Obsession
The thing is this. For all his friends teased him about a protection obsession, for all they poked at him for his constant inability to let things go without helping… he didn’t think that was it. Of course he would step up every time, but it wasn’t a pulling, consuming need, it was guilt, knowing the ghosts were his fault in the end.
If you asked Danny, he’d say his obsession was the stars, the world just past our planet’s atmosphere. A place so vast and so amazing that he couldn’t help but pause and stare sometimes. He’d say his obsession was his curiosity, his wonder, his desire to simply know.
But if he was honest with himself; truly, actually honest… that wasn’t it either.
They say your obsession forms by your last thought when you die. Your last thought in your mind, in your heart, the last thing you want before it ends. And if it’s powerful enough, if you want it enough, and there’s enough energy to power it…. You’ll become a ghost.
Danny’s last thought wasn’t about protecting.
It wasn’t even about his love of space.
When Danny had died, 14 and isolated in a machine of his parent’s making, his last thought had been not unlike that of the many others who are lost too young and too soon.
‘I just want to live.’
And when there’s enough energy, and the desire is strong enough… the last thought before death can be powerful enough to determine a ghost’s existence.
And all Danny wanted was to live.
So when he stumbled out of the machine, hair white and eyes glowing,
Danny Fenton lived.
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clone danny's accident in the clone^2 au
Im thinking about clone^2 danny's accident in this au. he doesn't have his halfa powers in this au. He has his scary eyes and the ghost sense and the ability to see ghosts - kinda takes up a psychopomp role with his ghost cases - and enough ectoplasm to trigger the ghost defenses in his parents' house. But he doesn't have his ghost powers or his ghost half. He's just very strongly liminal.
And im just mmmmm thinking about how that came to be. When I originally made the clone danny au back in the summer i couldn't think of how he had his accident without putting him inside the portal, and I couldn't put him inside the portal and have it turn on and then just say "oh! he doesn't have any powers. he got hit with the full concentrated power of the sun a dimension with just a scratch"
like - like i can't do it. i just can't. i need some plausibility in my aus or i hit road blocks and can't continue (see: my jason variant au and why that took so long to post). but i was at work today thinking about clone^2 au and it hit me like a lightning shot. I think said in the original clone danny post that maybe he got electrocuted by the on button on the outside of the portal. But i was never really satisfied with that answer - it felt too placeholder-y to me. too simple. Less plausible to me than I liked.
so, solution: he still gets shocked by the portal outside, but its from a wiring issue that he spots outside of the portal. My first thought is; the portal had a wire that was unplugged. His parents, essentially, forgot to plug it in. Or maybe in all of their excitement they accidentally unplugged it and didn't notice. It just sounds like the right amount of cartoonishly silly that the Fentons are known for. "We put a second "on" button in the inside portal" -> "we forgot to plug it in"
Danny notices it while he's showing Sam and Tucker around the lab and the two of them are checking out the portal. Something caught his eye from the corner and while Sam and Tucker were talking, he went over to investigate. If this were canon, this would be just before Sam tells him to put on the hazmat suit and go into the portal so she can get a photo (iirc). (So he's currently in reg clothes)
And im imagining it as slightly off to the side. Its two black cords - an extension cord to the outlet and then the cord to the portal. and danny crouches down over it, frowning. his eyes follow the cord to the outlet, and then the cord to the portal, and he picks both up.
'did they forget to plug it in?' he thinks, turning his head to look at the portal's entrance. and logically he knows he should probably put the cords down and tell his parents, let them handle it since they have the expertise for this stuff. But...
his eyes draw back to the plug. it's just a plug. it'd be fine if he plugged it in, wouldn't it? surely, it'd be fine. he thinks about it for a moment.
he plugs it in.
immediately, the energy that had been building up slowly through the wires of the portal - the latent ectoplasm in the room being funneled through whatever tech his parents used to make it - goes through the cord. Like a dam bursting. In a flash, the portal turns on with a worrying bang.
At the same time, Danny is hit with a near-lethal amount of electricity. While not as agonizing as being inside the portal, danny still mentally checks out with pain. and he blacks out. when he comes to, he's laying on his back, still in the lab, with sam and tucker kneeling over him. they're talking - probably yelling, with panicked looks on their faces.
He can't hear a thing they're saying, his ears are full of the overly rapid, irregular beating of his heart and the pounding of his blood. His chest hurts like he's having a heart attack, and he grasps at his shirt as his breathing comes in short, labored.
