Chapter Text
Danny floated through the halls of his home idly as he looked around. Parts laid scattered about his dining room table, his coffee table and the floors of his home. Different experiments and inventions strewn about in different levels of completion. This was what his half-life had turned into. Danny was twenty-eight years old now and really all he had to show for how long he had been existing were the contents of his home.
It had been eight long years since Daniel Fenton last existed. The name Danny Nightingale came into existence upon the destruction of Daniel Fenton. Eight years of going to school, of proving to himself that he truly was deserving of the title that Daniel Fenton had been given, that he truly was an expert in his field.
Danny Fenton had been given that name when he had fought for the overturning of the Anti-Ecto acts and had been the spearhead in giving ghosts–or ecto entities as they were now more commonly known– the same rights as the living.
Daniel Fenton had fought against his parents and an entire government agency to give rights to the ghosts, he had completed his obsession by providing the ultimate protection for the beings. And what did he get in return?
He got shoved into witness protection and a human body that was slowly deteriorating before his very eyes.
It had been so easy to get rid of Daniel Fenton. He had made a way for ghosts and humans to exist in harmony and then step out of the limelight altogether. He had completed his mission, he had destroyed the Ghost Investigation Ward, he had created a safe home for ghosts, he had even managed to get his parents thrown into Blackgate Prison for their crimes against ghostkind.
The halfa rubbed his hand across the scar that would forever cover his chest. The large V started at his collarbones and met just below his navel. He remembered the incident like it was just a few hours ago. How he had been sixteen and finally gotten the nerve to tell his parents about his status as a halfa. How they had turned on him, demanding that they could fix him.
Only they had just further broken him. When he had finally gotten away, he had realized what the Drs. Fenton had done. They hadn’t fixed him, they had kickstarted his full on death. It had started slowly.
Along his right arm grew red fern like patterns, lichtenberg figures crept from his fingertips to his chest, his death mark finally appearing on his body, showing how the electricity had raced from the palm of his hand and straight to his heart, killing him and turning him into the thing he had become. The monster his parents had called him.
It was a little while longer when the neuropathy started. He would slowly lose feeling in the right side of his body, tingling numbness that took over until he could barely walk.
An entire year of experimentation upon his body had kickstarted a reaction that had been held off by the ectoplasm that ran through his veins. He had found himself seventeen, homeless, and disabled.
It was as he started to watch his body start to crumble beneath him that he had decided he needed help. What had happened to him couldn’t happen to another being. Ghost nor human. He had managed to keep Dani safe and away from the Fentons and the GIW so that she would never experience the same torture that Danny had gone through, that still plagued his nightmares and his every waking moment to this day.
But that wasn’t enough. Ghosts were going to always come through and be in the world now that portals were opening up. There were three that he had known about after his capture, the Fentons’, Vlad’s, and the one that the GIW had built with the help of Maddie and Jack.
In the end, it had been two ghosts that led Danny to his saving grace.
Martha and Thomas Wayne had found Danny in the middle of the woods in buttfuck West Virginia. What they had been doing there, Danny didn’t know. What mattered was that they had kickstarted Danny’s new life.
The ghost finally settled in his living room and curled on the couch with his newest invention, a portal gun. If he could get it to work correctly, he would be able to use it to open portals anywhere by pulling from the ambient ectoplasm in the air.
Could he already do something similar with his powers? Sure. But this particular item wouldn’t be for him, specifically. It would go to those who truly needed it.
His phone rang loudly and shrilly, knocking him from his melancholic reverie. Danny lazily grabbed his phone and pressed it to his ear.
“Dr. Nightingale,” he answered tiredly.
“Danny, it’s Lucius. I was wanting to see if we could get you to come in to the labs tomorrow. Bruce and I are having trouble with one of the blueprints you sent us and could use your expertise,” the older man said on the other side. Danny held back a sigh.
That meant turning to his human form.
Which meant pain.
“Yes, I can come in. But you owe me lunch, Lucius,” Danny said with a chuckle. The older man let out a soft laugh of his own.
“I think I can do that,” he conceded before bidding his farewells. Danny tossed the phone back on his couch and looked down at his hands.
There were pros and cons to his life these days. Pros were that he was no longer a hero, he was getting to spend his days how he liked and was no longer stuck with the obligation to help others. He had a cushy job that allowed him to work from home, locked away from the outside world.
