Chapter Text
It happened.
He thought that it couldn’t happen.
Everything was just as it had to be. His family, Sam, Tucker, Mr. Lancer, strapped to a near boiling tank of Nasty Sauce with a glowing red band of ecto-energy. Ghost Gauntlets, tossed to the side and crushed, too far away to get and too damaged to even try. Dark Dan, standing over him, laughing. “You are such a CHILD. You promised? ”
He crawled to his knees, breath shaky.
“Yes, I PROMISED~~~~~~~~~”
Echoing across the street, wave after wave of his ghostly wail pushed Dark Dan back, stumbling, trying to withstand the energy only to be slammed back through the wall of a building. Dan held his head. “You can’t do that, it’s not possible—I don’t get that power until ten years from now.”
“I guess the future wasn’t as set in stone as you thought it was.”
He let everything out, his desperation to save the people he loved, his frustration and hate towards this thing that was supposed to be his future, his determination to be anything but him . When his “future” could no longer put up a fight, white flames as his hair barely staying lit, he pointed the thermos at Dark Dan and absorbed him into his new prison. He savored a moment of victory, only for it to sour as he remembered his loved ones still strapped to the fast food time bomb that was only seconds away from exploding.
He ran. Tried to fly only to find that he’d worn out his ghost half and was stuck with human legs and human endurance. He tripped. He fell. He screamed.
BOOOOOOOOMMMMMM
It happened.
He thought that it couldn’t happen.
He thought he was fast enough. He should have been faster.
Now, Danny sat staring at the spot where the most precious people in his life, and Mr. Lancer, had breathed their last breaths, his body numb and shaking, his mind unable to process what he’d seen. He’d thought that he’d be able to avoid it, but he wasn’t. It was as Dark Dan had said.
It was inevitable .
“What the stars above is this?”
Danny’s eyes shot up to see a woman who looked no more than three years his senior. Her clothes were plain, jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, but her boots were black with hot pink belts wrapped around them. Lavender hair bounced around her head like a ball of fluff as she looked around. It wasn’t until she looked down at Danny that he noticed her eyes.
Sparkling green.
It reminded him of that first moment after he accidentally turned on the portal after Sam had convinced him to go inside. That moment in the mirror when he saw his eyes had turned a sickly shade of ecto-green. He remembered avoiding eye contact with his family for at least a week afterwards, afraid he couldn’t control what had happened to him. He would have asked his parents for help, but . . .
“Look Maddie, the portal works!”
“That’s not the point, Jack! Danny was down here when the portal turned on, and we have no idea if he got exposed to anything harmful.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s a Fenton after all—we’re all tough walls of fudge.”
“Argh, Jack, I don’t know how the portal turned on, but if we had just disconnected it LIKE I HAD SUGGESTED, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
“But Maddie, if we’d disconnected the portal, our dreams of discovering the ghost realm would have been bitter and unfulfilled! Don’t tell me you don’t see the excitement in what lies ahead, right?”
“That future doesn’t matter if our SON has been permanently mutilated by our dream! Oh, I am about done with you and your irresponsibility with technology!”
“But you said that you loved that about me!”
“Endearment will only get you so far, Jack Fenton, and if I find that Danny has so much as a HAIR out of place from this latest screw-up, the only talking you and I will be doing will be through lawyers!”
If only he’d told them, maybe they’d still be alive. Unhappy, separated, but alive. Nothing like this would have happened. But he was too scared of the consequences, and too slow. For some reason, he was always too slow when it mattered.
“Hey, you there?”
Danny blinked rapidly and realized that the woman was crouched down in front of him, green sparkles staring straight through to his soul. He shuddered.
“Okay,” she clapped her hands together. “You’re Danny, right?”
He nodded slowly, barely questioning how she knew his name when he was completely confident that he’d never seen her before.
“Good, right. Gotta be sure when it comes to these things. So, this will be a little hard to hear, but this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Danny furrowed his eyebrows. What was she talking about? Of course this was supposed to happen. It was inevitable.
“Right, yeah, you don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, it’s not going to be a simple explanation.”
She stood up and began pacing back and forth in front of Danny as she continued talking. “Imagine a library. In this library, you can go to a shelf, any shelf, and pick out a book and read it. Well, every word in each of these books tell events that have to happen. Those events, those words, those people, are the backbone the universe is built on. Without those people and events following exactly as they are written, the world begins to crumble, often with drastic consequences. People dying when they aren’t supposed to, for example.”
