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five-rivers · 8 months

Text

Dreadful Calm Chapter 1

Tags from AO3: Major character death, freezing solid, Vomiting, gagging, suffocation, Hypothermia, most of those things don't REALLY happen, but it's close enough those tags should do it, Body Horror, ectoberhaunt 2023 day 11: dread vs calm

(MCD not shown in this chapter.)

Danny was glad the 'Fenton Family Vacation-slash-Road-Trip-slash-Ghost-Hunting-Extravaganza' was over and they were finally on their way back to Amity Park. The trip had been as long and tedious as its name, and Danny hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. They’d be crossing the city limits soon, and it'd only take another fifteen minutes to get home.

For Danny, it couldn’t come soon enough. He loved his parents. He really did. But being around them constantly for days had been taxing, and would have been even if he hadn’t been a half-ghost who had to watch himself for ghostly slip ups.

That wasn’t even touching on the stress of being away from Amity Park, which was the source of most of said slip ups. Heck, about halfway through the trip, he’d woken up from a nightmare in a panic, convinced something terrible had happened, and only calls from Sam and Tucker telling him that everything was fine had kept him from flying all the way back home to fight the perceived threat.

Although… Now that he thought about it, he wondered… how did they know to call him in the first place?

The GAV ka-thumped over a pothole - not one Danny had made by being thrown into the asphalt at high speeds, incidentally, he remembered those - and the thought was thrown from his head in favor of grumbling. Grumbling, and a faint sense of unease.

He leaned to the side so he could look out the windshield at the skyline, and couldn’t help the thought that something was different, something was wrong. Nothing he could see. All the buildings seemed to be there, and he would know.

The ‘Welcome to Amity Park’ sign flicked by the window, unreadable at the speeds Jack was driving at, and–

And Danny slammed his right hand over his mouth, unlatched his seatbelt with his left, and dove for the tiny bathroom in the back of the GAV. He got the door closed and locked behind him, and immediately fell into the tiny cubicle shower, dropping to his hands and knees.

His ghost sense dripped and oozed off the tip of his tongue and past his lips, heavy and almost liquid, despite still being insubstantial mist. It fell in wispy curls and silky folds, dispersing along the floor and leaving behind feathery patterns of frost. He retched, trying to clear his airway, and managed to draw in a single gasp of fresh air before his ghost sense reasserted dominance.

Well. Danny was assuming this was his ghost sense. It lacked the usual sense of accompanying hostility, and while his ghost sense might make him gasp, it had never made him gag.

“... motion sickness?” called Maddie from the front.

“Y-yeah!” rasped out Danny. He winced at the sound of his voice, then shivered once, violently.

“Don’t worry, son! We’ll be home in no time! And motionless! With fudge!”

Bluish mist pooled in the bottom of the shower well, and spilled over the shallow plastic lip, into the rest of the bathroom. Danny was glad that his mother had insisted on the bathroom door having a plastic seal and a separate ventilation system after one too many ‘incidents,’ otherwise the mist would be leaking out into the main cabin of the GAV.

He shivered again, and a hum from his core turned into a croon in his throat. To it, the cold felt like a comforting welcome, even though it was the one producing it.

But what was making it produce cold like this? Even Pariah Dark hadn’t felt like this. Going into the Ghost Zone for the first time hadn’t felt like this. Nothing felt like this, like being suddenly supercharged in the worst way, to the point of losing control, but also feeling paradoxically good, power dragging fingers up his spine, wrapping around him like a blanket.

He got in another breath, then lost it, giggling as a delicious chill spread from his core all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes.

What he should do, what he wanted to do was go ghost and fly away somewhere he could release all this energy safely. But his parents had upgraded the GAV before they’d left on the trip, and had spent the last several days explaining all the new features in detail.

There were a lot of weapons. A lot of weapons.

There were detectors, too, ones that would be able to see Danny if he was in ghost form.

Possibly more importantly, the walls were painted with Fenton Paint, and Danny couldn’t phase past that.

Another wave of cold bloomed from his core, and he exhaled more frigid fog. He could feel ice on his wrists and hands, and he snatched them up, off the floor, blinking tears out of his eyes. Those tears fell to the floor with tiny clinks.

