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breynekai-tfc · 3 years

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Number One Fan

Summary: Danny is injured during a ghost fight one night. Dash finds him, takes him home, and nurses him back to health.

Length: 7081 words

Part 2

Basically some meandering interactions between Dash and Phantom, with hints toward a one-sided attraction on Dash’s part. This is a two-shot; the second half will be up tomorrow.

Read on FF.net, AO3, or keep reading below.

He sucked up the puddle of arachnid into a Fenton Thermos. Holes littered the lawn around him where its feet had sunk into the spring soil, muddy and loose from three days’ worth of constant drizzle. ‘British weather’, his mom would have called it. Even now a light mist - heavier than fog but not substantial enough to be called rain - floated through the air. It had already coated Danny’s hair, face, and suit in a thin layer of condensation. The water ran over his face like sweat.

He was exhausted. If he had needed to breathe, he would have been panting. If he’d had a pulse, it would have been racing. Instead, his core ached dully, complaining of the expenditure of energy. His aura was not as bright as it should have been on this dark, misty, overcast night. Normally he would have been a beacon; right now he probably blended into his surroundings, giving off no more light than a will-o-the-wisp in a murky swamp.

And still, it wasn’t over.

After defeating a ghost and containing it in a Thermos, any ectoplasmic waste or byproducts it left behind should disintegrate and vanish. The Thermos completely sealed ectoenergy, thereby cutting off the core from any parts remaining in the world. But the Amity Park Public Library was still covered in a purple, pulsing tent of ghostly webbing.

Geez, he hoped there wasn’t another one.

Danny eyed the building. He wasn’t sure how long it had been sequestered like this. Presumably not much longer than it had taken for his ghost sense to explode out of his cold core, jolting him awake, and for him to race in the direction it pointed him. Five minutes later, he had discovered the library and the Godzilla-scale spider crouching on top of it.

He had no idea what time it was. He hadn’t checked the clock before flying off into the night.

It had been about eleven when he wrapped up his patrol earlier - a patrol which, ironically, had been entirely quiet. Goes to show what happens when you skimp on security duties because of bad weather, some mild discomfort from having to fly through a neverending curtain of damp. He wondered if he had stayed out a little longer if he could have intercepted the spider before it nested. Ghosts often tended to get a lot stronger when they were allowed to accomplish their objectives, drawing energy from the sheer satisfaction of fulfilling an obsession. Who knew how long it had been working before its sudden power boost triggered Danny’s ghost sense?

Danny squinted through the drizzle at the cloud cover, barely making out the position of the moon. Maybe three o’clock or after? He wasn’t sure how long it had taken him to beat the hairy, eight-legged behemoth. The fight had been tedious and drained his strength, but in all likelihood was shorter than it had felt.

He wasn’t sure he had actually defeated it.

His core twinging, he forced himself back into the air and drifted across the ruined lawn, across the parking lot, and to the side of the building. A feeling of unease filled him as he drew closer, the product of psychological wards woven into the strands of spider silk to scare away predators. Ignoring the way his core clenched and his skin crawled, Danny grit his teeth, turned intangible, and phased through the protective layer of webbing.

Inside, the dread atmosphere was even more overwhelming, hanging in the air like a miasma. Webbing draped over every surface and hung from the ceiling in loops and clumps, glowing a sickly shade of violet. It provided the only light in the building, and Danny’s own silver aura barely reflected back to him.

After nearly three years of being dead and fighting ghosts on a daily basis, Danny was rarely unnerved by the things he saw. But this was spooky, even to him. He shrugged and shook out his shoulders and arms, chalking up his feelings of trepidation to basic survival instincts, which were good things. He was tired, and his body knew it, and it was just sending signals to his brain to be careful. This was not actually all that frightening. Nope. Not frightening at all.

Danny floated further into the building, senses on high alert. The webbing stretched on and on, but nowhere did Danny see a creature who could have spun it. This was surely the work of the larger arachnid he had fought outside… right?

Danny reached the central help desk. It was a small unit of furniture - a U-shaped table, return bin, filing cabinets, and several computers with the library catalog system, all sitting in the middle of a wide and open space of carpet at the hub of the fiction and reference shelves. As Danny drifted towards it, he was so focused on looking and listening for an enemy on all sides that he floated straight into a web. Unlike the thick, goopy strands coating the rest of the building, this was a delicately woven oval suspended between the floor and ceiling. The kind of webs spiders built for catching prey.

He yelped and flung himself backwards, but the web followed him, snared him, snapped back into place with Danny still firmly attached to it. The webbing clung to his face, filling his eyes with violet light, inciting panic. He pulled at his arms, frantic to wipe the strands from his face, get them off of his body, but nothing was moving, he couldn’t budge, he was stuck, like a fly, and what did spiders do to flies…?

The realization of his own stupidity struck him like a slap in the face, and a split second later, he was intangible and shooting backwards, arms pinwheeling as he forced himself to a mid-air stop - before he blindly landed himself in a similar trap, or before he decided to phase through the roof of the building, call it a night, let another ghost hunter deal with this.

He wasn’t allowed to do that.

The leaden weights of responsibility wrapped around his body, draining the blind panic and replacing it with lucid determination. If Valerie or his parents were hurt because of some mess he failed to resolve, if one of them died, he would never be able to forgive himself, would never be able to claim the mantle of hero for the rest of his half-life. That reality was much more frightening than anything a ghost could throw at him.

As he centered himself, Danny noticed that the web he had just extracted himself from was vibrating, humming tautly, shivering from floor to ceiling. His eyes followed the anchoring strands of the web upwards. He groaned, and everything suddenly made sense.

