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Yes, I am back with another fic lol. Featuring blob ghost Danny. Enjoy~
Despite not believing in ghosts, Danny thought the portal was fascinating. While he didn't believe it would actually tear a hole in reality and open a door to another dimension, it was an engineering feat. Danny wanted to be an engineer as his back up profession if he couldn't make an astronaut, and as outlandish as his parents’ beliefs were, they were also technical geniuses and lived off of the money from their many non-ghost related patents.
“Good thinking, kiddo,” Jack said once Danny put on the hazmat suit to enter the device. It wasn't on, nor was it ready to turn on, but Danny was just being practical. If anything did come of it, it was best to start good habits early. Though, the face of his father on the suit was a bit much; he peeled it off.
“I still don't know how you dug into the wall, dad. I mean, there’s pipes and wiring all around the basement.”
“Pure luck! We broke many regulations, but nobody wants to deal with this house after all its accidents!”
Right. Fentonworks had originally been an abandoned building said to be haunted with a history of frequent deaths. It was the reason Jack and Maddie moved them there. Danny had noticed cold spots in the house often, but it was a stretch to call it haunted. Danny felt perfectly safe there.
He poked around the inside of the portal, trying to figure out how it worked just based on the chip layout and wiring. It was a bit of a mess, and Danny itched to fix it. “Dad, can I work on the wiring in here? It’s kind of a mess,” he called.
“Sure thing,” Jack answered. With careful fingers, Danny separated and organized the wiring and cables. He grabbed the rubber tape and labeled the mess of wires in an orderly manner. He didn't actually unplug anything and was certain he did no damage. On his way out to get some lunch, Danny’s hand snagged on a piece of paneling sticking out of the wall.
Some “protective” suit, he thought to himself as he looked at the tear in the glove, a small trail of blood coming from the cut. He left to clean and bandage the cut before returning to wipe up the drops of blood. But when he returned with the wipes, the blood was gone. Danny paused, absolutely positive he’d spilled blood on the floor. But… it wasn't there. There wasn't even blood left on the cause of the cut. It was weird. It was eerie. Danny backed out of the portal and went upstairs to where his family was eating lunch.
He shucked off the hazmat suit and left it on the table. “Mom, dad, is there some… biological or organic factor to the portal?” Danny asked, still bothered by the disappearance of his blood.
“What do you mean, son?”
“I cut my hand on paneling, and when I went back to clean it up, the blood had disappeared,” Danny answered, already feeling like an idiot for asking. He must have imagined it, and clearly his parents thought the same. Danny let it go. Jazz looked annoyed about all the hullabaloo about the portal, thinking it was nonsense like Danny, but not having any of the technical interest in the technology itself.
-x-
Danny jolted awake, dripping sweat, laying in bed with all of his blankets kicked off. He grabbed at his chest, realizing he was having a panic attack. He had no idea what had triggered it, but worked through it as best as he could. What a crappy way to wake up.
Once his breathing was under control, he went downstairs to get a cold glass of water. As he sat at the kitchen table, he felt a chill go up his spine, like something was dragging an ice cold finger up the back of his neck. But there was nothing there. It unsettled him. This was creepy. Was the house actually haunted and he was only realizing now?
He deliberated for a long moment before sighing, his curiosity and impulsiveness getting the better of him. Danny put the empty glass in the dishwasher and then headed down into the lab. Flicking the lights on, everything was exactly as it had been left that night. Inventions and parts, schematics and blueprints scattered around every flat surface.
The portal was as empty as it had always been. No lights were on on the control panel. He walked over anyway, and crouched. Still no blood. As much as he tried to convince himself it had never happened, Danny was absolutely sure he’d spilled blood inside. But again, there was no proof but his own memory. And he wasn't sure why it was freaking him out so much. Eventually, he forced himself to go back to bed, and slept through the night.
-x-
“Danny, hon, I think a break from the lab would benefit you,” Maddie said gently. Danny was sitting in front of the portal again, staring into it. “We’re just as excited as you are that it will be turned on soon, but you seem… a bit attached.”
“What?” Danny asked, blinking up at her.
