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By the time Danny Fenton was four, his parents have gone through all of the available babysitters in the entirety of Amity Park and Elmerton. Well, technically not all of them, but apparently, there is a critical percentage of babysitters scared half to death, at best, which makes all other babysitters turn you down no matter how high the pay.
Of course, in this case, the problem was with the house, not the kids, but the Fentons would not be convinced that their house is anything but the safest place for their children to be. What if a ghost came to the babysitter’s house? How would they defend themselves? Do ignore the fact that their own house was a magnet for ghosts, because that’s exactly what they did.
And it brought them to him.
The last thing Vlad Masters expected to hear during his Thursday dinner was his phone ringing.
Well, that was not entirely the case. He was running a rather large company by then, and he was known to take after-hours calls. Not happily, but it wasn’t as if he had any sort of life outside of work – not one that he could be open about, anyway – and with the global expansion of his enterprises in the last few years, sometimes people simply forgot about the existence of time zones.
He didn’t expect to find his personal phone ringing. A small thing that he modified himself and was fairly certain only his mother and a certain annoying definitely licensed and absolutely not shady or paranormal in any way psychologist had the number for. This was neither of them.
He was sure Spectra would give the number to someone just to piss him off, but no living being (and very few dead ones) even knew of their connection. Which left his mother, whom he did instruct to not give the number to anyone, under any circumstances. Of course, telling a Masters to not do something was entirely pointless if said family member did actually want to do the thing.
He hoped to all Ancients his mother wasn’t trying to set him up with some pretty single girl or a recently divorced single mother from her church again.
And while that prayer had been answered, it was much like making a wish to Desiree – somehow worse than the thing he wanted to avoid.
On the other end of the line was Jack fucking Fenton.
It took considerable willpower to not immediately crush the phone and burn the remains to nothing. He did, however, transform before Jack even finished the first sentence.
What ghost wouldn’t get defensive, hearing the voice of their ghostmaker, for the first time after a decade of silence, talking cheerfully and excitedly? Like he hadn’t killed him with his impatience. Like he hadn’t left him to rot. Like he didn’t turn him into an abomination. Like no time had passed. Like nothing had changed.
How dare he talk like that? How dare he ask for favors?
His ghost half may have been the more emotional one, but there was also a level of confidence and power that it brought. Things that he was going to need if he was to talk to Jack Fenton and not let the oaf know anything was wrong. He was fairly certain the man wouldn’t notice either way, but there was no way to know when Madeline could be listening in.
Jack – no, both of them – were asking for a favor. They needed someone to babysit their kids.
Vlad was vaguely aware the two of them had produced two children – the thought of Jack’s clumsy hands anywhere near Madeline made him see red every time – focus, Vlad.
It seemed the couple had bought a haunted broadcast tower to work in and had transformed it into a livable house (or so they claimed). Unfortunately, it seemed that while the ghosts haunting the tower steered clear of the Fentons, babysitters had no such luck, and neither did their kids – though they taught the kids basics of ghost defense (Vlad didn’t know much about kids, but he was fairly certain ghost fighting skills of any sort were not standard curriculum for four and six-year-olds).
It took Vlad a considerable effort to not send Jack to hell and tell him that it’s their own fault. He thought of Madeline. They were her children too.
Of all the plans he had come up with, of all the ways he considered wooing her, this was not one that had come to him before. Things have changed. They weren’t in college anymore. His Madeline was a mother, now.
Perhaps all he needed was to show Madeline that he was a better parent than Jack Fenton. It couldn’t be that hard, right?
***
If you told Vlad Masters the day he (run from) left the hospital that there would come a day when the love he felt for Madeline was going to be but a distant echo or that he would love children sired by Jack Fenton as if they were his own, he would probably laugh at you.
If you said to him the day he received the notice of the birth of their first child, that he would one day destroy any creature that would even dare to look at her meanly, that he would endure any pain, put himself between any weapon and this child, he might have blasted you to pieces. He would endure. But she was so human. So fragile.
If you told him the day he found out about their second child that one day, that the child would be the first human to find out his secret, he might have just flown over and throttled the baby in its cradle, just to be safe, and felt exactly zero remorse about the action. Nobody would ever know. Babies die all the time. Especially with parents like his.