On the ceiling, stretching from one wall to another and looking like a scene out of Femalien, were eggs, a hundred of them, violent purple and struck through by glowing green fissures like ichor. The spider he had faced outside of the library must have been their mother, and her objective had been finding a safe place to nest and lay her eggs. Having accomplished that, she was at her most ferocious when a certain human-ghost hybrid had shown up to threaten her children.

Danny had vaguely known that ghosts could reproduce - how else could he explain Box Lunch? But if this was seeing the miracle of ghost life in action, it was nothing he ever wished to see again.

The trembles from the web rippled through the eggs on the high ceiling of the library. First in the middle, expanding outwards in waves, the eggs began to wobble, began to crack with sharp snaps of verdant light. As he watched the first legs begin to poke through purple membranes, Danny realized why the oval-shaped web had been created. It would trap prey, and in thrashing for escape, whatever unfortunate creature (or person) was snared in the web would be ringing a dinner bell, telling the babies that it was time to wake up and have some breakfast.

The first of the brood had breached their cells and were dropping onto the floor. Deep black in color, struck through by ectoplasmic green striations, they were the size of large dogs, and they were fast. As soon as their myriad eyes found Danny, they began to leap at him.

Crying out, Danny flung up an ectoplasmic energy shield. The newborn spiders slammed into it, causing the shield to flare and for Danny’s core to tighten painfully. The shield broke within seconds, and the rush of arachnids slammed into him, knocking him to the floor.

Danny saw legs, flashes of black eyes with verdance burning deep within, and then pain like acid burst against his right shoulder, his stomach, his left leg. He screamed, feeling the bright acidic energy flowing into him, burning him from the inside as it bloomed across and underneath his skin. Distantly, he felt something soft drifting over him, light as snowfall but as firm as steel cables. It crossed his bleary vision, sickly purple.

The weights on his chest, his arms, his legs, were abruptly flung off of him. He was left staring at the ceiling, where spiders continued to crack their eggs and fall to the ground, but he could hear their hissing voices, impacts, sounds of tearing, squeals of pain, splashes of ectoplasm on carpet. The spider brood was fighting. Apparently there wasn’t enough of him to go around.

Danny could not move. His thoughts were blasted with hot green pain, eating through his limbs and leaving cold numbness in its wake. He knew he had been bitten, repeatedly. This was poison. His enemies were fighting for the chance to devour him. And he could not move.

The deadly, acidic pain trickled down from his shoulder and up from his stomach and danced around his core, which stubbornly burned it away. If not his body, at least his essence was refusing to go down without a fight.

The realization that he was going to die, really die, eaten alive and entirely helpless to do anything about it, galvanized him. He grunted, a strangled sound from deep in his chest. Then Danny pushed at his core. He had no confidence that he would be able to move his limbs to do a damned thing, but if his core was fighting, he would use it as his best asset. He concentrated on it with a singular intensity, blocking out the squall of the hungry spiders, blocking out his pain, willing his core to expand, explode if it needed to.

A different but familiar type of cold rushed through him. A split-second later, a blizzard burst from his awakened cold core, howling through the room and freezing everything in its path. It hit the walls and ceiling and windows, shrieking, and died away. In its wake - silence, like a winter’s night under a blanket of snow.

Icy energy crackled over his skin, momentarily halting the spread of the venom. Danny wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, succumb to the cold numbness of poison and frost. But the spiders weren’t gone, and the next prey they sought would be outside of the library with no weapons to defend themselves. This was a horde that could kill a town. Danny had to protect them.

With a Herculean effort, Danny sat up. The webbing laced over his body crackled and splintered to pieces. The room around him had been transformed into a glimpse of a modern-day Ice Age. Thick, supernaturally blue ice coated the library’s every surface, the spiders and their webs only barely visible in its bright but murky depths. Danny concentrated on moving his right hand, but it was entirely numb and dead to him. He switched to his left, fumbling for the Thermos that hung on his right side. He pulled the strap across his chest until the Thermos was sitting in his lap, wedged between his thighs for support. He unscrewed the lid, lifted it with one hand, braced it against his chest, and hit the button.

Blue light swirled from the softly whirring device, but with no target in its path, it simply dissipated into the air. Frowning, Danny channeled some of his own depleted power into the Thermos to influence its behavior. The light began to do what he wanted. It condensed above the checkout desk in a bright orb. Like a black hole, it began to absorb the ectoplasmic energy around it. Ice, webbing, spiders, everything ghostly in the room began cracking apart and flying into the focal point of the power, which in turn compacted and channeled the energy into the containment device. Danny felt it tugging on even him, but because of the nature of the energy fueling it, he was not swept up in the maelstrom of deconstruction.

No more than a minute later, the room was cleared. Danny snapped the lid back on the Thermos, and everything went dark. Without the ice or webbing, there was little to illuminate the library. After a few seconds, as his eyes adjusted, the room clarified under the soft orange glow of the street lamps outside.

Danny’s core felt like stretched taffy, or a threadbare cloth. It felt like if he were to exert any more pressure on it, it would snap or implode in on itself. Danny was surprised he hadn’t reverted to his human form yet.

He glanced down at himself. He couldn’t see the bite on his shoulder, but he could see the ones on his abdomen and his left leg. Four punctures, holes left in his jumpsuit, roughly the size of nickels. They oozed something green, which Danny might have mistaken for his own ectoplasm if not for the fetid feeling the ooze gave off. Danny wasn’t sure what the poison would do to him, if it was meant to paralyze him or kill him or turn his insides into goo. Already it was fighting his cold core to continue its inextricable path through his body.

A certainty settled over Danny, based on no evidence but his own gut feelings: if he returned to human form, with this poison coursing through him, it would be the end of him.

Sick with dread, Danny fell forward, planting his left arm against the floor, dragging his right leg underneath him, pushing to standing. He nearly toppled over again. His left leg from the knee down was numb, and it barely supported his weight. Danny only managed to walk by rocking onto it and back to his right leg before his knee had the chance to buckle. He did not dare fly.

