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raaorqtpbpdy · 2 years

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My minibang fic is mutichap so here we go for Invisobang 2022! For the minibang I was partnered with the fabulous and talented @astravis whose art will be posted along with the sixth and final chapter on Friday, so stay tuned!

(Chap two) (Ch 3) (ch. four) (five) (and 6)

BREAKING: NASA Lands Earths First Manned Spacecraft on Mars!

The creepy Fenton kid and the town's resident ghost hero go missing on the same day, and for weeks Amity Park is all abuzz about it. If the timing is suspicious, the doctors Fenton don't think anything of it. But Sam and Tucker think they can find Danny and bring him back. In fact, they're certain of it.

On a cold, steel table, in a certain lab, in a sprawling, labyrinthine, top secret facility, there is a boy named Danny.

[A tragedy following the wake of Danny's disappearance and the strange set of circumstances revealed between five points of view. But how did he get caught in the first place? And where did he go?]

Chapter 1: Space Case (Read it on AO3)

[Warning: dissection/vivisection, dissociation]

On a cold, steel table, in a certain lab, in a sprawling, labyrinthine, top secret facility, there is a boy named Danny. He is strapped down tightly with electrified restraints, his chest and abdomen cut wide open to make his insides easily accessible to the scientists examining him, a large needle lanced through his temple into his brain. Any other boy would be dead in Danny's condition. However, Danny is only half dead, and more importantly, he is half alive.

The situation he is in has lost all of its novelty to him. Though he has no idea how long he's been there, maybe days, maybe months, maybe longer or less—the horrific has become mundane. Where once he felt indescribable pain, he now feels nothing. Where once he screamed, he now is silent. Desensitized to the agony, absent from his senses, his mind wanders—as it often did before being ripped from his ordinary life, and brought here—to space. None of this would be happening to him if he was in space, he thinks.

Space is unfathomably enormous. So big, he's heard it said, that in the time it would take for one to finish describing its vastness, it would already have fucktoupled in size. The thought would once have quirked his lips up in a smile, but now his lips are stone. Space is home to trillions of planets, and trillions of stars, and trillions of other celestial bodies, and based on those numbers, it's statistically impossible that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe.

However due to the gargantuan nature of the universe, it is equally unlikely that humans will ever meet other intelligent life forms from across the many galaxies, light-years upon light-years away. Danny has always taken that as a challenge. He is going to go to space one day. No matter how much the odds are against it, he wants to discover alien life-forms. Even if he doesn't, he thinks, he'll fail among the stars, and that's a whole lot more interesting than failing in the dirt.

Before all this, Danny always kept up with the latest advancements in space travel and astronomy, and he wonders how much he's missed while trapped here. He used to try to escape, but now he's just tired. At least he has plenty of time to think now. Since he was four years old, he's been studying to be an astronaut. If research and development go smoothly, according to his timeline, he thought he'd be an astronaut in time to join the first manned mission to Mars.

That doesn't look as likely now.

No Mars Rover engineer ever cut open a fourteen-year-old. At least, he's pretty sure. And in space there are no ghosts, and no suffering, and no grossly unethical science. He could still do it, he thinks, as though he is not on a table, in a lab, in a top secret facility.

It's hard to be present in his own body now, to feel, to see, to taste, and hear, and smell. It's easier to forget where he is, who he is. He can't tell if he's Fenton or Phantom anymore. He can check, open his eyes, force his blurry vision to focus long enough to see if the hair falling into his face is black or white but... which belongs to which? He looks down and sees a slimy pink organ being roughly jerked upwards, out of his open torso.

Fenton then. Phantom doesn't have any of those, he thinks as he feels himself floating upwards, looking down on himself, and the scientists, watching everything, but at the same time not really paying attention. He hasn't moved, but he's not there anymore, not as far as he can tell.

He can remember some of the discoveries in the first day or two, the feeling of foreign fingers sifting through the ectoplasmic goo in Phantom's chest cavity where Fenton has a heart and lungs, the dreadful, icy feeling when a gloved fingernail brushed against his core, and he froze the whole lab and everyone there in an instant, defending his ghost half's only vital organ. They have the technology to clear the ice quickly, though they decided to put off experimenting with his core to a later date.