“Why do you keep coming to sit in front of the portal?” she questioned frankly. Danny’s eyes strayed back towards the empty doorway. His eyebrows furrowed.
“I… don't know. I just have this urge to come sit in front of it,” he said, unsure of why that was, and how he hadn't noticed until it was pointed out to him. He began chewing on his thumbnail. “It’s weird. It’s like it’s calling to me.”
“Calling to you?” Maddie asked, surprised and mildly concerned. Danny nodded, knowing he must sound crazy. “Well… that’s strange. I definitely think you need a break.”
Danny sighed, and asked, “Can I at least help you guys work on it when you're in here? I won't come in and be a weirdo on my own anymore. I'll try not to.” Maddie frowned, but ultimately decided, if they were down there with him, it was fine. She went back to work, and Danny went back to staring.
C༙྇o༙྇m༙྇e༙྇ t༙྇o༙྇ t༙྇h༙྇e༙྇ p༙྇o༙྇r༙྇t༙྇a༙྇l༙྇,༙྇ D༙྇a༙྇n༙྇n༙྇y
He jerked awake, and Danny found himself standing inside of the chamber. He couldn't remember walking into it, or putting on the hazmat suit. He was in the lab with his parents, Jazz arguing with them about letting Danny help clean up the lab when there was so much biohazard material.
J༙྇o༙྇i༙྇n༙྇ u༙྇s༙྇.
Danny turned to flee the portal, freaked out of his mind and absolutely sure the thing was properly haunted, but his feet wouldn't move. His mouth wouldn't open. He couldn't call for help from his family, or warn them as he heard a light humming noise, growing louder and hotter. His eyes slid slowly over to look at the poorly placed on/off switch. Danny’s hand lifted. The portal wasn't functional. This would do nothing. He was fine, he was just being possessed, or maybe he’d developed severe OCD and this was a compulsion.
To press big, dangerous buttons. That was it. He wasn't possessed or insane, just compulsive. Impulsive. It was fine. He’d be fine. It was okay.
His palm pressed on the button that shouldn't be operational, and a new scene flashed behind Danny’s eyelids. The portal, covered in his blood, before it vanished. Nothing happened, and he let out a sigh of relief, before the world exploded in green light, pain, and confusion. Supernatural electricity raced up his arm and into every nerve in his body, burning him from the inside out.
Danny screamed. His family shouted in terror as the portal flashed so brightly Danny’s silhouette couldn't be seen. He couldn't hear them trying to power down the portal that wasn't supposed to function, they couldn't reach him as he wailed in complete agony. It felt like his skin was being peeled from his bones and put through a shredder. Danny had had no idea pain could be this utterly blinding.
He had to be dead, right?
Then, it all stopped.
-x-
When the portal stabilized, Danny stumbled out of it, glowing a radioactive green. Jack and Maddie were in their protective suits, and Jack tried to catch the collapsing Danny. He fell into his arms, but something was very wrong. Jazz screamed in horror as Danny’s body began to melt.
He made no sound, his face showing no expression, as the green skin turned from a solid to a liquid. Danny melted into a giant puddle of ectoplasm within Jack’s arms, dripping onto his feet and down his jumpsuit. While Jazz screamed, Maddie and Jack stared at what remained of their son in frozen terror. This couldn't be real.
This couldn't be happening. Danny… was a puddle of green goo. Maddie collapsed to her knees and screamed, joining Jazz’s heartbreaking shriek as well. Jack frantically tried to scoop Danny’s remains up, but it was slippery and kept falling back to the stone floor. How did you even begin to try and put something like this back together? What had even happened to him? The portal wasn't supposed to be functional, yet it was open, glowing and lethal. Mocking them. Blaming them.
-x-
The Fentons were dead inside, in various parts of the house, lost in grief and shock. Danny’s remains were in a lead box, a thick pool of ectoplasm. The next day, they’d be looking at it under a microscope to see if there was life left, and what they could do to fix him. None of them were convinced they could find a way to put him back together, though.