Danny reached the door and opened it by hand. The webbing that had covered the building earlier was gone, destroyed with the capture of the spider brood. Dazed, Danny hobbled into the parking lot and across the lawn.

He had to get home to Fentonworks. His parents would have something in their lab that could get him through this, preserve his ghost half long enough for it to fight off the poison. Maybe, if he gave himself an injection of purified ectoplasm it would bolster the energy in his core, or maybe he could just toss himself into the Ghost Zone and absorb the atmospheric ectoenergy there.

He had to get home.

He had to walk there.

How many miles was it?

Danny stumbled down the sidewalk in a haze of existential terror and pain. The poison had begun to sludge through him again, climbing his thigh, spreading across his back, filling his chest. He began to feel light-headed, and the edges of his vision were filling with shadows. His feet jerked him forward numbly, but he had no perception of actually moving.

His left knee buckled, and Danny fell to the ground. He tried to catch himself with his hands, but they didn’t respond to the commands from his brain. His chin throbbed dully where it hit concrete.

Danny lay with his chest against the ground, arms limp at his sides, face turned toward the grass. Moisture pooled in his eyes and trickled out of the corners. If he’d had the energy for it, he might have been sobbing. But his upper body was numb, and so was most of the rest of him. Cotton wrapped around his head.

He was dimly aware of sounds: the crunch of tires over asphalt, the slamming of a car door, a shout. His body was turned over, presumably by a person. Danny’s vision was too full of shadows to see who it was.

After that, there was nothing.

---------

Dash had woken to the sound of his PhanClub Ghost Spotters app shouting, “I am the Box Ghost! Beware!”

Blearily, he grabbed his phone off the bedside table and swiped to unlock it. His eyes scanned the notification, picking out key words: public library, giant spider, literally it’s as big as a house, level 5 apparition or higher. It was 2:36 a.m.

Dash groaned, letting the hand holding his phone drop onto the mattress next to his pillow. He was too tired to deal with a fucking ghost spider halfway across town. He had school tomorrow, and besides that, it was a fucking ghost spider. He had no plans of being eaten.

He was nearly back to sleep when his phone nagged him again. “I am the Box Ghost! Beware!” Against his better judgement, Dash brought the screen back up.

2:41 - Phantom is engaging the spider. #IRememberEmber58

And like that, he was wide awake, sitting up in bed and staring at the notification.

It was a long shot. It would take him about fifteen minutes to get to the library, not including the time it took for him to get dressed, sneak downstairs to his car, and actually hit the road. There was a chance Phantom would be long gone by the time he got there.

But…

He was already moving, pulling on sweats and a hoodie, cramming his feet into sneakers that already had the laces tied.

But a level 5 apparition was tough, and a spider the size of a house was a new enemy. It might put up a real fight. If Dash got there in time, he would not only be able to catch a glimpse of his hero in action, but he would also be able to get some new material for his scrapbook. Grabbing his Fenton Camera (the only camera on the market with film and lenses specifically designed to capture ectoplasmic radiation), Dash crept out of his room.

His parents were heavy sleepers. Besides, he was seventeen, and the probability of him getting in trouble for going out at night was extremely low, even if he was caught. As long as he was on track for his scholarship, his parents hardly cared what he did. But Dash was still careful to move quietly through the house. Encountering his folks would waste precious time.

Shortly, he was out the front door, crossing the driveway to the curb, and climbing into his black convertible - top up, because of the absolute crap weather lately. He turned the key in the ignition, put it into gear, and sped out into the silent streets of Amity Park.

In the two and a half years since the PhanClub had been founded, many members had joined, and many of them had since become inactive. Everyone in town - except the Fentons and a few other diehards - had accepted that Phantom was a bona fide hero. No one had abandoned him in that sense. But after two and a half years of seeing Phantom kick ghost butt around town, the ghostly hero had lost his novelty for a lot of people, who then moved onto other things. There were very few members left who, like Dash, were willing to hop out of bed in the middle of the night to drive to ghost fights and take pictures. Most members had either muted their nighttime notifications or gotten rid of the Ghost Spotters app entirely.

Dash considered himself Phantom’s number one fan. He wore the badge with pride and contested it with anyone who tried to claim it (though very few bothered anymore). Sure, there were others on the Ghost Spotters app, like IRememberEmber58, who posted every ghostly encounter they came across, but these guys were “ghostakus” - they were in it for the ghosts, all ghosts, any ghosts. Some Ghost Spotters even supported the local bad guys. Ghosts like Ember, Technus, even the freaking Box Ghost had fans, and many Ghost Spotters would take bets on ghost fights, not over who would win - that was always Phantom - but how long their favorite ghost could escape the Fenton Thermos.

There was even a trading card game… okay, Dash collected those, too. They were pretty cool.

But for Dash, there was only one reason to be in the Ghost Spotters, and that was to be alerted of every appearance of Danny Phantom possible. Watching Phantom in action, risking his life to selflessly protect the people of Amity Park, displaying awesome feats of power, and doing it all with a good sense of humor - it never got old, and Dash didn’t think it ever would.

Dash drove to the library at however many miles over the speed limit he could get away with. Every few minutes, the Ghost Spotters app would light up with a new notification. Dash grabbed his phone and glanced at them:

2:50 - Spider is down. I repeat, spider is down. #IRememberEmber58

2:51 - Vestigial ghost matter on library not disappearing. Phantom looks wary. #IRememberEmber58

2:52 - Phantom entering library. Ghost fight part deux? #IRememberEmber58

2:58 - Webbing on library vanished. May be over people. #IRememberEmber58

Dash growled. He was so close, but it looked like this was going to be a waste of time after all.

