Chapter Text
“Do you want a sibling?”
Danny stops, the molten ball of ectoplasm fizzling out in his palm. Confusion zings through his chest, and his brows furrow. “What?”
Vlad follows suit in extinguishing his own plasma bolt, his expression calm as anything, like he was discussing the weather. “Do you want a sibling, dearest?”
Danny stares.
Sorry, what?
His frown deepens. “I’m not following.”
He receives an eye roll for his confusion, which is enough for Danny to reconsider throwing a melting wad of ectoplasm in Vlad’s face. “I was thinking about it, and I’ve always wanted more than one child. But I know how you are, badger, and wanted your opinion first before I do anything drastic.”
An unsettled, jittery feeling crawls through his chest, worming through his ribs and burrowing a hole right into his heart. Danny shifts in the air, feeling all of a sudden like a cornered animal.
His frown threatens to tilt into a scowl; his teeth ache. “You don’t need another kid,” he says tersely and without thinking, “you have me.”
“I’m not replacing you,” Vlad says frankly. Danny nearly scoffs, his shoulders turning away and hunching up steadily.
“I have Jazz.” He retorts, the jittering growing stronger, edging into panic. His fingers flex, then forcibly relax. “She’s sibling enough.”
“I was thinking biological, dearest.”
The panic turns into a snarl. Launching straight up into his throat and getting lodged at the back of his mouth. Danny’s palms ignite furiously as his knees draw up.
“You said you weren’t replacing me!”
Vlad dodges the fireball, tilting his head to the side with an unchanging, placid expression, while the bolt skims right past his ear and off into the nowhere distance. Probably to go slam into the side of a building and leave a melting dent the size of a waffle ball.
Danny preps another one, and the heat burns into his hand, just a touch on the side of too hot.
"And I said I wasn't," Vlad says, taking on a soft, patronizing tone that makes Danny's metaphorical feathers ruffle and the insisting drip of his hair cling to his back and sear into his spine following an intense wave of rage.
(Although, it's not like it makes much of a difference. Danny's hair is always melting down his shoulders like liquid metal; a never ending stream of lava that reflects the hissing fury roiling beneath his skin and settled into his tissue. It, like the rest of him and his sharp edges, prevent anything and everything from getting too close.)
(...Everything and anything that can't withstand the heat, that is.)
Danny's mouth tilts to retort, the edge of his canines skimming against his lower lip just enough to threaten to pierce it if he so desired. The slag in his hand glows brighter, burns hotter, enough that part of him is hoping that it leaves injury on his flesh when he transforms back.
"Why would I replace you?" Vlad continues, maintaining his stupid, horrid coo while dutifully ignoring the murderous rage illuminating from Danny like a bonfire. His eyes curl up into crescents, and he gives Danny a horrible, terrible, indulgent smile. "You're so wonderful, dearest. I wouldn't trade you for the world."
And Danny really hates how terribly earnest it sounds, and how genuine it actually is, because Vlad says it in two-tone. The sound of his core reaching out between the space like a swarm of ribbons encircling him, rumbling out something in Soulhum that has no direct translation, but could be best described as an embroidery of truthtruthtruth–you–love-love?–you-love—love-MINE—
It's so thick and heady that, for a moment, it makes his head spin. Danny shrinks away instinctively, batting back at it with his own furious, hissing sound from his own core. Half-tempted to reach out, grab onto the ribbons, and then wrap his arm around it himself so he can yank it forward and tear it to shreds.
He doesn't do that, although he probably should. Instead, the ecto-bolt in his hand extinguishes. Liar, he thinks. "You want another child." He hisses, trying to swallow down the bitterroot taste of abandonment swelling in his heart. He's tasted it before, it shouldn't be so strong.
"I want," Vlad corrects, "for you to have another sibling, little badger. More than just Jasmine."
He doesn't want another sibling, though. He barely tolerated Jazz when he first arrived in the Fenton House, all too used to being ignored in favor of the blood child -- something he used to sympathize with, reluctantly, but still felt hurt about, and now can no longer fucking stand --and it took her far too much pushing and shoving for him to do more than begrudgingly coexist.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful for you to have someone related to you running around?" Vlad continues before Danny can give his two cents.
And yet...
Danny looks away. The tight, defensive ball in his chest loosening.
From the corner of his eye, Vlad gives him a knowing look, and the corners of his eyes squish smugly. "Someone that can't be easily taken away from you?"
And yet...
He hates that the idea is tempting. The embers of a want he'd long since thought doused sparking to life in his charred ribs, threatening to eat at him just like the rest of everything else rotten inside him.
(Danny always liked to pretend that he was above the concept of blood ties. That he doesn't need to be related to anyone to make his own family, that blood was not thicker than water, that he could forge one on his own.)
(And he'd probably succeed in deluding himself over it, if it weren't for the fact that, pressed tight into the ache of his soul, is the desperate, ever-lit desire he has to reunite with his birth parents. To belong somewhere that wasn't another foster house that hated him, and that he would inevitably end up leaving after a year, maybe two, maybe more.)
His shoulders roll uncomfortably, catching the liquid edge of his hair and encouraging it to pool down the front of his chest like a heated blanket. "How would you even do that?" He scoffs, trying to smother any other emotion that wasn't mocking disbelief. "Planning on hunting my dear old ma and pa down?"
Delight sparks across the air, stark and screeching stars like metal across metal. He nearly flinches away from it, but Vlad's ribbon-speak turn into spikes and dig into his arms like stakes, and so Danny doesn't move.
"That," Vlad coos, his core a roar of pungent joy in Danny's nose, "is a secret."
Danny sneers at him.
Drifting closer, he reluctantly allows Vlad to circle behind him and scoop up the flow of magma at the nape of his neck, their fight all but forgotten now.
From here, he can hear clearer Vlad's purring, along with the never-ending sequence of lovelovelove-you—love-you—love-MINE emanating from what is functionally the metaphysical-sometimes-physical manifestation and ecto-infused version of his soul.
It takes too much practiced restraint for Danny to not immediately try and wriggle away and flee from the easy-given affection. He swallows down the primal terror. He'll take the love where he can get it, the starving little beast that he is.
"Brother or sister, lovely?" Vlad croons, heating up his hands and twisting Danny's hair. It's painless entirely. And Danny's mouth thins into a line.
(He has several questions he doesn't feel like asking, and doubly so doesn't feel like dwelling on, in fear of accidentally scarring himself for life with the mental image.)
(He also doesn't think this is something he can outright choose. There's a voice that sounds suspiciously like Sam's, compelling him to answer with ''sibling'' out of spite for the archaic question.)
"...Sister." He says reluctantly. He's hated almost every foster brother he's ever had — although he's rarely had any — and the idea of there being another son for Vlad to dote on makes too-familiar terror spike and flutter in his chest.
...He likes Jazz though, so he doesn't think he'd mind a sister related to him.
The Soulhum reaches an orchestral peak into the sky above the both of them. The heat emanating from Vlad's hands flashes boiling hot, and then with a painless yank, he tears off Danny's cord of hair from the neck down.
It's a literal weight off his shoulders.
He turns just in time to watch Vlad toss the rope of magma carelessly off to the side. It falls gracelessly to the ground, dozens of feet below, and immediately pools with a terrifying hiss.
"Perfect."