Afraid of what he’d find, he pressed his tongue against the back of his lower lip. His tongue was slow, heavy, it didn’t want to move. Tiny spears of frost crunched against one another, then were bound together by another plume of mist. He could feel more frost forming around his back teeth, locking his jaw open. Danny crooned again, and the sound was oddly content for how terrified Danny was.

Sudden, sharp pain radiating from around his core forced him to double over the rest of the way into a fetal position, trapping his arms between his legs and his chest. There was ice forming around his core. He knew this with a terrifying certainty. There was ice forming around his core, in his chest, in his organs. He could feel it creeping across the outsides of his lungs, freezing them in place even as he choked in a final breath past the mist still curling past his lips. He could feel his heart slow then stop as his blood turns to slush, then freezes solid.

Despite this, despite the pain, part of him still found this comfortable, pleasureable. The cold was good. The power was good. Whatever was doing this, it felt like home and safety and welcome back. He knew, he knew he could use this, once he got it under control, to help and protect people, his people, his city, his family, his friends, better than ever. Ice clattered against ice as more tears fell from his eyes. His core purred happily, and all the ice crystals around it reverberated with the tone.

It hurt. It hurt so much to have all those crystals inside him chime, vibrating enough to feel them inside his flesh, inside his bone, but it also soothed him in ways he couldn’t explain.

He could still transform, could still go ghost. But the GAV’s defenses were still there, still active. He’d be trapped again, just in a different way, and for all he knew, this could get worse if he went ghost. Right now, his out-of-control powers were only freezing him, but they could very easily freeze other people. People who didn’t have built-in resistance to being frozen solid.

(The humming purr of his core stuttered momentarily, as if that had finally gotten through to it, but the moment didn’t last.)

And either way… his parents would know.

No. He wouldn’t transform.

He blinked tears out of his eyes again, but this time he could not open them. His eyelids had frozen shut. He tried to shift, to bring up a hand to break away the ice, but the cold had made his joints and muscles stiff, immovable.

He was stuck. Trapped. The only parts of him still mobile were the fog pouring out of his mouth and nose, the growing ice, and his core, humming away without a care in the world. Everything else was frozen to stillness.

Trapped, and he wasn’t even trapped alone, somewhere he would have time to figure this out and get it under control. Any moment, they would arrive home, and his parents would want to know why he wasn’t coming out, and when he didn’t answer, they’d barge in, because they’d worry, they would, and they’d see him like this, and know he couldn’t be anything but dead.

Ice crept up and down his spine, filling in the gaps between his bones. It touched the base of his skull, and spread slowly along his scalp, like a hand carding through his hair. The feeling sank deeper, into his skin, his muscle, his bone. Someone approved. Someone was proud of him. Someone cared. Someone was thanking him. Someone wanted him. Someone loved him.

Each and every part of him sang with the song of his core. He was frozen solid, coated with ice inside and out.

Danny stayed that way for what felt like hours, his feelings churning between the externally-induced happiness of his core and the very real dread of his parents finding him like this. But for all that he was, nominally, in human form, the parts of him that were human were asleep in the ice.

The calm won out.

The calm… Out the window, Amity Park had seemed remarkably calm.

The thought slithered away from the numb, chilled fingers of Danny’s mind, and he let it. He’d been distracted by a new sensation. An unbearable lightness. It filled him up as thoroughly as the ice, with his core as the kernel. It felt like his soul was straining against the upper surfaces of his body. It felt like he was having a fight with gravity that was far more personal than usual. It felt like peace and contentment, just out of his reach.

Below him, there was a resounding crack as he lifted up off the floor to float mid-air. His core-song grew louder, without the damping effects of touching something that wasn’t in tune.

He didn’t know how long he hung there, floating, in the air, his thoughts becoming progressively sleepier and more abstract, drawn out into slow, simple cycles by the lack of anything to think about. His usual methods of time keeping were out of reach. No light, not action, no breath or heartbeat, and for all that the ice and the song and the floating made him tired, they barely put a dent in his energy.