If you told him the day he received that fateful phone call that one day, he would be the first to hold Danny Fenton after his death, the only way he would imagine such a scenario happening would be he was the one to kill the boy. Why else would he hold Jack Fenton’s son?
If you told him, any time in those 18 years between his transformation and today, that the Fentons would make their own child a halfa with their negligence, he would have nodded along. Perhaps he would have even been excited about finally having someone be like him, someone he could teach, someone who would share the hate every ghost feels for their ghostmaker for Jack Fenton. It didn’t surprise him – they never changed in that way. And if there was some excitement, when he found out, he could never imagine how much it would hurt.
If you had told him how much the second fateful call would hurt, what emotions it would ignite with him, how irreversibly it would alter him, he would have never picked up the first one.
But he picked up both and there was no going back.
***
Danny’s hands were shaking as he carefully put in the numbers into the phone.
He felt so stupid. He knew it was stupid. He knew it, and he did it anyway.
And for what?
He had been so proud when his parents left him alone at home for the whole weekend for the first time, when Jazz convinced them to take a campus tour at one of her top choices for a university.
She was sixteen for god’s sake, she had so much time for that stuff.
So, of course he invited his friends over. Of course his techno geek and goth best friends wanted to see the stupid ghost lab his parents had in the basement.
Of course they dared him to go into the ghost portal. It wasn’t working. Danny knew that. He also knew it was dangerous. If he could avoid touching any of his parents’ stupid invention for the rest of his life, he would. Which was kinda hard when half of the house counted as one of those inventions.
They called him a coward.
Tucker was one to talk. He was afraid of hospitals for no good reason. Danny could name about a hundred reasons why messing with his parents’ tech or ghosts was a bad idea. It didn’t bother him that Tucker called him a coward. They were losers and cowards and that was one of the reasons they were friends in the first place. Okay, maybe it bothered him a little, but he would never admit that.
Sam, though, it hurt from her. The girl seemed to not be afraid of anything and she was fascinated by all things strange and dark. All the things that pissed off her parents. And as much as Danny told himself she was a friend and he didn’t want to make it weird, anyone with eyes could see the giant crush he had on her.
Sam wasn’t afraid of anything. And even though he could name all those reasons for why he shouldn’t do it, why they shouldn’t be in the lab at all, why he just wanted to spend the weekend playing videogames and raiding his dad’s snack hideouts and why that’s exactly what they should do, none of those words came to mind as Sam goaded him.
He never asked to have a weird family. He just wanted to be normal and deal with just the normal kid problems. He just wanted his friends to understand that unlike them, he wasn’t a weirdo by choice.
Maybe he snapped at them a little. Maybe he raised his voice a little. Maybe he called them just as shallow and image-obsessed as the A-listers. Maybe he called them boring and attention seeking. Maybe he cursed them out a little.
Maybe a lot more than little.
And they left.
He sat in the living room, watching the clock, alone.
Of course he was alone. He yelled at his only friends.
And for what?
Maybe they were right. Maybe he was just a coward. The portal wasn’t working. How dangerous could it be?
As the minutes ticked by and he felt worse and worse about what he did, he got up and headed back into the lab.
He put on one of the small hazmat suits his parents had for him. He had meticulously torn off and threw out all of the stupid patches with his dad’s face that the self-obsessed mad scientist put on them, months ago, in the off chance he was forced to wear one outside or near a camera. He knew that Sam would mock him for it. But with his parents inventions, he’d rather be safe than sorry. Or dead. Or worse – a ghost.
The thought terrified him. If his parents were to be believed, ghosts were nothing more than echoes of human minds, twisted, either entirely animalistic or evil. Monsters, wearing the face of the dead.
He didn’t even believe in ghosts. He had memories of them from when he was a kid, but they could have just been dreams. With how much their parents talked about the stuff, of course his mind would haunt him (ha!) with them in his sleep.
He realized Sam had left her new camera on the table. She had shown him and Tucker how to operate it a few weeks earlier when she bought it.
Danny turned it on, started recording and left it on one of the tables, pointed at the portal.
“Hey, Sam, Tucker… here’s to show you I’m not a coward. I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier.”
He waved at the camera, took a deep breath and stepped into the portal.