In the morning, Jazz refused to leave her bedroom, and while Maddie tried to comfort her, Jack went downstairs to check on the portal. Danny’s box was in the middle of the floor, far from where it had been left the night before. Jack paused, processing how it had moved so far. What had moved it? Had… it been moved from within, or had a ghost or something come through the portal and moved it themselves?
He immediately installed a security camera in the corner of the room. Cautiously, he walked to the box and lifted it. It felt much lighter than it had the night before, and he yanked it open in a hurry. Had some of it evaporated? Why had it lessened its weight? But… what was inside was no longer a puddle. Not really. It looked more like a hunk of dough that had expanded a bit. Semi-solid, smooth. Still glowing, neon green, but when he touched it, his glove didn't come away wet and sticky.
Jack wiped away tears, hoping beyond hope that Danny could somehow reform. Even if he was a ghost, if he was alive, it was enough. More than enough.
Once Maddie was down into the lab, and she saw Danny’s remains had morphed, they quickly began examining what was left. What was shown under the microscope was beyond anything they knew or had hypothesized. But anything that made Danny Danny was gone. There were no living cells, but ectoplasmic cells that were dividing like crazy. Glowing neural networks almost impossible to decipher.
It was clear, though, that the lump was some sort of “alive” and evolving.
Jazz tried to resist the hope that Maddie and Jack embraced, but she couldn't avoid it forever. To delay the pain of grief, she accepted the idea that, maybe, somehow, Danny would come back to them, even if it was different than how it had been before.
-x-
Sam and Tucker were told Danny was sick, the Fenton’s putting off telling anybody that Danny had melted and was now a lump of ectoplasmic energy.
A week passed, and the Danny Blob became more and more solid. And on the exact seventh day after his death, the Danny Blob started to bob up and down, bouncing around. Under an xray, right in the center, there was a glowing bright spot. The blob was cold to the touch, and when anyone tried to interact with it, it twitched, reacting to stimuli.
It was living. No brain, no heart, no circulatory system, but it seemed to be able to feel to some degree. The Fentons had nothing to go off of, to give any clear idea as to what was happening with it, but something was.
Then, the speed of change began to accelerate. Over breakfast the next morning, the Danny Blob fell off of the table, bounced like a malleable rubber ball, and began to roll around the kitchen floor. Maddie ran to catch it before it made a mess or was injured, but it split in half to avoid her grasp, and then rejoined once it was out of range.
Eventually, they closed all the doors and let it roam around the first floor of the house. Maddie followed it around, supervising, hoping beyond hope that this was her son, somehow playing with them, communicating in the only way possible with nothing but a lump to go with.
Two days later, and the Danny Blob started to float. Three days after that, two white, glowing circles appeared on the top. They couldn't help but assume they were eyes. They didn't move or blink in any way, but there were two, and the Danny Blob always faced them forward in the direction it was heading.
It kept floating away, when not attached to the back of Jack’s head, or Maddie and Jazz’s shoulder. It continued to float towards the portal, so Maddie created a better leash and attached it to her belt, or Jack’s.
Then it started to turn intangible, and became a pain in the butt to keep track of. But it was a sign of life. Of personality. Still, the Danny Blob behaved like a reckless toddler.
Late at night, Jack and Maddie were in bed, the Danny Blob on the pillow between them, bright circle eyes closed in straight lines. Maddie woke to the cold sensation of it against her forehead disappearing, and opened her eyes just in time to see the Danny Blob sink through the floor. She was up and out of bed in an instant, running down the stairs to try and catch it before it disappeared out of reach. She couldn't fly to go after it.
It wasn't on the first floor, so she sprinted down the steps into the basement just in time to watch it disappear through the portal. “Danny, no!” It was too late. Maddie wasn't willing to melt herself as well, and could not follow behind her primitive son. “Shit!”
-x-
Danny floated through the green and purple cosmos, weightless like never before. The entire place felt nice. He felt alert, and clear headed, not that he had a head. Or a brain. He was a sentient blob. He was aware of everything that went on around him, but had no way to really react. It was just nice he had eyes again, if nothing else.
