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Danny reconvened under moonlight.
He converged as four, in the park at the center of town, standing shrouded in shadow. Threads of moonlight bled through the canopy and speckled all four of him across. And each of him carried his own faint pulsing glow that beat in metronome synchronization. He stared across his selves, drinking in the iridescent lantern eyes that flickered with the ghost lights of a witches’ gathering.
With a collective unspoken decision, he fused back into one.
Danny breathed out, and he allowed himself a few moments to recover from the sensation of being all too much at once. His chest was tight with the vice-grip of déjà vu. His night fanned four-fold, four patrols braided all into one, and he was all of them, and they were all him, and he had no recollection of being any one of them separately.
He had and hadn’t taken down the Box Ghost and Skulker simultaneously. His night had been uneventful. He had seen a cat. No he hadn’t. He’d cut his arm and he didn’t. The stars had been beautiful tonight. He’d never actually bothered looking up.
His night collided, and like he did every time, Danny tried to remember which one he’d been. His mind failed him. Remerging killed any notion that any one of him had been him, any more so than the others.
That was perhaps the scariest part of duplication. The complete inability to remember having any one experience separately. His duplicated selves did live the experiences separately. They were not telepathically linked. Those nights happened individually, with no overlap and no input and no awareness from the other three.
But no one of them was him. They all were, or they all weren’t, and that uncertain sense of self crawled along his skin like spider legs.
Danny’s knees buckled, and he lowered himself onto the sidewalk. He breathed deep to still his tremble, and he checked to ensure he was whole. He played through his mind four walks of the night, tripping over memories that braided together across selves. His head hurt, and he stopped. But they were there. He was all there.
…
Jack Fenton tore a rift into the ghost zone, and he tore it right through the center of Walker’s prison.
It was announced to the town in the form of Walker blazing through the streets, immaculate white atop the Fright Knight’s flaming horse commissioned for bounty hunting. And it was with a low and collected voice, that prick of southern drawl, that Walker ordered all the guards at his side to round up his every last escaped prisoner – no mind paid and no thought spared for any human casualty in the way.
It took all four duplicates, and the entire night, to simply play defensive. Phantom existed as everywhere at once as he could manage, shielding civilians, blasting back ghost rioters, slicing through prison guards.
By sun-up, Walker reclaimed his every lost prisoner, just as he had ordered.
His every last one.
Danny had reconvened under moonlight, awaiting anxiously as the moon dipped away and the bleeding light of day broke and still, and still and still, he was only three.
At the brink of daylight, only three of him merged into one.
…
It took a full month of trying before he succeeded at storming his way through Walker’s walls – and even then, it was not with a mounted attack to the prison walls. It was with a carefully cut stitch in the rift his father had torn open a month before. Danny did it with bomb squad precision, with the squirming fear that his selfishness would throw Amity Park back into the thralls of Walker’s crusade.
He considered more than once to cut his losses.
To not look back.
To let it be.
Had he even lost anything? Was anything amiss? He was safe at home, and Amity Park was safe with him.
But he knew himself behind Walker’s walls would be fearing the exact same conclusion.
Danny hacked and slashed his way through guards, through the prison alarms blazing, through the riot he invoked.
He found himself.
He was found by himself.
He converged before it was too late to escape back through the healing-shut rift.
Sprawled on the basement floor, arms braced to the floor, gasping for breath, the Fenton portal zipped shut behind him. It left the darkness and the cold basement air swirling around him as he gasped harder and deeper, choking on his own saliva, pinprick pupils fluttering erratic like wayward gnats as his mind consumed the horror the relief the horror the blubbering thankfulness the indescribable terror of being saved being prisoner being one. Again.
He’d thought he wasn’t coming back for himself.
Danny let out a choking heave, and tears flowed with the mucus dripping from his nose. His shaking arms gave out, and he collapsed curled on the floor, dissolving into sobs. He curled around his left hand, which had been gashed by Walker three days before during his routine punishment session.
Thank god.
Thank god.
Thank god he came back for himself.
…
Danny gave himself two months to recover. He gave himself enough time to distance himself from the indescribable sensation of being more than once. He let the nightmares of Walker’s prison fade. He let himself grow secure in being himself. He let himself consider that, if he hadn’t split, Walker may have taken all of him to his prison, and he would never have escaped.
Danny eased back into duplication when it felt safe. First just by necessity. Then, for convenience. And slowly, he allowed himself the luxury he hadn’t dared touch in so long – he let himself duplicate for himself.
Danny Fenton was in attendance at Paulina Sanchez’s Superbowl party. Danny Fenton stayed home to study under his sister’s watchful eye, because flunking tomorrow’s test meant failing Lancer’s class for the year. Danny Phantom patrolled the streets of Amity Park with Tucker and Sam in tow. Danny Phantom—
Danny converged under moonlight, which leaked like silk threads through the slats in his bedroom window. He stood facing the window, a bit goofy drunk. He stood facing his bed, leaning against his desk as he thumbed nervously through the pages of his English textbook. He stood facing the dresser and wiped at the leaking gash along his forehead from a clash with Technus. He—
He—
Three Dannys waited. Three Dannys let the moonlight wane. Three Dannys watched the sky bleed red from the spot where Four had split.
Three Dannys merged as the sunrise broke.
…
Danny searched.
He searched every corner of the map, both human and ghost zone, he could think of.
He pulled Tucker and Sam in in a panic. And Jazz. And, with his options slipping away, he as Phantom begged Valerie for her help too, as a truce, as a desperate favor.