It didn’t work. How dangerous could it be?
How dangerous could it be?
He couldn’t get that thought out of his head as he stumbled out of the portal. It hurt. It hurt so much. And he wasn’t himself. Not anymore.
Twisted monster wearing his own face. A monster his parents would probably hunt and tear apart for stealing his face, for stealing their child away from them.
He sat on the couch and cried. He wished so much to just be himself again.
He couldn’t be dead, right? Everything hurt. He couldn’t be dead. Ghosts didn’t feel pain.
He looked at his arm, at the formerly black glove, now snow white.
He just wanted to be himself again…
He watched as white light appeared, first around his waist and then travelling along the rest of his body, turning him back into himself.
But his parents said ghosts could sometimes pose as living humans.
He felt his heart beating in his chest, now.
He couldn’t be dead if his heart was beating, right?
It didn’t just moments ago.
The rings.
A memory came up. A memory he dismissed as another dream.
He must have been really small, one of the first times uncle Vlad was watching him and Jazz. He was making smoothies in the middle of the night.
Danny wanted to see what was going on and he saw uncle Vlad, with those same rings around him. His normally silver hair seemed pitch black, before the black rings swept across him and turned him into his normal self. He was too young to have gray hair even now, and more so then. His parents explained that it was because of an accident back when they were in college. And accident with a portal prototype…
Vlad gave him candy to promise to never tell anyone what he saw that night. Danny did very distinctly remember eating it all at once, because he was a four-year-old given an irresponsible amount of candy, and how sick he wound up being after.
He thought the whole thing was just a dream. And maybe it was.
When he looked at his hand, he couldn’t see it. He still felt it there, it still made a dent in the couch pillow, but it was invisible.
Something was very, very wrong and he needed to solve it before his parents got home.
And there was only one person that might have the answers.
He called uncle Vlad.
***
Vlad told him to not panic.
That was easier said than done.
He tried to. He tried to keep himself occupied. He took off the stupid hazmat suit.
He other him was still wearing his.
He wanted to watch the TV, but after the remote phased through his hand and fell beneath the couch, he gave up on that.
He could just go to bed. Vlad lived a few states over. It would take him a few hours to arrive.
Maybe he would wake up in the morning and find out it was just a bad dream.
It couldn’t be. Bad dreams don’t hurt.
Most of the pain had faded by now, though he still felt sore, especially in his own body. The other him didn’t hurt that much – but Danny was scared if he fell asleep in that body, he would never wake up. Not as himself anyway.
He was staring at the living room ceiling as the sun set outside. His whole body felt numb. He was tired, but in a different way than needing to sleep. He didn’t have the energy to get up and turn on the lights.
As the darkness crept up more and more, he realized that he could see in the dark a lot better than he did before.
He felt cold, he realized. Not horribly so, just barely colder than would be comfortable.
Cold like the dead.
A horrible thought crossed his mind.
His parents said ghosts could possess human bodies. Maybe he was already dead, his body growing cold slowly, but he just refused to leave it.
Maybe if he closed his eyes, he would never wake up. He could just let go.
Uncle Vlad would arrive in the morning and find his dead body, laying here on the couch.
A shiver run down his spine, and he would swear a cloud of mist escaped his lips.
Maybe it was just cold in the house, and he was freaking out over nothing.
Then, the light turned on.
He jumped up to see who did it.
Uncle Vlad stood by the door leading from the kitchen, looking him up and down.
It took Danny a moment to realize he was floating and that he didn’t have legs.
Instead, there was a wisp-like tail, moving with a mind of its own.
He may or may not have screamed in shock and moments later, he was back to his old self and hit the couch.
He poked his leg. Solid. Normal.
He gulped and looked up at uncle Vlad.
“Danny…” the man whispered. Danny knew his uncle. His voice was always comforting. It was now, too. But there was something else, that he couldn’t put a finger on. Vlad breathed in as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
He sat down next to Danny and pulled him into a hug.
Uncle Vlad was always warm. Too warm. And he was always super weird about it. But right now, Danny felt the chill that had plagued him since he stepped out of that stupid portal melt away. For the first time since that scream left his throat, he still felt it hurt, he felt like he could breathe properly.