The portal had destroyed him, and he was slowly becoming something again. The entire thing was terrifying, and he had a feeling whatever he ended up becoming, life as he’d known it was over. And somehow, after turning into a puddle of goop, the portal had stopped being scary. It was dumb. It was weird. It made no sense.
But here he was, inside the portal, in the dimension he didn't believe existed. Floating doors and random islands dotted the endless landscape. Danny had no idea how to return back to where he’d come from, but there was a sort of pull to a location behind him, so he just blindly hoped he could find his way back.
Danny just had hoped that he’d somehow find a way to “get better” from inside the place that killed him. He knew he’d died. But here he was, something else completely. He passed a few creatures that were either semi-humanoid or completely alien. They ignored him, sending him fleeting, uninterested looks. He was just a blob, nothing interesting or novel, apparently.
He couldn't speak or interact. But he was fine being left alone. With no idea how much time had passed, eventually he found a cold rock, and settled on it, drifting to sleep.
When he woke, he was being held by someone - or something. “Hello, Daniel,” a male voice said, belonging to the person holding him, flying through the space with Danny cradled in his arms. Danny wanted to ask who this was, and how he knew Danny’s name. How he knew Danny was anything but a blob. How he knew Danny could understand him without a face, body or brain.
With no ability to ask, he had to hope the person would offer his own explanation. It didn't take too long for them to arrive at a floating island through a large, glass doorway floating in the middle of nowhere.
It was a clocktower of some sort. Danny looked around as they passed through the hallways and floated up pillars. There were no stairs, but they werent needed because its occupant could fly. Finally, they stopped at the top of the tower, the walls dotted with portals that looked like windows. Danny was placed on a floating pedestal.
He finally got a good look at his captor who had been exceedingly gentle with the simple, faceless blob. He was pale blue, without legs, a purple hood and robe on. Red eyes and a clock panel in his chest. Somehow, Danny wasn't frightened at all. He bobbed contently, feeling safe despite everything telling him he should be scared.
The stranger smiled at the reaction. “My name is Clockwork. I am the ghost of time. I see all timelines in existence. I have seen every future and past of yours. Futures where this doesn't happen, and futures after this.”
There’s an after. Am I not trapped like this forever?
He froze when Clockwork responded to his disjointed thoughts. “There is an after. You are reforming. Most ghosts who destabilize into ectoplasm never are revived. You're doing very well so far. With time, you may become similar to how you were before. You just need to be patient. You will reform quicker in the Ghost Zone, now that you can absorb ectoplasm and harness it into energy.”
He wasn't doomed to be a blob forever. Danny felt immense relief. But how was he feeling all of this, thinking, if he had no brain? Did that even matter anymore? He clearly wasn't a human anymore, so why think about these things in human constraints?
“You are no longer human - you are a ghost, now, too. But if you want to know, you are thinking and feeling because you’ve developed a core. They are like the heart and brain of a ghost, and the source of its existence and powers. I suppose you have no idea what ghosts are, given you’ve never met any before.”
Well, they couldn't all be too bad since Clockwork was a ghost and he seemed pretty friendly. The ghost smiled at Danny’s thoughts. “I appreciate the opinion, but many ghosts are violent, though most violence stems from their obsessions. Would you like to know more about ghosts?” Danny bobbed in affirmation.
Clockwork summoned two chairs, one exceedingly plush, which was the one he moved Danny to rest on top of. He “sat” on the chair across from Danny, and began to speak. To explain the Ghost Zone, its inhabitants, and its history. It was distracting from Danny’s constant anxiety and fear over the state he was in.
-x-
Danny slept most of the days, hibernating as he absorbed massive amounts of environmental ectoplasm. When he wasn't sleeping, he was tended to by Clockwork. Sometimes they toured the Ghost Zone, sometimes the Ancient took Danny to “meet” his allies. Danny was quickly growing attached, and hoped, after this was over, whatever came next, that he could still see his savior.
After a long while, Danny sprouted a mouth and four stubby legs. He looked a bit like a frog, now, but it was a major turning point. Limbs! He could still fly, but he could walk, now, too. Waddle, at least. Clockwork celebrated the evolution, and cooked some food now that Danny had a mouth to eat with. No tongue or teeth, so he couldn't speak, but a mouth hole was definitely a good start.
