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tourettesdog · 1 year

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Still Deeper

Based on the prompt “How deep is the Ghost Zone?” for Phic Phight!

For @aggressivelyclueless Word count: 3,055 AO3 Link

Danny often wondered how deep the Ghost Zone ran. When he let himself drift over the islands, watching the lap of ectoplasm tug at the purpled stones like the endless waves of a moonless ocean. When he drifted closer, feeling that pull that ached to tug him into the depths.

Settling down on one of the islands, Danny let his spectral tail dip where the ectoplasm grew heavy. It sent a shiver down his spine, not unlike a cold splash of water, freshly thawed in the spring.

He couldn’t help but compare it to the sea. Green and ghastly as it was, the similarities felt hauntingly close when great behemoths rose from the depths, too many eyes skirting what Danny could only call the surface, before sinking back down to the depths.

He tried to venture there once.

Shutting his eyes, Danny recalled that hapless voyage with a shudder. He’d tied a Fenton fishing line around his waist and trusted Sam and Tucker with the other end. They’d advised against it, knuckles whitening with fear for his safety as they held that thin thread with everything they had.

Danny offered a smile and a salute as he took the plunge.

Diving was easy. The ectoplasm did not fight him, rather welcoming him as he struck through the wash of green. That first layer was not too dissimilar to the surface itself, and by the time Danny glanced upwards he would not have been able to see the difference at all were it not for the sharpened bases of the islands striking downward.

He struck downward too, his tail flickering as he went.

If the surface of the Zone was air, this layer was a fog. It clung to Danny’s skin like mist, cold and hazy with the scent of petrichor heavy in his nostrils.

Blob ghosts trilled in the distance, their sounds echoing on and on in the open expanse. They darted towards Danny, a flock of bright green and brighter red eyes. He welcomed them with a pulse of his core and their trills redoubled with glee.

“Is everything okay?” Sam asked through the Fenton Phones, her tone as tense as the line around his waist.

“Everything’s fine, Sam,” Danny reassured as he held his hand out, letting one of the blob ghosts roll over his fingers. “There’s just some blob ghosts here.”

She wanted him to resurface, but Danny had more to see.

The blob ghosts stuck with him for a time, corkscrewing around his tail and settling in his hair like fat drops of rain. Danny hummed with their trills, finding a chorus of song answering his own.

The mist of the expanse began to densen, coalescing in a blanket of jade fog. It coiled around Danny as he met it, the chill it left on his skin buzzing.

The blob ghosts quieted as he swept his tail through the fog. They tentatively drifted to meet it, their own tails skirting just above the layer. Curiosity and unease mixed, pinging from their little forms with each warbling trill and chirp.

Tentatively, Danny sank his hand beneath the layer of fog, feeling that electric buzz shudder through his ectoplasm.

It wasn’t unpleasant. Strange and new, but no less unpleasant than the crackle of a distant storm.

With one last glance at the blob ghosts, sure they would not follow him down, Danny sank deeper into the abyss.

The cold sparks that danced across Danny’s face electrified his core, filling him with energy and nerve. The jade of the fog had faded into a strange sort of blue, not unlike the open atmosphere of the world the Zone paralleled.

Large, cloud-like structures rose up from the new depths, cyclical spirals that drifted slowly, as if caught in a current. Danny could spot rocks drifting along with them, some as vibrantly purple as the ones at the surface and others as jet-black as obsidian. He moved in an arc to meet one of the stones, finding it tumbled and rounded like the pebbles of a river.

A loud trill startled Danny from his thoughts. He spun around to find a large blob ghost winding towards him, a long tail flowing behind it. Its ectoplasm was as teal as Jazz’s eyes and its face pointed like the tapered snout of a sturgeon. It met Danny with beady magenta eyes, his own glow reflected in those bright orbs as it drifted around him. Its tail ghosted across his arms, curiosity brimming from its ectoplasm in one long, drawn-out trill that whistled and crackled at the end.

Danny returned it in kind with a chirp from his core, watching the ectoplasm ripple across the ghost’s back as it made one last spin around him.

Just as soon as it came, it was gone, tail flicking lazily as it threaded through the stones circling one of those cloud-like spires.

Danny wondered just how deep the spires went. He followed their spiral, finding more oddities amidst the collection of stones. There were odd items gathered in the current: old watches, faded photographs, and glistening jewelry. Trinkets lost to time— though how literally, Danny couldn’t say. He regarded a locket with an inscription so worn that he couldn’t read more than the letter ‘A’. It took everything in him not to reach out and touch it and see if something lay inside.