Cons were that he couldn’t risk going out as Phantom. The expectations that had been placed upon him as a teenage hero and then ghostly activist had been too much, he had gotten exhausted. So he retired Phantom, made it where no one knew what happened to the ghost and kept that side of Danny to himself like he had always wanted.
This meant, though, that when Danny left the house, he had to leave as Danny.
As the crippled, disabled man he had become. The symptoms hadn’t stopped after throwing his parents in prison and forcing the GIW to shut down. In fact, they seemed to slowly grow worse as time went by.
His human body was plagued with bouts of tremors, pain settled deep into his very joints, seizures rattled his body, and numbness would take hold randomly. He had learned to live with the symptoms, had accepted them for what they were. He tended to stay in his ghost form whenever he could, just to keep it all at bay. It was a losing battle, though. The more time that Danny spent in his ghost form, the weaker his human form seemed to get.
Danny looked at his hands, the claws that tipped the point of his fingers in his ghost form and slowly watched as his body changed from ghost to human. Slowly his hands started to shake ever so slightly with the tremors that plagued his body. Most of the time the tremors were barely noticeable. Other times, they were so bad he could barely hold a fork. He stared at the scars that covered his right hand and let out a quiet growl. They were the first to come when the symptoms hit.
He had done so much with these hands.
He had defeated Pariah Dark with these hands, had helped the Ancients form a council to rule the Ghost Zone with these hands, had overthrown the GIW with these hands. These hands as broken and shaky as they were, they were his.
They were the hands that helped him create inventions that were currently changing the world.
He was Dr. Danny Nightingale now, the leading research scientist on ecto-entities and ghost tech. He wouldn’t let his disabilities stop him from his continued obsession with creating a safe space for humans and ghosts alike, even if it killed him and he became a full ghost. It would be better than to give up, to become a slave to his own body.
“We can do this, Nightingale, Jazz didn’t raise no baby,” he muttered to himself as he flipped the portal gun around in his hands, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain that ran through his fingers.
He grabbed a screwdriver left on the couch and opened the side panel to start tinkering with the wires.
Danny’s life after the overturning of the anti-ecto acts had been busy. Bruce had assisted him in getting his name changed, helped him erase any traces of Daniel Fenton. It had taken Danny four long years to get the acts overturned and he had become rather prolific by the end, something he had hated more than anything. He had become known as a ghost expert at just twenty years old and had been expected to be the one make sure that the integration of ecto entities in society was a smooth one. But Danny didn’t want that. He didn’t want that just as much as he didn’t want to be ghost king. And he had managed to successfully get out of both of those things.
So, Bruce had helped him disappear without a trace. Helped him become Danny Nightingale and helped him get into the best university in the country where he focused on biology and chemistry. As soon as Dany had gotten his doctorates just last year, Bruce had hired him on at Wayne Enterprises for Project Zero, his and Bruce’s own little project to ensure that ghosts and humans were able to live in harmony together. They worked to clear the misinformation that was spread even eight years after the overturning of the acts. He also consulted with Bruce who had become Danny’s biggest supporter in the overturning of the acts and had become one of the biggest voices since Daniel Fenton’s disappearance eight years prior.
So Danny became his consultant, teaching him how the ghosts existed, how powers worked and everything else he needed to know.
He consulted with Lucius and Bruce about how to create ectocontainment devices for if ecto entities did commit crimes in the world they had to know how to contain them. He created day to day inventions like curtains that ghosts couldn’t see through, things that kept ghosts from phasing through the walls of houses.
He made and consulted with inventors on ghost appliances for the average consumer.
Ghosts would still commit crimes for fun, or if they were victims of mind control, or just being plain malicious. So, Danny consulted and told them about how they could create non lethal, secure units that kept ghosts out rooms, vaults or whatever else. He also created things that people could wear on the regular basis to keep themselves from being overshadowed.
He of course made sure to teach the two all about ghost customs and culture and how to not offend ghosts from different eras.
The job kept him busy and happy. While he mostly worked at home, he still stayed busy enough to not have to think about everything else. Of all the things he left behind, the people he cut off. He hadn’t seen his sister or Sam or Tucker in over ten years now and while it hurt. It was for the best.
Seeing them reminded him of the past, of the shit he had gone through and he coldn’t handle the pain of it. It was easier to be busy, to stay distracted with his current obsessions and think about only what he was doing now.
Things were easier like this.
To just exist in his safe space, working on his inventions and helping Wayne Enterprises be the leading expert on ecto-entities. If he could do one thing before he fully died, it was going to be this. And that meant he couldn’t obsess over the past or regret things that could have been.