But then, past the layer of ice over his ears, he felt-heard the door open, and people came in. He couldn’t see them, of course, but he felt their warmth/energy/emotion, and they looked on him kindly, lovingly, with gentle affection and concern. They touched him with warm-cool hands, and he let them direct him, effortlessly, first out the bathroom door, then out the GAV, and from there into his home.

Weightless cold pulsed through him again as they crossed that threshold, the power even greater here than outside. The hands withdrew, then, for the first time since they’d found him, and his core-song turned plaintive, the notes making his notes ache bitterly. But the hands returned, their journey not yet done.

They continued, into the kitchen, through the lab door, down the stairs, and–

Danny couldn’t help it. His song turned sad, mournful. This was where he had died the first time, for all that it was also where the power coursing through him was the strongest. Those with him wept as well, feeling the same, he could tell. But they didn’t stop. They pushed him steadily deeper into the lab, steadily further and further into power, into pain.

Into the portal.

He passed into the Ghost Zone, and whatever was feeding him power simply went away, as if it had never existed. Danny’s ghost sense stopped streaming from his mouth. The sublime weightlessness receded into the regular weightlessness enjoyed by most things in the Zone. The things that were keeping Danny awake, stopped.

He slept.

#ectoberhaunt #23 day 11 #23 prompt dread #23 calendar science #eh23 #reblogs #23 prompt calm #23 calendar magic #danny phantom

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jackdraw-spwrite · 8 months

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Fine, Chapter 5

Words: 3033 Characters: Clockwork, Danny Warnings: Graphic description of a bad gear :(, body horror

No preview snippet today because we're starting with some body horror.

Read on AO3, or below the readmore:

The metal of the wall was smooth at Danny's back, and warm where his suit was cut away. The sides of the slot cupped his spine perfectly, and it matched its length as well. He could feel the top of it at the base of his neck, and the bottom at his tailbone.

There was a snick, and his spine was pinned neatly into place.

It was painless. It was curiously secure. When Danny tried to turn his head, he discovered his neck was immobile. But his eyes could move, and these he used to look at Clockwork. Questioning, devoid of panic.

"Synchronization is a delicate process when it's done so quickly,” explained Clockwork. “Immobility will keep you safe."

Oh. That made a certain degree of sense.

Danny tested his other movements, and discovered he could also move the fingers of his right hand. He wiggled them at Clockwork. Obligingly, Clockwork took it and gave it a squeeze.

Danny would have smiled at him if his mouth hadn't been locked into position. He tried to smile with his eyes instead. He wasn't that experienced at it, and briefly worried that he didn't do a very good job. But Clockwork seemed to understand regardless. He hummed again in response, soft and familiar before rubbing tiny circles on Danny's hand with his thumb.

Danny tried humming back, but it was like he was missing traction, spinning, lost. Like that part of him had been rendered silent, too–

And then something made contact.

It would be reasonable to assume the process of synchronizing with Long Now would be a jarring one, when it was driven by metal on metal contact. It would be reasonable to assume there would be scraping, especially if one were unfamiliar with the mechanics of gear works.

Neither was the case.

There was a click as a gear made contact with his spine (except it wasn't his spine, was it? There was something else with a sensation that he couldn't quite name) but the pressure it exerted was gentle at first. There was no violent catch like a bike shifting gears too quickly. It pressed, smooth and sure. It pressed harder, and Danny felt the pressure flow through him, through all of him from his head to his toes, before it began to ease.

Something settled. He couldn't say if it was inside him or out, and then the pressure faded.

Another click, a ratchet behind him and contact. Pressure like a cresting wave radiating from his back.

Settling.

Click.

Clockwork was watching him intently, still holding Danny's hand. He had woven his fingers together with Danny's and now he was fluttering them so they rose and settled back on Danny's skin in a quick staccato, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap.

Danny squeezed in silent thanks.

Settling. Click.

Another ratchet.

Pressure.

It felt like resting in a snowbank during a winter storm. Cozy and soothing and safe. Quiet, except the faint patter of falling snow.

Except here, there was a different sort of song, and that song wasn't discordant anymore.

Danny's eyelids fluttered.