For a moment, it didn’t matter what happened, or if he was some kind of monster now. He felt safe.
He began to cry. He cried into Vlad’s stupid fancy suit, because the man apparently didn’t own any other clothes.
He felt his body tingle the same way it did when he dropped the remote and he feared he would slip from Vlad’s grasp. But he didn’t.
“If you don’t want to hug, you can just say that.” Vlad muttered.
Danny sniffled and looked up at him. “What… what do you mean?”
“Intangibility. But I think you didn’t do it on purpose, did you?”
“I… I don’t know.” Danny admitted. He didn’t want to let go, but he felt like a baby sobbing into his uncle’s chest like that. Vlad run his fingers through Danny’s hair.
“It’s okay. It takes time to learn to control it.” Vlad said. “And I’ll help you in any way I can, little badger.”
“Do you… do you know what…” Danny paused, looking for words, unsure of which question to ask first. “What happened to me?”
Vlad seemed to have just as hard of a time finding words.
“Am I dead?” Danny whispered after a moment.
Vlad sighed. “Yes. But you’re also alive.” Vlad run his hand along Danny’s left arm, where he still felt echoes of the electricity that went through it not so long ago. The electricity that killed him. Vlad let go of him and moved away. Danny didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to go back to the cold. “I want to show you something.”
“Oh… okay.” Danny muttered, letting.
Vlad took Danny’s hand and placed it over his own heart. Then, he laid his own over the center of Danny’s chest, where the cold was coming from.
“Like this, we’re still alive. Our hearts are beating. We need to breathe. We need to eat and sleep like any other human.” Vlad paused for a moment. “Can you transform?”
“I think so.” Danny nodded. He had tried turning back and forth a few times while waiting for Vlad. All it took was a thought.
Vlad turned, too.
If he looked closely, he could still recognize his uncle. The shape of the nose and face, the stupid goatee. But if he didn’t look for his uncle, he probably wouldn’t see it. The ghost had blue skin, red eyes with no whites or pupils, pointed ears and when Vlad spoke, Danny could see sharp fangs glint inside of his mouth. Even the shape of the body was different – mom said uncle Vlad had never fully recovered from his accident and the resulting hospital stay. It seemed that the ghost half of him had no such problem, and probably much more resembled the shape the man had been back then. And if his human body had been a little too warm, this one was basically a walking space-heater.
“Like this, no heartbeat.” Vlad whispered. “No need to breathe and no need to eat human food, either.”
“What about sleep?”
“Unless you’re in the ghost zone, yes.” Vlad nodded. “But you can’t stay in one form for too long. If you stay human for too long and don’t use any of your powers, they will simply happen on their own, whether you want it or not. And if you stay as a ghost for too long, your human body will weaken.”
“Will it go away?”
“No. This is you, now.” Vlad sighed. “But you’re not alone in this. I’ll teach you. I’ll help you.”
Vlad turned back to his human form again and Danny followed suit. He could now name the feeling that happened when he did. The suddenly loud thump of his heart, the need to breathe.
“What was that… tail thing?” Danny asked. It had been bothering him the whole time.
“Sometimes, ghosts do that, when we’re flying. Not all and not always, but it does make flying a little more effective.”
“Am I a monster, now? Mom and dad said all ghosts are monsters.”
“Your mom and dad are too obsessed with being right that they get a lot of things wrong about ghosts. Ghost are much like people. Some good, some bad, and most just kind of in-between.” Vlad said. “They are… different, though. Their society, their rules and traditions, it’s very different from human ones.”
“Why do I need to know that? I’m not planning on hanging out with any ghosts… except you, I mean.”
“Some of those customs and values are inherent to being a ghost. It will not be right away, but your view on those things will likely change to a more… ghost-like one.” Vlad explained. “But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
“Vlad… do mom and dad know about you? What you are?”
Danny saw Vlad’s eyes flash red. He had seen it before, though he was sure he was imagining things. Often whenever his accident was brought up. Or when dad said something stupid and insensitive – so most of the time dad talked.
“No.” Vlad said after a moment. “No, they don’t know what I am. And they must never find out about either of us. Nobody living can.”
“Why? I mean… yeah, they are ghost hunters, but I’m still their son and you’re still their friend.”