At last, the public library rose in Dash’s sight down the road. Like IRememberEmber58 had indicated, everything seemed quiet. Dash figured he ought to drive by anyway, see the damage, maybe catch a glimpse of Phantom flying away, make sure this wasn’t a complete fucking waste of time.

As he pulled up along the eastern side of the library, Dash’s phone went off one more time.

3:01 - Phantom emerging from library - on foot? Probability of injury high. #IRememberEmber58

Dash blinked at the notification. He took his foot off of the pedals, letting his car cruise slowly down the road, all while he squinted through the damp on his windshield towards the front of the library.

There. At the end of the parking lot, cutting across the grass toward the sidewalk a few hundred feet down the road from Dash’s car. Phantom’s aura was so weak that he barely stood out from his misty surroundings. He was limping, on the ground - the actual ground. Dash could see that his right arm was hanging at his side like dead weight and that his head was down, like all of his attention was on putting one foot in front of the other.

This was not good.

Fear wound its cold fingers around Dash’s heart and squeezed. Dash had never seen his hero in such bad shape; even when he lost battles, it was because the other ghost would get away, not because they actually defeated him in combat. Nervous, unsure of what he should be doing, Dash let his car keep coasting down the road so that he could follow Phantom, make sure he got to where he was going okay.

Phantom reached the sidewalk, Dash following a few yards behind. The ghost’s steps were slowing, and he was not walking in a straight line.

All of a sudden, one of Phantom’s knees gave out and he fell over face-first onto the ground.

He did not get up again.

“Shit!” said Dash. His foot slammed down on the accelerator, and his car leaped forward before he managed to slam his foot on the brake. He was out of his car a second later, running around the front of it, falling onto his knees by Phantom’s head.

“Phantom!” he cried out. “Hey man, are you okay?”

Phantom did not respond, did not move. He lay on the wet sidewalk in front of Dash completely inert, damp hair hanging over the half of his face that was turned upward. A Fenton Thermos, strapped over his left shoulder, lay in the small of his back, its indicator pulsing red.

Dash brought up his hands, and they hung in the air over Phantom’s back, shaking. He was hesitant to reach out and touch his idol. He had not been this close to Phantom since the time at Fentonworks back in his freshman year, when they had both been shrunk by some loony Fenton invention and had to fight Skulker to get back to their normal sizes. A true team-up, and Phantom hadn’t spoken to him since. Instead, Phantom had gone on to become even more powerful, defeating huge and impossible foes, rising to a place Dash could never hope to be, probably forgetting all about Dash in the process. Dash didn’t deserve to be this close to Phantom, not anymore.

But Phantom was in trouble, and Dash was all the help he had. It looked like, after two whole years, it was time for another team-up.

As Dash grabbed Phantom’s rain-slick, icy-cold shoulders to turn him over, he did not feel excited about the prospect at all; rather, he felt sick to his stomach.

Phantom weighed basically nothing. It was the easiest thing in the world to roll him onto his back, and Dash half-expected the ghost to dissolve into nothing in his fingers. Once he was on his back, Phantom’s head lolled against Dash’s knees. His eyes were open, dull green rather than the bright, vivid neon they should have been, staring blankly ahead at nothing. Dash saw trails of some silvery moisture coming out of the corners of his eyes, mingling with the rain, and he realized that they were ectoplasmic tears.

“Phantom…?” he whispered. Phantom did nothing to indicate he had heard Dash. The muscles in his face hung slack, and he wasn’t breathing - shit, he wasn’t breathing! But did ghosts even need to breathe? Did they even have lungs?

Could they die?

“Calm the fuck down, Baxter,” he told himself. “He’s not dead. He can’t be. He’s just hurt bad, real bad.” He glanced over Phantom’s body, looking for the injury that had put his hero in such a terrible state. What he saw were six small holes in his jumpsuit, in pairs, two on his right shoulder, two on his stomach, two on his lower left leg, all oozing a sickly green substance. Now that he looked more closely, Dash noticed veins of the same color, branching under the skin on Phantom’s neck where it rose out of the collar of his jumpsuit, curling over his jawline towards his cheeks like emerald lightning bolts.

“What the…” Dash murmured. Then it hit him. Phantom had been fighting a spider. These were spider bites.

Without thinking, Dash reached out his right hand and touched the green stuff oozing from Phantom’s shoulder, just above his collarbone. Immediately he recoiled - it felt like it had stung him! And it kept stinging him, burning him as if he had stuck his fingers into a vat of acid. Dash stared at his fingers in horror. His forefinger and middle finger had two small drops of venom on their tips, and even as he watched, it absorbed into his skin, snaking down through his fingers in bright green lightning bolts of poison.

Dash screamed, kicking away from Phantom, staring at his burning hand. The venom crept down his fingers, into his palm, where finally the green veins tapered to nothing. The sensation of burning sunk into a deep cold, and then into complete numbness. Dash tried to move his fingers; his thumb, ring finger, and pinkie only twitched, and the two that had touched the poison would not respond at all. The muscles in his wrist and at the base of his thumb ached dully. Turning his hand over, Dash saw more lightning bolts pulsing on the back of his hand.

“Fuckfuckfuck.” What had just happened? What was he supposed to do with this?

His eyes were back on Phantom. Whatever had just gotten on Dash’s fingertips, Phantom was full of it. No wonder he wasn’t moving. The dude needed help.

Dash clambered back to his feet, careful of his right hand. He opened the back door of his car, then turned around and, with extreme caution to avoid touching the spider venom again, lifted Phantom into his arms. One arm under the ghost’s knees, one under his back, Dash carried Phantom to his car and gently laid him in the backseat. The weakness of Phantom’s aura was even more apparent in the darkness inside the car.

Dash slammed the door shut and climbed back into the driver’s seat. His Ghost Spotter’s app went off again. Thinking that there might be another ghost around, Dash checked the message and scowled.

