyes had faded back to black. Danny could now feel the air filling his lungs; he was really breathing. He was alive again.
How- how was that even possible? He looked back up, and sure enough, there lay the charred corpse of his body. His old body?
Danny reached back inside him, feeling for that ghostly self of his. The change came just as it had before. He did it again, and again, and again… Back and forth between life and death. Somehow, he was now both human and ghost. And somehow, there was a residual body left over.
No one could know. He didn’t know what would happen if anyone knew, but none of the logical answers seemed good. The word ‘ghost’ was never brought up in Amity Park without any negative connotations.
So, Danny did the only thing he could do. He hid the body.
It was nighttime when he came down into the basement to try and fix the Portal; when he had died. It seems as though no one woke up in the aftermath of his little… incident, and Danny was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth at the moment.
He grabbed one of the industrial-size garbage bags his parents kept in the lab and wrapped the body, his body, in it. He didn’t want to possibly be seen carrying a dead body so blatantly out in the open, even if it was his own. He hoisted it up into a princess carry; it felt wrong to do so any other way, to not handle with the utmost care. This was him, who else carried their own corpse?
Under the cover of night, Danny took his body to the Clyde Forest and buried the remains way off the beaten path. As a child, when things were hard and the ridicule from the town was overwhelming, Danny could always find peace in these woods. Maybe now he could find peace here one last time.