As Fenton, however, there is no soft bubbling and fizzing of ectoplasm, instead the sloshing and squishing of flesh and fluids fills the air, along with the smell of antiseptic and raw meat. The sensation of someone else's hand, reaching inside him and pulling out foot after foot of intestine where in his ghost form there is only green fog and ghostly swamp sludge.

"Subject continues to regenerate lost organs," says a male voice which Danny has grown familiar with, though he still has not been able to put a name to it. The man is referred to as Dr. H, and nothing else. "Thus far there does not appear to be an upper limit to the subject's healing factor, even when deprived of oxygen. According to our sensors, the subject has not taken in oxygen in the last six days and nine hours, approximately."

Has he really not breathed in over six days? Danny wonders. He hasn't even thought about it, but in retrospect, that seems right. Breathing hurts—everything hurts—so he stopped doing it. He doesn't try to breathe. He doesn't hurt anymore, doesn't feel anything.

A door opens. The door. There's only one door in the room as far as Danny is aware, and no windows. He remembers checking when he first got there, but it takes him a few seconds to remember why. It was probably the getting nabbed and strong armed into ghost proof bonds that put him off to the idea at first, but the clinical laboratory, suspicious vials of colored goo, and medical equipment that looks like torture devices, didn't ease his worries.

"Ah, Miss Fenton," Dr. H greets. "I was hoping to get a quick evaluation of the subject's psychological state. It hasn't screamed in over a week, and hasn't been breathing lately. It doesn't appear to be in danger of destabilizing or dissolving, which would put a halt to our research, but I am worried that it may be in danger of turning into a full ghost and losing its human attributes if it cannot maintain its humanoid psyche."

"Danny?" It's Jazz. Jazz is here! She's here! Why... why does that matter? "Are you there?"

"Somewhere," he responds, voice floating out of his mouth with no force behind it. To speak without breath always felt strange to him in the past, but he's not thinking about that now. He's excited to see his sister, though he can't remember why. He's angry, or maybe he's afraid. Maybe he feels nothing at all. Should he?

She smiles at him, a sad, pitying smile, but there is horror behind her eyes, and he vaguely wonders why. "Are you in pain? How are you feeling?"

"Dunno... should I be?" he asks. "How can I be?"

"Well?" Dr. H cuts in. "Can I continue or not?"

"I believe his body is fine." She sounds relieved. Her voice is wracked with guilt when she speaks again. "In my opinion, he seems to have entered a severe dissociative state. He is aware of his situation, but his brain has disconnected itself from everything to protect him, so he may feel as though he does not exist, or as though he is watching what's happening like a movie, rather than experiencing it."

"Excellent," says Dr. H, as though that's the best possible answer she could have given. "That means the subject is complacent, and in an excellent state to be moved for the next stage of experiments." A radio crackled with static. "Agent Q, ready the ecto-repulsive vacuum chamber, over."

"Affirmative, Dr. H, over and out," a voice hissed back through the radio.

"I do not believe that's the best—" Jazz tries to say, but she doesn't get to the end of her sentence before Dr. H cuts her off dismissively.

"Thank you Miss Fenton, that will be all. I have to stitch it back up before we can begin experimenting in the vacuum chamber." After a moment, the door opens and closes again. "Activating subject's spectral transformation to increase the speed of its healing factor and thus the likelihood that it will be able to withstand vacuum chamber experiments." Dr. H tweaks the needle in Danny's brain and as the white rings wash over his body, he is hypnotized by them.

They are like the rings of Saturn, thin and white and cold, made of ice and rock and space dust, a hundred and seventy thousand miles across, and only thirty feet thick, circling the gaseous planet like fan blades. He knows it's unlikely, but Danny hopes to see them in person one day, too. Maybe as mankind encroaches further outward into space, they'll send a manned mission to Titan, or Enceladus. Maybe he can be on it.

By the time Dr. H and Agent Q transfer Danny into the vacuum chamber, his mind is long gone again, in a vacuum of its own, marveling at the beauty of Saturn's rings as he looks down from one of its moons. Outer space never ceases to amaze, and Danny is struck dumb by its radiance.

#dissection tw #dissociation tw #human experimentation tw #danny phantom #danny fenton #guys in white #angst #dp #space science #space imagery #fic #invisobang 2022 #breaking: NASA lands earth’s first manned spacecraft on mars #why oh why did I give it such a long title T-T #chapter one #things i wrote

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