3:08 - Phantom abducted by strange black vehicle. Probably the feds. Good luck, ghost boy. #IRememberEmber58

Dash had no clue where IRememberEmber58 was watching the library from. Regardless, he rolled down the window, stuck his hand out, and flipped the dweeb off.

Dash put his right hand over the gearshift but could not clutch it to put the car in drive. Awkwardly, he used his left hand to shift gears. Driving home, his right hand was hooked in the steering wheel at the wrist to help in steering as much as possible. He sure hoped the numbness wasn’t permanent. That was his throwing hand.

On the way back to his house - and was that really the best place to take Phantom but he couldn’t go to a hospital and the Fentons wanted to gut him so screw it Dash’s house was as good a place as any - Dash kept an eye on Phantom in the back seat. There was no outward change in his condition, which could have been good or bad for all Dash knew. The green venom leaking from the bites and glowing under his skin was the brightest thing about the ghost, who could almost be mistaken for human at this point.

Dash speeded all the way home, and it still took too long. As soon as his car was on the curb, Dash cut the engine, leapt out of the vehicle, and got Phantom out of the backseat. He ran with the ghost, who couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds, up the driveway to the front door. Dash had to shift Phantom, drape him on his stomach over Dash’s shoulder, so that he could get his key out and get the door open. Once they were inside, Dash carried Phantom up the stairs, praying to God that his parents didn’t choose now to wake up.

At the top of the stairs, Dash began to feel a biting pain in his right shoulder, underneath where Phantom was laying on top of him. Clenching his teeth against an expletive, Dash hurried down the hall, into his bedroom, to the bathroom attachment. He shut the door, turned on the light, and hurriedly deposited Phantom in the bathtub. Stepping back to the counter, Dash looked in the mirror and was horrified to see that some of the venom from Phantom’s stomach had seeped into his hoodie. Crying out, he frantically yanked the hoodie off and threw it into the corner.

Turning back to the mirror, Dash watched three small fireworks of ectoplasmic venom sparking across his right shoulder. The bitter cold sensation sank deep into his muscles, and by the time the numbness set in, Dash was not surprised to find that he couldn’t lift his arm. With his hand already out of commission, the only thing he could do was bend his arm, weakly, at the elbow.

Dash gripped the countertop with his left hand and leaned forward until his forehead was resting on the cool surface of the mirror. Things were fucked, and he knew it. His hero was laying in his bathtub, possibly dead. Dash himself had been poisoned by a giant ectoplasmic spider he hadn’t even seen, and who knew what kind of messed up shit this was going to do to him?

He had no idea how to help either of them. He was just Dash Baxter, high school quarterback. He wasn’t smart enough to be useful to anyone in an emergency, not even himself.

He forced himself to take several deep breaths. He reminded himself that he might not have been the best help for Phantom, but he was the only help the hero had. Dash had to do something. For all the times Phantom had saved his life and the lives of everyone in Amity Park, he had to do something.

Not looking at Phantom - not yet - Dash went back into his bedroom. He dug around in his closet until he found the lime green raincoat his grandma had bought for him on his last birthday, which was so ugly that he had never worn it. Awkwardly, he shrugged it on, using his left hand to grab his right and drag the right arm into a sleeve. Then he went back downstairs into the kitchen, where he grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from under the sink that his mom used to wash dishes. He hoped that this would be enough.

Back upstairs in the bathroom, wearing the raincoat and rubber gloves, Dash finally looked at Phantom in the tub. The ghost looked even worse under the bright LED lighting. His glow was essentially nonexistent, his normally tanned complexion was sallow, and his dulled green eyes continued to stare into nothingness. Phantom’s white hair was plastered to his head with the moisture from outside, and his suit was wet with water and smears of toxic venom.

Dash had to get the venom out of Phantom. The question was - how?

Dash sat down cautiously on the edge of the tub. With his left hand, he pushed Phantom into a more comfortable position, sitting propped against one end of the basin. He grabbed the strap of the Fenton Thermos and pulled it over Phantom’s head before setting the surprisingly heavy contraption on the floor behind the toilet; Dash knew what was inside, and he wasn’t about to unleash a house-sized spider monster because he accidentally kicked the thing.

Turning back to Phantom, he experimentally touched some of the venom on Phantom’s leg with his glove, half expecting the ectoplasm to eat through the material. It didn’t, and Dash heaved a sigh of relief.

Using his left hand, Dash tried pinching the skin and muscles of Phantom’s shoulder to squeeze some of the poison out, but between the rubber of his glove and the slick material of Phantom’s jumpsuit, it was impossible to get a hold. Really, the jumpsuit needed to go.

Dash flushed red at the thought. Was he really sitting here, thinking about undressing his hero…? His eyes found the little zipper at the top of the neck, and Dash gulped. A second later, he was berating himself. “You’re being an idiot. Just take the damn suit off so you can help him.” He reached out, grabbed the zipper, and pulled.

Dash soon discovered it was a chore and a half to use one hand to undress another guy who was completely limp, and any excitement he might have felt at the task quickly evaporated. It was several minutes before Dash had Phantom out of his gloves, boots, and jumpsuit, which he piled in a heap on the floor next to the tub, leaving Phantom in nothing but his white undies.

Like the patterning on Phantom’s neck, the rest of his body was covered in zigzagging bolts of pulsing emerald poison, especially concentrated around the three weeping bite wounds. Dash felt sick looking at it, and he hoped Phantom wasn’t conscious underneath that blank expression.