Eventually, he was able to speak, but it wasn't English. It was some harsh, unfamiliar dialect that Clockwork informed him was Ghost Speak, the official language of all ghosts. No matter what human language they spoke, it was universal. But now Danny had a way to properly communicate!
“Why did you save me?”
“I have watched over you since birth, Daniel. I have seen all of your futures and pasts. Why wouldn't I save you from this?”
“Why me? Do you watch over everyone?”
“Only those that bring great change.” Danny’s round, glowing eyes blinked widely. “That is all I can say. You were worth saving.”
“Can I still see you once I’m able to go home?”
“I would like that. You will be able to enter the Ghost Zone whenever you wish, and find your way to Long Now.”
Danny nodded, bobbing a bit on his four stubby legs.
-x-
It had been four months after he “destabilized” upon death when Danny could look in the mirror and see a “person”. He looked like himself, but as a ghost he had no bones, no human anatomy, a flat body. His hair was white, with glowing green eyes. He wore the hazmat suit, though its colors were inverted.
He was solid. He felt alive. Clockwork floated beside him, looking pleased that Danny had reformed into a human appearance. “Now, for the twist I’ve kept from you,” the ghost said mischievously. Danny furrowed his brows. “You are not just a ghost, you are a Halfa. Half ghost, half human. If you will it, you will become what you were before. At least, a version of your before self. Think that you want to be human.”
Danny couldn't bring himself to believe the ghost, mainly because it was too much hope for him to handle being nothing, but he did as he was told anyways. He watched as a white ring of light appeared around his waist and split in two, traveling up his body. It revealed his human appearance, even in the clothes he’d worn under his hazmat suit the day he’d died.
Shocked, Danny just stared at himself in the mirror. He brought shaking, bare hands to his face, back to being textured and imperfect. He had all of his human parts back; he breathed, his heart pumped even if he felt his ghost core thrumming away beside it. Warm tears dripped down his cheeks.
“Ah, there we go,” Clockwork said, pleased at Danny’s success.
Danny was not a touchy person, but he couldn't stop himself from hugging the ghost of time. Clockwork hesitated only for a moment, before hugging him back. He patted Danny’s back, and asked him, “How do you feel?”
“Not normal,” Danny laughed, voice thick with emotion. “I feel cold and light and full of energy. Definitely not… not how I was before.”
“Yes, even now, you're a Halfa. In time, you’ll master your abilities. But for now, I’m sure you want to return home to your friends and family.” Danny desperately wanted that. He hadn't planned his detour to take this long, but to him, it felt like days and not months. Time was disjointed when he had no real brain.
He transformed back into his ghost form with ease, and he and Clockwork began flying to where Danny’s core tugged him. Home.
On the way, Danny asked, “What happened to the portal? Did I really bleed in it?” He couldn't believe he hadn't asked the all knowing ghost this question before.
“You did. There was already ecto-energy spilling from it, but it was untraceable. Once your blood mixed with its energy, it biologically imprinted on you. You and only you would have been able to activate the portal. The energy that had latched onto you was able to influence you to act out how you did. You didn't turn on the portal of your own volition. However, that link was severed. The portal is not sentient. You won't be forced to do its bidding ever again.”
“Good,” Danny sighed in relief. “That was scary.”
“I assume it was.”
Soon enough, faster than Danny anticipated, they floated in front of the familiar portal, only from the inside instead of the outside. Danny turned to face his savior. “I… can come see you again?”
“Yes. I would like you to, at any time.” Danny smiled, nodded, and flew through the portal, ready to see his family and friends again. And to have them see him, whole, alive and back to the most normal he was ever going to be again.
He transformed into his human appearance, and found the basement littered with what looked like weapons. Danny jogged up the stairs. “Mom? Dad? Jazz?” he called.
Multiple shouts were heard from upstairs, and then thundering footsteps as his family raced to the source of their son’s voice. When Danny came into view, the waterworks started, and he was enveloped into desperate, relieved hugs. "I'm okay,” he promised. He knew he was, he had a guardian angel on his side, always watching over him.