Settling. Click.

If he listened carefully, he could hear the sound of the gears synchronizing him as their teeth beat the air. And yet the pressure was still gentle, still soft.

Settling. Click.

Pressure. The thrum of belonging. The song of time crashing into him over and over like it was rocking him to sleep. The rise and fall of anticipation in the air in time with him. Or him, in time with it.

The pressure steadied, dropped, became a slight and reassuring tug.

And then, with a feather-light brush farewell, it vanished. The pins holding him in place released, and Danny slid to the floor.

He wanted to protest. He felt like he'd just been dumped out of the world's most comfortable bed, but his mouth was still stuck open. He twisted his face into a deep frown, too sleepy to be embarrassed about it.

"I know," said Clockwork. "It is pleasant to be so synchronized, but we do have repairs to make."

He touched the back of Danny's neck again and his spine released, falling back into its usual curve. His jaw clicked as it returned to flexibility, and Danny eased it closed the rest of the way. He rubbed at it near his ear, but it didn't ache.

The sudden absence of peace did, though. It had washed over and through him with each additional step of synchronization, until it felt like part of him, like purpose and belonging and like he was a part of it and the lack felt, felt–

Danny looked back, eyes lingering on the slot that had so gently held him.

But Clockwork was right. They did have repairs to make, and enough of the pleasant hum of synchronization was still with him to drench the world in honey.

Or oil. Was it oil, now?

He took Clockwork's offered hand and clambered back to his feet, and Clockwork helped him back to the bench. Danny's legs felt as solid and stable as chains beneath him, and he clutched at Clockwork for support. When they reached the bench, Danny let himself fall to it with a thump.

He closed his eyes, rested his head against Clockwork’s shoulder, and spent a while just listening.

To himself. To Clockwork's mechanisms. And to the song of Long Now, which cascaded from the open door like a lullaby. It wrapped around him like another blanket and cloaked him in security.

"Daniel?" asked Clockwork.

Danny hummed. It earned him a chuckle and stroke of Clockwork's hand through his hair, which he pressed back against. He hadn't felt this at peace in months. It was like a joint that had been just out of place had popped back in, except the joint was his nerves. Instead of feeling worn and ragged, they felt soothed. Calm.

The relief was dragging him towards sleep.

"I'm going to remove the rest of your panels now," said Clockwork.

"Mmmm," Danny agreed. Where had Clockwork's cloak gone?

"You will need to stop leaning on me."

"Mmmm?"

"You will catch your teeth on my shirt, without the panels keeping them safe."

Clockwork worked quickly, gently, and with ease born of long practice. Soon, there was a jigsaw puzzle of panels set to the side and Danny's arm and hand lay open on the table.

Like this, the wires and gears and rods within seemed almost to spill from his arm. The strange depth within him was gone and without it, everything it had contained had little elsewhere to go than out.

Danny’s fingers and hand were a dizzying collection of rods and wires and other things. They bent weirdly, curving outwards even as they ran to his elbow in ruler-straight lines if he tilted his head just so. The articulation of each joint was incredibly intricate, and Danny couldn't help but imagine what it was like moving, even if looking at it–at any of it–made his eyes feel a little funny.

Clockwork moved to the panels around Danny's elbow, and then up his arm. With deft movements and soft tugs, the pile of panels grew. So, too, did the distance between the parts of his hand and arm. Or, maybe not?

Danny squinted, turned his head to the other side.

Gears that had started touching had stayed touching, even as the space between them had. Unfolded? Relaxed? Shifted, halfway between a holographic poster and an optical illusion. But no matter how he looked at it, one thing remained the same: Danny's arm was splayed out on the table, a huge mess of brass rods and wires and gears.

It looked like a maze. It looked…Danny’s lips quirked.

“It looks like we have quite the task at hand,” he said. “And arm, and elbow.”

A puff of air from Clockwork made Danny's hair flutter.

"I'm glad you're feeling better," he said.

And Danny was.

He hadn't really expected that. But sitting here next to Clockwork, with the song of Long Now thrumming in his ears in time with his gears and light streaming in from the garden, it was hard not to feel better.