Dash turned on the bathtub faucet and ran the water until it was lukewarm. Phantom showed no reaction to the liquid sloshing around his legs, but Dash had not expected him to. Dash figured room temperature was the best bet - he didn’t want to burn the ghost, but he didn’t think cold water would be good for someone with spider bites, even if ghosts were naturally cold. Thinking about that, Dash rinsed his left glove in the faucet and then used his teeth to tug it off of his hand. He then laid the back of his hand against Phantom’s forehead.

It was warm. Human warm. Dash had been grabbed by enough ghosts in his life to know that Phantom should have felt as cool as the inside of a freezer. Phantom’s heat now must have been the ghostly equivalent of a fever.

On second thought, Dash cut the heat to the faucet entirely.

He used his teeth to pull his glove back on, grabbed a clean towel from under the sink, took down the showerhead, and turned the hose on. Dash used the showerhead to rinse the globs of venom from Phantom’s wounds. Then he set the hose down near the drain and began pinching the punctures, starting with the ones on Phantom’s shoulder. Venom ran from them freely, running in viscous rivulets over Phantom’s chest. Dash stopped every few seconds to hose Phantom off, sending the toxic - probably radioactive - ectoplasm down the drain to be carried far away from the Baxter home.

Dash pushed against the wound until he was sure Phantom would have bruises, and it kept offering him venom. It was not until several minutes later when the green liquid oozing from the wound lost its visceral feeling of venom and turned into a much more neutral shade of green. It was the strangest thing. The two types of ectoplasm - the spider venom and Phantom’s ‘blood’ - were almost identical to the naked eye. Dash only knew that the venom had turned to ectoplasmic lifeblood when his gut stopped screaming at him about the wrongness of the liquid he was seeing.

Dash repeated this process on the other two punctures. By the time he finished, Dash noticed that some of the bolts of venom across Phantom’s skin had begun to lose their intensity. That was good. Dash had actually been able to do something.

He rinsed Phantom off one last time from head to feet and then turned off the water. Dash patted Phantom dry the best he could considering the ghost was sitting in a damp tub in soaked underwear. Tossing aside the towel with the rest of the discarded clothing, Dash bent down, slid his left arm under Phantom’s back, managed to hook his right arm under the ghost’s legs, and lifted him out of the tub. He was thankful that Phantom weighed next to nothing, otherwise his mostly paralyzed right arm would not have been able to support his weight.

Dash carried Phantom back to his bedroom and laid Phantom in his bed. The covers were already thrown back from when Dash had gotten his Ghost Spotters alert an hour earlier. Complexion drained, eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, hair damp, veins etched in poison - Dash’s hero looked so small and helpless. It made Dash want to hold him. Either that, or cry.

He did neither. Instead, he stripped off his gloves and raincoat, which he put in the bathroom with the rest of the contaminated articles of clothing. He went back to his closet and pulled out a pair of pajamas from the bottom of a bin. They were his favorite pair from when he was in junior high but had no longer fit him once he got taller and bulked up in high school. Warm red flannel, patterned with brown teddy bears wearing cozy-looking scarves - the only person outside of his family who had seen these was Kwan, who was sworn to secrecy. But they had been the best, especially during the winter or when Dash had been sick, the times when it was important to feel comfortable. They would probably fit Phantom.

Averting his eyes, feeling his face burning, Dash peeled Phantom’s soaked underwear off, dropped them on the carpet, and immediately put the ghost boy’s legs in his red flannel pajama pants. The hero’s modesty preserved, Dash pinched the underwear between two of his fingers, took them to the bathroom, and hung them over the shower curtain rail to dry. They hung there innocuously, glowing faintly - ghost undies.

Back in his bedroom, Dash wrestled Phantom’s upper half into the pajama top. His estimate had been mostly right - Phantom was a little too tall and his arms too long for the pajamas, by about an inch, but otherwise the pjs fit him. Phantom was pretty small.

The veins of venom on the ghost boy’s face had retreated past his jawline and were not glowing so fiercely. Now that the rest of the ones on his body were hidden from sight, he looked a lot better, although it was strange to see the hero wearing Dash’s favorite childhood pajamas, laying in his bed. A strange flutter tickled in Dash’s stomach and flitted into his heart. He was blushing again.

Gingerly, Dash pulled the blankets over Phantom up to his chin and tucked them around him. Even more gingerly, trying not to draw comparisons between this paralyzed ghost and a dead body, Dash touched two fingers to Phantom’s eyelids and closed them. If - no, when Phantom recovered from the spider poison, it wouldn’t hurt him to get a few hours of sleep… assuming ghosts slept.

Dash preemptively texted his parents, letting them know that he was sick and would be staying home from school that day. He hadn’t had a sick day since last school year, so he knew they would take him at his word. To be safe, he locked his bedroom door.

He pulled his computer chair over to the side of the bed and slumped into it. His numb right arm lay in his lap, paralyzed, the green lightning bolts on his hand as harsh and virulent as when they first appeared. He tried not to think about it. Instead, he sat up, determined to watch over his hero through the rest of the night.

-----

Part 2 -->

#tfc writes #danny phantom #dash baxter #pre-swagger-bishie #protective!dash #injured danny #here be spiders

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mischiefandspirits · 3 years

Text

Doppelgänger (14/19)

Previously on Doppelgänger ~ Masterlist ~ Next time on Doppelgänger

Danny, Sam, and Tucker were just 14 when they took a look inside the portal Danny’s parents had built. From there, everything changed. They woke up with white hair, green skin, and powers they could learn to control. They were hybrids, halfas.

They were the hero Doppelgänger.

{Memory Blank, Part 2}

Something sunk into Danny’s stomach as the pieces started coming together. “And you were wearing this all night, up until school?”

“Yes, why? Do you know what’s wrong with me?”

“Not you, us.”

“Us?”

He waved his hands around, trying to encompass everything. “All of us. Everyone. This is supposed to protect you from ghostly powers. So if you think the entire world changed on you overnight, maybe it did! Maybe a ghost used some… some reality altering ability.”