"Hospital" he wheezes out, and sam gets up and sprints out of the lab upstairs. everything else feels like a blur - his parents and jazz are by him - his parents completely ignoring their swirling, working portal, someone's calling 911, danny's being loaded onto a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face.
danny gets discharged from the hospital a week later, and sick leave from school for another two. his parents refuse to allow him back into the lab, stating it was too dangerous, and their work comes to near grinding stop to watch over him. It's honestly kinda sweet, but the hovering is annoying him - stubborn, independent teenager that he is. When he gets back to school he's still relatively sat out for phy.ed - he's been getting random heart palpitations (which had been at its worst when he was still on sick leave) and what the doctors think is a strange case of arrhythmia. Although Danny insists that he's fine - he's breathing, alive. Nothing feels wrong with him.
Then one day in class, Tucker turns to him to say something - a joke -and yelps - "your eyes!"
Danny on instinct turns his head to the window, frowning. And in the faded reflection, his eyes are burning shade of green like that of the portal. He blinks, breathing in sharply, and they're back to the his old bright blue.
Unfortunately, they're in english class, and the entire room was staring at them. "Is there something wrong, Mr. Foley?" Mr. Lancer asks from the front. Tucker is still wide-eyed and in shock, and he looks quickly between Danny and Lancer.
"I- no, um- Danny's eyes- they- were, um..." He looks panicked, confused.
Danny steps in, and leans over to Tucker. "I think he just spooked himself, Mr. Lancer." He says, looking frontward with his brows furrowed. "Sorry, it won't happen again."
Mr. Lancer looks unconvinced, and suspicious, but he lets it lie. "Are you feeling alright then, Mr. Fenton? Do you need to see the nurse?" It wasn't a secret to the school or student body that he'd been to the hospital from a lab accident - and that it'd resulted in heart problems that he was recovering from.
Danny grins at him, and pounds his chest lightly, "I'm fit as a fiddle, Mr. Lancer. No heart attacks here." He jokes, and leans back into his seat. Mr. Lancer stares, eyes squinty, and then returns to the lesson.
It keeps happening. Danny's eyes turn green at the most random of times, and the three of them begin wittling down what was causing it. In general, Danny's eyes were turning green whenever he was engrossed with something, or when he got emotional - when he was laughing, angry, upset, anything. Sometimes it resulted in heart palpitations, sometimes it didn't.
his ears were hurting too, aching, like when they were cold. Danny wakes up one morning and spends twenty minutes in the bathroom turning his head left and right - his ears were beginning to point. Sam thought it was cool - Danny just thought it was concerning.
He was seeing things too - apparently. He struck up a conversation with someone on the street once - a strange looking man who looked terribly pale and wore old clothes. He looked delighted to be talking to Danny - and then Sam and Tucker walked up to him and asked who he was talking to.
("What do you mean? I'm talking to him.")
("Danny, there's no one there.")
("What?")
After multiple instances of this, they configure that the accident had given Danny some sort of ability to see ghosts.
("So you're meta now?")
("Mm... I don't know. That doesn't feel right.")
("Oh come on, that basically fits the name to a tee!")
("I know, but I just- it doesn't feel right to call myself meta.")
("If you don't like meta, why not just call yourself liminal? Since the portal is supposed to access the afterlife and it gave you powers to see ghosts.")
("Huh, good idea, Sam. Liminal it is, then.")
And as time goes on - and his parents begin to catch and experiment on ghosts - danny adjusts to these weird new abilities. It's not so bad, he supposes, its just some creepy eye magic and a ghost sense. He can live with that, and no one needed to know. He could go back to being normal - right. ...Wrong.
Do his parents really have to catch ghosts?
plus additional sketch that i made at like 3am last night because i needed to draw it down -- aha ignore the inconsistent drawing ability that i have. i'm more of a writer than i am an artist.
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Here have some fluffy Jon/Damian/Elle (Super Serious Chaos? Super Serious Chaos) where Jon & Elle bully exhausted pre-vet college student Damian into taking a nap with the cruel application of cuddles on the couch:
Jon’s hand was wide and warm against his back as the Kryptonian absently swiped it along Damian’s spine. Meanwhile Elle was intent on gently dragging her nails along Damian’s scalp, fingers soft through his hair. Between the two of them, the soft couch they’d bullied him into getting when they moved into the apartment and the slant of sunlight they were currently all laying in, Damian didn’t have a chance.