Danny raised his head. “They . . . weren’t supposed to die?” he asked, his voice raw. “It wasn’t . . . inevitable?”
“Now that’s where this gets a little tricky. See, there’s multiple worlds that have similar characters, all following different plots. In a book, there’s a plot where yes, the death of your loved ones was inevitable, but it’s not this one . This one was supposed to be the one where your loved ones lived—that Clockwork guy was going to come in and save them at the last possible second. But he didn’t, and I don’t know why. I only noticed because I happened to be reading your specific script when I saw that the letters and words started melting, which means that events are collapsing off-script.”
She looked down at Danny, her expression softening. Kneeling down, she put her hand to his face. “I know it’s hard. I know what it’s like to have your parents taken from you. So I’m gonna help you.”
She stepped back and contemplated her hands, whispering to herself, “This is gonna hurt” as she opened her mouth, grabbed one of her teeth and yanked as hard as she could. Danny jumped back as she tried to muffle her scream with her one hand over her mouth and the other hand holding a tooth between her fingers.
With the hand that covered her mouth, she pulled it away just barely and snapped her fingers. She massaged her gums, taking a moment to examine the tooth in her hands as she mumbled, “I hate doing that.”
Danny watched, eyes wide, as he noticed that when she’d opened her mouth again to speak, she wasn’t missing any teeth. In fact, the tooth that she’d taken out—one of her incisors—was noticeably not missing. Yet she was still holding a tooth in her hand, though as Danny’s gaze switched to the tooth in her hand, he watched it turn from pearly white to a glossy green, like an emerald.
She handed it to him. “Here, take this.”
He leaned away. “Why in the hell would I take that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because right now it’s the thing that's gonna help you get your friends and family back.”
His eyes dilated in interest, followed by a narrowing of the eyebrows. “How could a tooth do that?”
“Look, in order to get your friends and family back to where they’re supposed to be, we first gotta make sure that we don’t step into another script path. We’re in open territory right now. If we step onto another script path at this point, I can almost guarantee that I won’t be able to save your loved ones without destroying the very ground beneath your feet. Now, if you want my help, you have to follow my instructions, got it?”
He nodded, taking the crystal hesitantly from her.
“Good. Now, while I’m off trying to figure out where exactly things went wrong, your job is going to be staying off script.”
Danny frowned. “Yeah sure, Sherlock, no problem. Just hand me my cane and I’ll get going.”
She sighed. “As far as I’m aware, there are two major scripts that deviate from this point, so here’s what you’re gonna do. Stay in your ghost form. Avoid relying on your human form as much as possible. That crystal should help you maintain your ghost form even if you’re tired or sleeping, so don’t lose it. Oh, and don’t swallow it. I had someone try that one time, and I had to blast a hole through him to get it back. Follow so far?”
“Stay ghost, keep crystal, don’t swallow.”
“Alright. Now for your second major thing: stay out of the ghost zone. Going down that road will lead to worse results than Dan, at least much more painful, traumatic, agonizing ones before anything might get a shred better. If the ghosts come here looking for you for whatever reason, use your parents' technology to get away. The more energy you use up fighting those ghosts hand to hand, the less time you’ll be able to stay ghost. You’re only half -dead after all.”
Danny examined the crystal in his hand. Even though moments ago he’d seen the woman yank it out of her mouth as a tooth, it looked more like a crystal claw from a decorative animal. He couldn’t decide if it looked more like that jade statue in that one Chinese restaurant they had in town or if it looked more like the emerald eye of that stone cat in Sam’s bedroom.
“Is that it?” he asked in disbelief. “If there’s a way to help everyone, I want to do everything I can. Trying to live without them doesn’t feel like it’s helping them.”
“Because it’s not,” the woman deadpanned. “It’s stalling until I can figure out what happened. If you don’t do what I asked, then you’ll be dragged down the path of a script where your parents and friends die, and if that happens, I won’t be able to get them back.”
“Fine. How long do I have to ‘stall’ then?”
She paused for a moment before speaking again. “Go for a month. If I don’t find you within a month, go to Jump City and look for a girl named Rachel. Either she’ll be able to find me or she might be able to help you where I failed. But don’t go there until a month has passed, you got that?”
Danny nodded.
The woman stood up and looked beside her. She held her hand up in front of her gaze and snapped her fingers. Ecto-green clouds swirled into a spiral before her, creating a portal just tall enough for her to walk through.
“Alright,” she said to herself, stretching her limbs out. “Time to find this Clockwork and show him what real time magic looks like.”