Something as innate as the hum of his core told him that he shouldn’t disturb their rest.

Rest… it was a funny word for a lump of old bronze and a rusted chain.

“Where are you?” came Tucker’s voice in his ear, the words oddly distant and ringed with static.

“I’m not sure,” Danny answered, still following the curve of the spire, giving distance to the items pulled towards it. “It almost looks like the sky here. It’s nice, honestly.”

Tucker hummed, his anxiety evident. “Just don’t go too far. There’s still plenty of line, but you need to turn back at the first sign of danger.”

Danny nodded, though they couldn’t see. “I know, Tuck. I’ll be careful,” he said.

The buzz hummed alongside his core as he dove still deeper.

The spires did not end, in a sense. They merely faded, drifting apart into a layer of rich white fog that mixed in swirls and rivulets with bright streaks of goldenrod. The static lingered most prominently there, as cold as the Far Frozen and as lively as a sparking wire. Danny hesitated before he met this fog, worried for a moment that the sparks would be more electrical and biting than the familiar caress of active ectoplasm. He brushed the tip of his tail through the swirls, watching as it melted outwards from the contact in jagged ripples.

His core pulsed with energy, a cold hum resonating with the fractals of ice that lingered in his own ectoplasm.

He readily dove through it, laughing as ice bloomed over his hands and in his hair, trailing off of him in powders of snow.

The channels of white fog faded altogether into that goldenrod yellow. It was denser than the green and blue had been, yet no less alive— in a way only ectoplasm could be. Danny tensed as he saw shadows in the distance, moving through the last fading reaches of the spires. It took him a moment to recognize them as ghosts, though he supposed he ought not be surprised.

They were like no ghosts that Danny had ever seen. More fish and mollusk than blob, with arching fins and tangling whiskers. They drifted in schools, watching him with too many eyes above too many teeth. Each was as different from the next, some more vapor and smoke than anything, and others as dense and sharp as horn.

They ignored Danny for the most part, continuing on their course, though some darted away as soon as their eyes met.

One approached, six eyes green and gleaming in the golden haze. Danny knew fear, his hand tensing on the line as it drew close. It was as large as he was, an awful thing that was more shark in the front and nautilus in the back, with a mouth that stretched from its snout to the horn of the shell.

It kept some distance and Danny let go of some of his fear, regarding the ghost with a tilt of his head that it copied— as much as it could with the stiffened, inorganic rigidity of something that may have never existed outside of this place.

Three of the eyes blinked and two long tendrils stretched out, brushing close to Danny’s face as the ghost let out a staccato of unearthly clicks.

The same curiosity as the blob ghost from the layer above, enough to mirror Danny’s own. He tried to return it in kind, finding a trickle of something neighboring on amusement when his core garbled the odd notes.

The creature went on its way, leaving a channel of rippling goldenrod in its wake. Sparks danced along its ectoplasm as it went and Danny watched as the green of the ghost's eyes faded into the mire around him.

More of those strange ghosts followed Danny, perhaps emboldened by the first. They ranged in size, some no larger than dimes and others enough to rival small whales. A ghost swam below Danny, all tentacles and eyes, like a jellyfish without its crown. Small fish-like ones flitted around his head, all teeth and sharp edges.

He kept his guard about him, ready to make good on his word and flee at the first sign of danger, but… found none amidst the odd assortment of ghosts. They almost danced, in a way, following currents he couldn’t feel in patterns he couldn’t see. Many of them dove downwards, fading to golden shadows in his periphery.

Danny followed one of them, tracing the trail it left in its wake, watching the flicker of its smoke-like tails as they wound and undulated with the ghost’s movement.

The goldenrod darkened into a rich sunset orange. The trail tunneled, the path wavering like sand pulled by the tide. Sparks crackled along Danny’s back, the space smelling of ozone and, strangely, of stone. The mute scent of a cavernous cave far below the soil, all rock and dripping water.

The ghost before him took a sharp dive downwards, the smoke of its tails stretching to faint wisps that tickled Danny’s nose. He scrunched up his eyelids, shaking the vapor from his face. His movement felt slow and stuttered, the air as dense as the mud-choked waters of a swamp.

When he opened his eyes again, Danny had to blink to make sure he was seeing things correctly. The rich sunset ombre of orange had gone, and in its place the sky bled red.