He was supposed to be studying. He had an exam next week for his zoology course and it didn’t matter if he knew the information front to back, he was going to get a perfect grade. But then Jon had splayed out on their plush and over-sized couch with some documentary about scientists attempting to grow seeds discovered preserved in permafrost. And Elle had been pestering him about shrimp posture at his desk - he had perfect posture, thank you he was just making sure to get close enough to his study material, his back hurt because he had patrol last night, nothing else - so he’d allowed her to herd him over to study in the living room instead.
And it was a law of the universe that a Kryptonian wearing soft fleece Robin-themed pajamas basking in the sun was always going to be the most comfortable place for a Bat to perch. So he’d sat down beside his boyfriend - no he had not flopped, he’d simply allowed gravity to do the work for him, it was energy conservation, it was practical - and prepared to study as Elle took her own spot curled up sideways in Jon’s lap with her legs tossed over Damian’s. Sun-sleepy Kryptonian’s were an ideal landing place for ghosts with fire cores as well, obviously.
Somewhere along the line his significant others had conspired against him.
It was the only explanation for how his notes ended up tossed on the coffee table haphazardly while he laid face down across the couch in a nest of pillows with his head in Elle’s lap and Jon’s arm curling over his back, eyes drooping as he lost the battle with sleep. Titus, the traitor, had hopped up to lay against his legs, a heavy warm weight drawing him further and further down. Elle had started humming a song somewhere along the time she’d begun playing with his hair, and Jon was giving those low - near imperceptible - rumbling purrs he gave off when content as he traced patterns along Damian’s back.
This was pay back for staying out until five last night on patrol even though he had a class at seven-thirty. He’d told them he would be fine, he’d done far worse on far less sleep. Timothy routinely juggled a dozen or so projects at a time with just an hour or so of sleep ever few days and Damian was far more competent than him. That argument - for all his grumbled weak protests in the face of Jon and Elle’s unimpressed and worried expressions could be called an argument - had apparently not swayed them though. He was fairly certain Jon had texted the family group chat - Damian’s phone had been confiscated upon stumbling returning home from Gotham U on the grounds that he would end up running off to try and join in on one of the cases one of his siblings mentioned if he was allowed to keep it, again - to ban him from patrols for the rest of the week.
He’d have to get his revenge somehow. He couldn’t just let them run roughshod all over his life like that.
Maybe he could make some sù yā for dinner. Elle had picked up fresh bamboo shoots along with some other stuff on her last portal hop when she’d found herself in Guangzhou. And Jon’s grandparents had passed along some carrots and ginger from the farm that they needed to use.
Last time he’d made the dish Jon had almost cried and Elle had glowed so brightly it had looked like the sun had taken up residence in their dining room. The two had nearly set the apartment on fire fighting over the last piece. Their shrieks of despair when they realized Damian had eaten it while they were tussling had been more satisfying than every victory over every enemy he’d ever faced combined.
Yes. A fine vengeance indeed.
But…later. After he’d lulled them into a false sense of security. Let them think they had the upper hand and strike when they least expected it. It wasn’t that he was falling asleep. No. It was tactical. And had nothing at all to do with the surge of affection and warmth and security that came with having them so close, doting on him. He was tactically allowing himself to appear vulnerable. Nuzzling closer and tightening his hold on them where he’d wrapped his arms around the two was a ruse.
Jon squeezed back, tight enough to press the air out of Damian’s lungs and sooth away some of the latent anxiety over his upcoming test. Elle swiped a lock of hair that’d fallen into his eyes away, palm curling around his cheek and thumb softly stroking along his temple. On the TV scientists droned on about soil composition and growth rates of similar modern plants. Titus gave one of those low grumbling whines that meant he’d fallen asleep where he was curled up against Damian’s legs and was happily dreaming.
Damian allowed his eyes to close. Content to drift to sleep in the arms of the two menaces he loved most in the world.
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Where do you guy’s HC the A lister’s home lives?
Do you think Dash is your “Gets a lot of pressure put on him by his parents at home so he take it out on others” type of bully, or do you think they’re super lax and let him do what he wants and the lack of discipline contributes to him a bully?
Do you think Paulina speaks Spanish with her family at home? We see in the show that she’s ‘daddy’s princess’ but how well do you think she gets along with any other members of her family?
Do you think Kwan’s parents would be shocked to find out so many of his peers at school see him as a bully or that all his friends are bullies?
Any of them have any siblings? Divorced parents? What’s the general consensus with the DP popular kids’ families?
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