Valerie’s eyes widened. “And since I was wearing that, I was unaffected.”

“Do you remember any ghosts that were about lately?”

“The last ghosts I saw were the circus ones and none of them were that strong. Oh, and Terminatra.”

“Termi-who?”

“The ghost in the park, the one that attacked Paulina. She looked just like the movie monster Terminatra.”

“Movie monster… Wait! Like that new movie coming out. The chick flick.”

“Chick flick?”

“The one with the three female monsters.”

“Trinity of Doom is not a chick flick,” she chuckled.

“It’s the closest Sam gets to chick flicks and she’s the only girl I hang out with.”

“I’ll give you that.” She shook her head in amusement. “Yeah, Terminatra is in Trinity of Doom.”

“And let me guess, one of the others is some green shark-alien thing.”

“Femalien?” Valerie pulled up a picture of the poster on her phone and showed it to him. “Yeah. Why?”

He pointed at Femalien. “That’s the ghost that attacked our class.”

“Why are movie monsters coming to life to attack people?”

“Not people, Paulina,” Danny corrected. “And I don’t know why, but I know it’s connected to Sam. Femalien said her name just before Phantom beat her and Sam really wanted to go see the movie, but Tucker and I wanted to go to Paulina’s party since she actually invited us for once.”

“Wow, she hates Paulina on the best day. She’d probably wish hell on her after you guys pulled that.”

Danny went pale. “Wish. Oh man, that explains everything.”

“What? What’d I say?”

“There’s a ghost -- Desiree -- she’s basically a genie. She grants any wish she hears, can make anything come true so long as someone wishes for it.”

“Such as bringing movie monsters to life or changing all of reality as we know it?” Valerie said, her eyes widening.

“Theoretically. I’ve never seen her grant such a big wish before though. What would someone even wish to change things so much?”

“I don’t know, but we need to fix it. Do you know how she was defeated last time?”

Danny snorted. “I wished she’d go into the thermos.”

“It was that easy?” she laughed.

“Like I said, she grants every wish she hears.”

“So we just need to find her then wish everything back to normal before she can grant any… more… wishes! The meteor shower!” Valerie said, grabbing Danny’s shoulders. “She’s going after the meteor shower!”

“Everyone will be making wishes,” Danny said as he caught on. “We need to find her, now.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“What happened to you?” Tucker asked as Danny stumbled up to them, dreary-eyed.

“Was up all night. Finally figured out what was up with the ghosts and Sam,” Danny yawned.

“Still blaming me?” Sam asked, slamming her locker shut.

“I wasn’t -” Danny groaned and slumped against the lockers. “Look, it was Desiree, okay. She’s back and she messed up big. I need to stop her. I just wish I knew what idiot made a wish to warp the entire world and what they’d even wished for.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam asked.

He opened his mouth to explain and his breath fogged in front of him. “Wait, no,” he hissed as he realized his mistake. He spun around to see Desiree forming in front of him.

“Well, this is even better than I’d hoped,” she laughed. “You really are getting rid of all my problems, aren’t you?”

Danny took a step back as she pointed a glowing hand at him.

“So you have wished it, so shall it be!”

He dropped to the ground as pink mist washed over him.

“Danny!” Sam and Tucker shouted, running to his side as the ghost flew off. “Are you okay?”

He groaned as he opened his eyes. “What’s going on? Why are we at school?” he asked, sitting up. He looked at his partners, then flinched away. “Who are you? Where are Sam and Tucker?”

They both frowned. “We are Sam and Tucker.”

“Yeah, no you’re not. I’d recognize my partners anywhere.”

“Dude, what did Desiree do to you?” Tucker asked and Danny froze.

“Desiree? What about Desiree?”

“She just hit you with her magic and now you think we’re imposters,” Sam explained.

Danny got to his feet, looking around. “I-I don’t remember anything about Desiree. The last thing I remember was getting home from our pity party and going to bed.”

“Pity party?” Tucker asked.

“Yeah, where Sam and Tucker -- the real ones -- were cheering me up after Val and I… decided we couldn’t date.”

“Date!” the two shouted.

“You can’t date Valerie,” Tucker said.

“I’m aware,” he huffed.

“Seriously Danny, she’s trying to kill Phantom! Why would that even be an option?” Sam said and Danny gave her a confused look.

“Phantom?”

They shared a look and Tucker said, “Danny Phantom, your ghost form.”

“My ghost form. My, as in not yours.”

“Duh, you’re the half-ghost. Not us.”

Danny sucked in a breath. “Oh no. No, no, no. You guys said Desiree was here?”

“Yeah?”

The school bell rang.

“Crud,” Danny hissed. “Meet me after class. We really need to talk.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“You realize how crazy this all sounds, right?” Sam said as she and Tucker watched Danny pace around his room.

“How do you think I feel?” he said, rubbing his neck. “No one remembers anything!”

“Danny, maybe this is just Desiree,” Tucker said.

“Of course it’s Desiree.”

“No, I meant she’s why you’re thinking these things. None of it happened, man.”

“It did though! I know it did!”

“But you only knew this stuff after she blasted you.”

Danny scowled and pinched his nose.

He missed his partners, which these two weren’t even if they were the real Sam and Tucker because these two were human and weren’t in a relationship with him so not only couldn’t they soothe him mentally, but he couldn’t even cuddle with them because the one time he’d mentioned it he’d gotten weird looks and Sam had flushed brighter than a stop sign. He also missed Valerie, but he couldn’t talk to her because they weren’t even friends in this backward world, let alone the messy whatever they were now that they’d admitted their feelings but couldn’t actually date back in his reasonably crazy world.

“I need a nap,” Danny groaned, laying down on his bed.