A red so absolute that it pressed on Danny’s eyes, warping the colors around him. It stained his gloves the same color, as rich and bloody as a weeping wound. The static had lessened from the lively buzz to something much more languid and rhythmic. The slow beats of a resting heart. The offbeat thumps of a timpani drum. The rumble of faroff thunder without so much as a spark of lightning to see.

Shadows hung in Danny’s periphery, blacker than the night. They formed strange structures not unlike tangled tree branches, only too geometric and sharp-edged to ever be something so organic. The ghost he had followed swam on, its blue ectoplasm now a rich purple in the red light. It coasted along, uncaring of the shift in pressure.

Danny tried to follow it, but paused when that energy squeezed at his core, pulsing like the heartbeat of something far too vast and far too old. It had pinpricks racing along his arms and to his chest, freezing his torso in a way that had nothing to do with the chill surrounding him and everything to do with the frantic, nervous humming of his core.

He shouldn’t be here. Wherever here was, it did not know the living. It hardly knew the dead, too uncaring of Danny’s fear in its vast wake.

Sounds echoed around him, the cracks of shattering glass and grinding stone joining the monotonous tune that squeezed at his chest. The air smelled strongly of iron, only worsening the awful likeness to fresh blood.

The ghost was nearly gone now, aiming towards one of the blackened structures with slow, languid flicks of its tails. Danny could just make out its eyes, too many luminous dots that raced along every inch of its form.

Just as it began to round the corner, the air seemed to shift. The space behind the structure rippled, a wall of red colliding with the ghost, opening into a vast, cavernous maw of blade-sharp teeth.

It swallowed the ghost whole, the rich purple ectoplasm disappearing into the void-dark belly of the beast.

Danny’s core could have shattered with how strongly it hummed, fear coursing through every inch of his being. He remained stockstill, hoping that the thing with too many teeth wouldn’t turn its attention on him.

Static crackled in his ears, the garble of voices unable to make it through the wall of interference.

A thousand eyes, each darker than shadow, turned to meet him.

The line tugged and Danny didn’t fight it. He welcomed the reminder of safety up above and turned sharply, throwing everything he had into rocketing upwards through the warped tunnels above.

The static rippled in his ears, a small nuisance compared to the heavy thunder of crashing glaciers and rumbling earth that chased behind. It brought its own static, too piercing and high for Danny to make sense of anything more than a cruel, twisted pitch that met his ears so sharply he was sure they bled.

Danny didn’t stop, his chest heaving with breaths he didn’t need as he shot through the electric buzz of goldenrod, this time finding no safety in its energetic embrace.

He could feel the creature behind him still. Its thrum of energy, the acidic bite of its breath. He didn’t dare spare a glance backwards, least of all when he felt something sharp rake along his tail, the world darkening as the thing that shadowed him drew too close.

Danny put everything he had into soaring upwards. Every last ounce of energy, every prayer. He ignored the fish-like ghosts as they peeled away, their cores sparking with a horrendous fear as Danny brought the thing that lurked in the bloody depths into their peaceful layer of gold.

Danny could have cried when he saw the goldenrod mix with white. Could have kissed the odd trinkets that danced around the spires, if disturbing their rest meant escaping the gnash of too many teeth.

Its presence lingered behind Danny far too long, his core stuttering with each rhythmic pulse of ancient, resonant ectoplasm. It knew no emotion he could recognize. Nothing he could understand past the desire to tear and bite and end.

Danny didn’t stop when the last deep thrums of the ghost’s core faded, sinking back to the depths far below. He kept going, tears pricking the corners of his eyes when he spotted the sharp stones of the islands overhead.

Danny shot out of the ectoplasmic sea and breathed like a man starved of air. His chest heaved, his arms shook. He landed on the nearest island, crumpling into a quivering heap.

He sobbed.

Danny hardly remembered when Sam and Tucker found him. They had been several islands away when he resurfaced, he was told.

They had almost gone down for him, they had said.

That memory lingered much more strongly— the fear tied to it as he looked at his friends with tear-stricken eyes and made them promise to never venture where he had gone.

Danny rolled on his side as he remembered the fear that had gripped at his core. How close he had come to finding himself in the belly of a beast, utterly lost to anything resembling home.

His hand ghosted along his hip, right over where the ghost’s teeth had scraped him, digging deep channels into his body that bled through layer upon layer of gauze.

More layers than he has dove.

The scars remained, just as much as that fear, and yet… as Danny flicked his tail through the dense waves of ectoplasm, part of him longed to delve still deeper.