He was safe here, even if he couldn’t, shouldn't, wouldn't want to stay. Here, he knew, Long Now would take care of him.

Clockwork would take care of him. Was taking care of him. The gentle tug and click of Danny’s panels was reminder enough of that.

The ever-present song of Long Now surged comfortingly around him, and Danny felt his eyes flutter.

His head was growing heavy.

Clockwork’s shoulder was right there…

Danny almost let his head fall back against it before remembering why it was a bad idea. With effort, he straightened his head and tried to focus.

Clockwork set a final panel of skin on the rest of the pile with a faint click that Danny felt as a tingle of sensation at his shoulder. Then, he turned to examining the bared machinery of Danny's arm.

With an index finger, Clockwork traced the lines of the wires. He hovered just above them, following them up and down, up and down as Danny watched.

Clockwork fell silent, deep in concentration.

Quietly, Danny pulled a face. He desperately wanted to disperse the nervous energy he felt at such close attention, but he also didn't want to disturb Clockwork’s concentration. The conflict was making him feel a little antsy.

Finally, Clockwork seemed to come to a decision. He reached for a pair of tweezers and grabbed one of the wires in a motion like a bird hunting for worms and then the comparison was driven from his mind because–

"That–pinches."

It took a moment for Clockwork to remember Danny was there. He paused before he pulled his head up from focusing on Danny's arm and even then it was more a tilt of the head than looking at Danny.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"I just, um. Didn't expect that. Can you? Could you, when I was touching your gears?"

"Yes," said Clockwork, the fondness in his voice unmistakable.

"What did it feel like?" Danny asked.

In answer, Clockwork touched one of Danny's gears with a careful finger.

"Oh," said Danny.

It felt a bit like pressure on a fingernail. Distributed, with little sense of specifics. But it was also indisputably there.

Danny reached out with his own hand, but Clockwork stopped him.

"Not all of them will be pleasant," he warned. "Remember that your arm is broken."

Danny stilled. Clockwork returned his focus to the intricate workings of his arm, tracing wires over and under one another, following chains of gears until–

"Here," said Clockwork. "Do you see it?"

Danny ducked his head so he could see what Clockwork was showing him.

It was a tiny thing, about the width of Danny's pinky, but it was about where his wrist had been. Perhaps a little farther up his arm, towards his elbow. It was nestled deep in among a chain of other gears and hard to see because of it, but the problem wasn't, once Danny could spot the gear at all.

He stifled a hiss.

The gear was warped horribly, the disc of it bent almost at a right angle. There were impressions in it that looked almost like bite marks, and its teeth were mangled. One was almost sheared off.

"What are you going to do?" Danny asked, feeling a little queasy.

"Fix it," said Clockwork. He tapped one end of the chain. "Does this hurt?"

Danny winced. "Yes."

"Then the damage isn't isolated to just that region. I'm going to try the rest of the way down your arm, to see where it ends. Tell me when it begins hurting."

They continued like that for a while, with Clockwork lightly testing what did and didn't hurt when he pressed on it. It sucked, but Clockwork never put a lot of pressure on anything, never made the contact anything but brief. And in the end they were left looking at a piece of Danny's arm surrounding the bent cog about as long as Danny's hand.

Danny’s stomach was tying itself in knots.

There were dozens of gears that had hurt when pressed. A few gears linked to wires in his fingers had teeth that were visibly smeared.

"How bad is it?" asked Danny, futilely. It was bad. It had to be bad.

"Worse than it would have been if it had been repaired quickly. There is a great deal of secondary damage to fix, now."

Danny's shoulders hunched, his dead arm flopping a little with the motion.

"However, I have repaired far worse damage, even to my own person. I will need to recast some of these, but most can simply be heated and hammered back out, or have their teeth welded."

Clockwork looked at Danny then, and even the accustomed creases of his frown were soft to match his eyes and tone.

"Everything here can be repaired, Daniel. There is no permanent damage."

It was clearly meant to be comforting. Danny wasn't sure it was, but he nodded anyway. The motion was jerky. Robotic.

Clockwork lingered on Danny's face for a moment longer before returning to his arm. He traced a circle in the air around the damaged part.