“Are we? Or are we monsters wearing stealing their faces?” Vlad shook his head. “Your parents have very hard time accepting they were wrong about something. What you are… what we are… goes against all of that, all that they think they know. You might be right. Maybe their love for you is stronger than their stubbornness. And maybe it is not. It’s better we never find out.” Vlad sighed, pulling Danny closer to himself again, seeing the boy shivering again. “And they are not the only ghost hunters out there. Even if they do accept us, the others would not be so forgiving. We must be careful to not leave any evidence of what we are.”
“The camera.” Danny exclaimed suddenly.
“What camera?”
“I… I was recording myself when I went into the portal. I wanted to show my friends I was not a coward.” God, he felt even dumber saying that out-loud.
“Is it still in the lab?”
“I think so.” Danny nodded. Vlad stood up and headed there immediately. Danny followed him.
He always knew Vlad seemed to make no sound while he moved. For the first time, Danny understood how.
“High ectoplasm can mess with electronics. If we’re lucky, the recording doesn’t show anything.” Vlad muttered, seemingly talking more to himself than Danny. The camera was still recording while he picked it up. That was not a good sign.
Vlad began to watch the playback of the video. Danny cringed at the awkward intro he did. And then, moments later, a piercing scream echoed through the lab. Danny felt a sharp stab in his chest at the sound. Even through the recording, it was awful.
Vlad’s features seemed to be made out of stone, but somehow, Danny was certain the man was furious. As the figure of ghost Danny emerged from the portal, Vlad closed the camera and his palm erupted in magenta flames.
Danny stepped back.
“You could have just deleted the video.”
“There are ways to recover deleted videos. This is more certain.” Vlad said, the poured the charred dust from his hand into the hazardous waste disposal. When some of it refused to come off, Danny watched Vlad’s hand change – it seemed almost like static on a TV, but in real life. Vlad’s hand was now perfectly clean. “I’ll buy you a new camera.”
“It was Sam’s actually.”
“I’ll buy her a new camera.” Vlad corrected himself.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Danny asked.
“It will not be possible right away, but once your core settles a bit, it should come naturally.” Vlad nodded. “I promise, I’ll teach you everything I know. But first, dinner. I’m sure you have a million more questions. You can ask them while I cook.”
***
Vlad Masters was not a father. Not that he knew of, anyway.
And Vlad Plasmius wouldn’t even consider exposing himself to such a weakness.
But cores are as fickle as they are stubborn.
Vlad wasn’t Danny’s father, and perhaps in a different lifetime, that would have mattered to him.
It didn’t in this one.
It mattered that the boy he had watched grow up was dead, because of his parents’ negligence.
It mattered that he was alive, stuffing his face full of pasta, badgering him with questions about a subject he had no interest in until that day.
By human law, he was the boy’s godfather and the assigned guardian, should something happen to his parents, just as he was for his sister. Some days, he was tempted to make something happen. Today was one of those days. But he looked at Danny, remembered the conviction with which he claimed his parents would accept him, both of them, even as the abominations they both were now. The boy would mourn. The boy would break. The boy loved his parents, because he was a child and that’s what they do. It was for that look, that conviction, that Vlad held back the inferno rising through his body. The Fentons were lucky their son Remained – had that scream in the portal truly been the boy’s final breath, Vlad knew there would be no holding back.
By ghost rules, however, the boy was his child. Nobody, living or dead, had a greater claim to Danny than he did. Danny couldn’t understand it yet, but the trust he had put in Vlad, the love he held for him, and whatever it was that Vlad felt for the boy in return, had bonded their cores. Perhaps the boy would never realize – his core was so soft and new when the bond formed and would be such a natural part of it by the time Danny would start to understand his core that he wouldn’t even notice it.
Vlad wasn’t sure what he felt for Danny could be called love in the human sense, but after ten years of fighting it, he knew it would be recognized as such by ghosts. Ghost love was like that. Possessive, obsessive, a powerful and unbreakable bond, built on strength and devotion.
Danny was his.
He had let go of his old obsession long ago, perhaps on that fateful night, but he knew the parts of him that still clung to the rage of death would rest easier from now on. In the battle between himself and his ghostmaker, he had won.