~*~

A fish-like ghost, more shark and nautilus than any one thing, knew the red depths well. It often sank through the goldenrod tunnels to linger in the forests of blackened branches. It was quicker than most, able to dart away from the behemoths that stalked the open stretches and hummed discordant songs that spelled a death it didn’t know.

The black branches shot downwards into the familiar dusky stretches of its first home. Here the branches merged into colossal trunks that stretched too high and too low. It would hug the trunks, sinking deeper until the red faded into a cold silver rich with fragments of stone and drifting globules of ectoplasm.

The trunks branched out again if the ghost went deep enough. They formed massive roots, digging into shattered plains amidst glowing fronds, each clinging to the other. Small ghosts congregated on these expanses, finding shelter in the vast network of roots, and sustenance in what fell from the stretches above.

The behemoths, ancient as they were, did not always last. When they fell they would drift through the haze and into the silver, their weakened forms snagging on the roots and laying within the fronds. The last hums of their cores, if they still pulsed, rang like a dinner bell throughout the hallowed roots. The ghosts that lingered there would congregate, a symphony of cores welcoming a feast for the Ancients— perhaps even of them, if they could ever be so lucky to have one fall.

The plains were not endless, broken by great cracks that wove over the blackest black.

It didn’t know what lay below, only that it went still deeper.

#danny phantom #phanfic #fanfic #aggressivelyclueless #the ghost zone #eldritch ghosts #ghosts #the ghost zone is like the ocean #deep water tw #jic #phic phight #phic phight 2023 #dogfics

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snaileer · 1 year

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How A Ghost Town Dies

They say that if you drive down Interstate X, take the exit off of Elmerton, there’s an abandoned town.

Amity Park, they called it. ‘A nice place to live’ said the lopsided sign at the edge of the road.

‘ I’m still here’ says the graffiti on the back of the rusted metal, visible only in your rear view mirror.

They say that the town was once a city. That the long empty houses were once full, the stores once busy and the roads once clean. But by now the woods have grown back into the property lines anyways, blurring them with sidewalks cracked by roots and gates opened by creeping vines and crawling rust. Trees have sprouted thick in the middle of roads and a canopy of leaves like the cover of streetlights.

There’s no way this could have ever been a city; ‘But it once was’ they say.

When people walked the streets and children played in the yards, there was life.

There were flowers and laughter and voices on the wind.

They say that something happened.

That something changed.

It was not quick. As death rarely is.

But still.. there was an instant, where things changed. Though it wasn’t just one moment that anyone could tell you, only that it did.

They say that monsters attacked, that creatures no one could explain suddenly appeared.

They say there were protectors who fought the monsters. People who fought back, if they were people at all.

They say that’s what killed the town. The fighting.

Streets mangled by craters and walls burned by battlefire.

They say it’s still alive.

Oh there is no life, no people or children playing in the streets, though you may hear their voices on the wind.

There is no life, but it is still alive.

It must be.

Because they say that if you drive through town theres a building. Half-collapsed and charred, old metal still screwed into the side of the awning.

They say that as you enter, you’ll hear the sound of pounding footsteps down the stairs or hallway, like a child running in.

They say that if you stand too still, you’ll see your breath puff in front of you even on the hottest summer day.

They say that you’ll see the flicker of green eyes in your peripheral and the flash of black hair disappearing around a corner.

They say that if you enter the basement, there’s a hole in the wall, and from the moment you step down the stairs, a scream lingers in your ears.

Not everyone hears it, and those that do, rarely want to.

You’ll leave the house feeling chilled, tired, and afraid, though you couldn’t explain why.

And as you talk to your friends about one thing or another, you may feel a listening ear over your shoulder, eavesdropping for snippets of the world outside of the small town roads.

And they say that as you turn back on the roads, and make your way back to the highway, you’ll feel that listening ear fade away.

And they say that if you bother to look back, you might even see someone standing at the town line, watching you leave.

That’s the thing about a ghost town.

To be a ghost town, it must first die.

And when it does, when it truly becomes a ghost town, it becomes a part of a different world and it becomes unchanging to ours.

Where no one new ever truly stays.

And no one left behind ever truly leaves.

#Danny phantom #Danny fenton #cryptid Danny fenton #creepy Danny fenton #dp #Sam manson #Tucker foley #the fenton family #amity park #the ghost zone #the infinite realms #ghost king Danny #full ghost Danny fenton #maybe not but it doesn’t change anything #feel free to use this as inspo idk where it came from #cross posted on ao3 #supernatural

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