Then he wondered if he could even take a nap. He was the only halfa in this world. How much extra work did he have? Clearly enough that he screwed up a lot, judging by the stories his friends had told him.

“We don’t have time for that. We need to track down Desiree and fix you.”

Danny moaned and pulled his pillow over his head.

A knock sounded, but Danny ignored it. Who knows how weird his relationship was with Jazz. They’d gotten so much closer since the Spectra thing, he didn’t want to know how not having Sam and Tucker there to save him would have affected that.

“Uh, why is Valerie in her ghost hunter getup outside your window,” Tucker whispered just loud enough for Danny and Sam to hear.

Danny threw the pillow off. “Val?”

Sam scowled at his reaction, but he ignored her and ran to the window.

“Hey, Danny,” Valerie said as she opened it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, trying to push down his excitement, this wasn’t his Valerie. This Valerie didn’t even like him.

“Checking in,” she said, climbing into his room. “I haven’t seen any sign of Desiree, have you?”

“How does she know about Desiree?” Sam asked.

“You didn’t tell them?” Valerie asked.

“My head’s been in two places lately,” he chuckled. “Were we, uh, working together or something?”

That didn’t make sense given what San and Tucker had said, but he kind of hoped it was true.

Valerie retracted her suit and gave him a worried look. “Yes, after I explained everything to you about Doppelgänger we figured out Desiree was behind it. Don’t you remember?”

“Thank god!” Danny cheered, pulling her into a hug. “You remember Doppelgänger. You don’t know how good it is to hear that, Val.”

“Of course I re-Wait, Val?” She pulled back so she could see his face. She studied it for a moment before smiling. “Danny?”

“Hey, cage buddy.”

She laughed and hugged him back. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again, Fenton.”

“Sorry.”

“Uh, hey, yeah, what’s going on?” Sam said, but the two ignored her.

“How did you get your memories back?”

“Heck if I know. All I know is Sam and Tucker said Desiree blasted me and when I woke up I could remember everything from our world. This one’s bananas by the way.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How do you remember everything?”

“Your Specter Deflector. It stopped me from being affected.”

“Go me.”

Suddenly a hand grabbed the back of Danny’s shirt and he was yanked away from his -- honestly, much needed as he hasn’t gone this long without cuddles in ages -- hug.

“Yeah, hi, still here,” Sam growled, sending Valerie a death glare.

She stared at Sam for a moment, then glanced at Danny. “Does Sam have a crush on you in this world?”

Danny shrugged as Sam sputtered and Tucker snickered.

“I don’t have a crush on Danny!”

“Right, back on topic. Desiree, any ideas,” Valerie said.

“Last time I met her, Tucker and I went to a W-ing fountain and W-ed for her to appear so we could capture her. We could try that again,” Danny offered.

“Good enough. Let’s go.”

“Hold on,” Sam said, yanking Danny back when he tried to follow Valerie to the window. In a low voice, she said, “What are you doing? You can’t go to a ghost fight with her. Your secret.”

“Calm down, Sam. We’re just going to W for her to fix everything then go in the thermos. No fighting involved. Besides, I’ve fought in human form plenty of times. I won’t give myself away.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. You need to trust me.”

“You can’t go alone. You need to let us help you.”

Danny gave a sad smile and grabbed her hand off his arm. He squeezed it, saying, “Trust me, if this has taught me anything, it's that I need you guys at my side. But not this time. You guys don’t know what’s at stake. Besides, I’m not alone. Val’s got my back.”

“That’s worse than alone.”

Danny leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be fine, promise.”

He pulled back and was surprised to see she looked floored and was cherry flushed.

Okay, Valerie might have been right about the crush. Weird.

Danny took that as his chance to follow Valerie to the window. He sent Tucker a smile, but the tech geek was too busy gaping at him and Sam.

“Let’s get out of this crazy world,” Danny said as he climbed onto the hoverboard.

“Agreed.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Home sweet home,” Danny sighed as he brushed against the mind link. His partners seemed confused, but affectionate and he quickly assured them he’d explain later.

He and Val were currently hovering over the park, sitting side by side on her board. Valerie had the thermos containing Desiree in hand, fiddling with it as they stared out at the sunset.

“I’m glad you were there to help.”

“It was the least I could do. The, uh, W was actually mine,” he admitted.

“Really? What had you been W-ing for?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It was a stupid one. I was just sad and frustrated and worried about Sam and Tucker.” He looked up at her. “And you.”

She smiled and took his hand. “About what we talked about?”

“Val -”

“I know what you said, but I don’t care if you have a secret.”

“I do,” he sighed, pulling his hand away. “I don’t want to have to lie to you.”

“Then don’t. If you can’t tell me something, then just tell me that.” She turned fully to Danny. “This whole mess has made me realize that I want to be with you, Danny. If that means you have secrets, then I can live with that. I,” she thought about Doppelgänger floating before her with blood-red eyes, “have my own secrets too. And it wouldn’t be fair for me to ask you to keep my secret, then be turned off by the fact you’re keeping someone else’s.”

“You’ll be mad I kept it from you when you find out,” he whispered.

“Then you can hit me over the head and remind me it’s my own fault.”

He snorted. “I don’t have a death wish, thanks.”

She reached up to cup his cheek. “I’m serious, Danny.”

“This is a bad idea,” he said, but he didn’t pull away.

“It will be fine.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I want this, and I know you do too.”

“I…” You deserve to be selfish sometimes. “I do. I’m just worried.”

She leaned forward and kissed him, soft and sweet.

When they pulled back, she said, “Don’t be.”

He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Sam, Tucker, and I were going to see a movie tomorrow, but do you want to come over after to watch the meteor shower together? The best time to watch is supposed to be one in the morning.”

“Can’t wait.”

#danny phantom #danny fenton #valerie gray #sam manson #tucker foley #Doppelgänger au

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