"Once I remove this we will be able to return some of your panels temporarily. You'll be able to lean on things without worrying as much about your gears, that way."

Things, Danny thought, meaning Clockwork. He couldn't pretend he didn't want to.

He kind of just wanted to curl up in general. The image of his mutilated gear kept floating to the top of his mind’s eye, and the idea of everything around it running into it, bending around it and going crunch…

Danny grimaced, and tried to pay attention to what Clockwork was doing.

Clockwork extracted the set of gears from the rest of Danny's arm in deft and delicate motions. He used tiny screwdrivers and similarly-sized tweezers to pick apart screws and extract shafts, and arranged them all on a soft cloth in neat columns.

Danny watched.

He could feel what Clockwork was doing, in pinches and flutters and tiny little twists, and while it didn’t feel bad it still felt–strange.

It felt strange.

He’d thought that once they were detached from him, he’d stop feeling anything from the gears. Instead it was like a thousand ghost-touches along surfaces he didn’t even know he had, like wind whispering along his arms, or ants marching in lines over his skin.

“This may hurt,” said Clockwork, and snaked his fingers beneath an entire section of gear wheels before lifting them in one big chunk.

It did hurt. But it was a deep and lingering kind of ache, and when Clockwork rested it upside down on the table, the ache ebbed. Clockwork set to untangling the mass of gears on the underside with the same movements he'd used earlier, and Danny left him to it. His arm had hooked his eyes once more.

The cavernous hole beneath the gears was exposed, now. And there–

It was only more machinery. More joints and wires and rods and other things Danny couldn't name, even if he could recognize some of them.

But it was more machinery.

Machinery all the way down.

Machinery, all the way through.

He'd known. But with the way the center of his arm had been so tightly woven of cords and other things, he'd been able to imagine bone somewhere underneath it all. Bone and flesh and muscle and brass growing around it like a shell, like hair or leaves or, or.

He hadn't been completely wrong. He could see a slip of something long and smooth and solid in the window left by the gears Clockwork had removed.

Clockwork moved back, and it shone gold in the light of the workshop, solid and smooth and–and cold.

It was brass.

He was brass, and ice, and crystal, all the way down. All the way through. Cold things. Machine things.

Dead.

…

Danny shook himself.

Clockwork had already finished dissembling all of the group while Danny had been distracted. There were columns of shining parts now, set so each piece rested in its own space. Like this, they seemed more like the random collections of parts Danny would find on a lab table back at Fentonworks than part of Danny.

"We will want to protect the other components of your arm while we work," said Clockwork. He tweaked the position of one of the gears.

Danny felt something flitter just on the edge of sensation and resisted the urge to rub at a wrist that wasn't there at the moment. "We?" he asked.

"You will want to know how to maintain yourself."

"If this ends up permanent," said Danny.

Clockwork looked at him out of the corners of his eyes. "You are curious."

With that, he began bundling the remaining parts of Danny's arm together again. He coiled loose wires into loops and secured them with ties. He folded things in so they lay closely together, if not neatly. In places, he wove cloth between parts of Danny's arm.

"As padding, and to keep them separate while the gears are absent," he explained. Then, "Do not worry. I would never use anything prone to dust."

And finally, after another lullaby-intoxicating fastening of Danny's panels, he was left with the odd sensation in his left arm of being at once stuffed, and compressed, and entirely too exposed.

Clockwork let Danny slump against him as he pulled himself back together.

And then there was nothing left before them but the set of little gears from Danny's arm.

"This one first," said Clockwork, and selected a gear wheel of moderate size. The shaft running through it was long and thin. "The pin is bent, see?"

Through lidded eyes, Danny watched the gear wheel spin unevenly between Clockwork's fingers. There was a tug at his senses as it did, a hint of friction overshadowed by a deep and uneasy movement that made his stomach twist from side to side with the pin.

"How do we fix it?" Danny asked.

"The forge, and a press."

#danny phantom #danny phantom dp #clockwork dp #jackdraw-spwrite #jackdaw-spwrite #ectoberhaunt23 #23 day 11 #calm #body horror #cw body horror

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