I don’t… really get it, Tucker’s words rang in Danny’s head. Can’t you just like dismiss it and call it back? And he phrased his question as though the Danny he spoke to was Danny, and the other was not.
Danny shivered at the memory of Walker’s jail cell. He couldn’t explain it to Tucker.
You’re smart, Danny. You’ve got good instincts. I’m sure he’s fine. Sam. Your other duplicate survived in Walker’s jail cell. And besides, if something REALLY terrible happened to your duplicate, I think we’d have heard about it.
Danny couldn’t know.
Whether he was alive or dead, fine or in terrible danger, he couldn’t know like this.
And again the creeping thought came back – did it even matter…? Was it fine like this? Was he Danny, and the other simply was not?
The creeping cold of Walker’s jail cell permeated back into memory, and he broke again into a fit of uncontrollable shivering.
…
Danny did something he never wanted to do.
He asked Vlad.
Have I ever lost a duplicate? Vlad asked with a laugh. Oh certainly. It’ll cut down on the maximum number of duplicates you can produce, but when you reach my level of mastery you regain the power in a few days’ time.
Danny thought about this. He asked another question.
No, it doesn’t matter to me what happens to them. Vlad spread his arms wide, cape sweeping out around him, fanged teeth flashing along a grin. I’m right here after all.
…
Three of Danny split for patrol.
This was necessary. The portal had grown unstable. Dimensional cracks had spiderwebbed beyond the cover of the portal, leaking through like water damage against a broken seal the portal doors could not hold in place.
It was more ghosts than what one Danny could deal with. But three could handle it. Three was all he needed.
He’d suited himself with Fenton earpieces, and he checked in with himself every fifteen minutes.
Months passed, and three settled into the new norm.
Another few months, and his check-ins with himself waned.
Another few months, and the memory of a fourth faded into the distance.
Under moonlight, in the sweet late-summer air, Danny pressed his finger to his earpiece and signaled out to his selves.
The earpiece crackled, and one response came through.
…
In the maw of late autumn, Danny split for patrol.
The influx of ghosts had not ebbed, and it stole away whatever time Danny might have had to spare to search for himself. It was too much work, even for two of him, and by pure necessity he forgot his other lost self.
If he trained harder, as Vlad suggested, he could work his way back up to three. From there, maybe four. And the thought comforted Danny. The notion that he could build himself back to normalcy, and that he could live believing nothing had ever changed.
Autumn died in the dark. Winter claimed its hold along an icy shuddering breath.
And it was furled in that icy breath that Danny waited, under moonlight, for himself to reconvene.
Each exhale brought the prickling fear of another ghost waiting in the shadows. He’d fought too many in the night. More than his normal share. He’d lost his earpiece after being slammed into a snowdrift near the school.
Danny waited, consumptively cold, until the sky bled pink. He wouldn’t panic yet. Maybe he’d missed a communication, unaware due to his lost earpiece, and his self had gone home early. He needed to head back soon, anyway. He needed to prepare for school anyway.
With the cresting sun, one single self returned home.
…
Something wrong sat like a pressure against his ribs. Every kitchen light remained on. The remnants of dinner from the night before sat wantonly stacked by the sink. It carried a smell that had grown stale, grease left to sit. The television in the living room remained on. It droned through the 6 am news report.
Danny flashed human again, and he stepped through the house. He swung his eyes left and right, seeing nothing, finding no one. His heart skipped a beat. Worry wormed through his chest.
“Mom…? Dad…?”
If something had attacked himself last night, it could have attacked his parents too. His sister. His–
Something bumped from the basement.
Danny walked forward until the basement door became his whole world. Hand prickling and numb, he wrapped his fingers around the knob and twisted.
“Mom?” he called through the creaking gap.
Blue goggles like iridescent bug eyes stared up at him from the depths of the lab. “Oh, Danny! Do you need something?”
Orange reflective goggles found him too, predator eyes in the darkness.
Danny eased down a little. “Just uh… it’s morning. Just—getting ready for school. Just seeing what you two were up to.”
“Oh!” his mother answered, straightening. “My gosh Jack, have we been at this all night?”
“Seems so.”
“Wait right there Danny! I’ll be up in a moment to start breakfast. Jack you should go shower. You know what wearing that spandex too long does to your—”
Danny shut the basement door, too tired to process much more. He set his hazy eyes to the stairs and walked up, heart beating sluggishly with exhaustion. Worry still swamped his chest, but less so. His parents were fine. They were just—
Danny shivered. He closed his bedroom door, and waited, back pressed against the wood. A few minutes passed, and his father’s clunking feet rounded up the stairs. The clatter of dishes sounded from the kitchen. The water rushing. The slam of the fridge door. The crackle of something frying. Danny held his breath, and he phased to Phantom, and he dropped himself down through two floors.
The basement air rushed around him, chilled ice cold. He blinked through darkness, pierced weakly by the swirling light of the portal whose green veins bled into the concrete foundation. Danny blinked again, and he averted his eyes from the massive swirl of green. Nearly drowned beneath the glow, there was something else, something beating off the faintest glow from deeper into the depths of the basement.
Danny floated closer, and closer.
He looked down (up).
His feet hit the ground with a thock, and Danny only stared.
He stared back from the steel examination table. Danny watched him with those glowing green eyes losing brightness, hazed with delirium, chin and neck splattered ecto-green. A faint, sporadic flutter of breath pulsed from his chest. His suit was torn back, chest carved into a Y with ribs cracked back. His innards spilled out like garbage leaking from a split trash bag.
Danny swallowed, frozen, standing. A tremor stole through his entire body, pulsing with the sudden eruption of his heart. Rings split around his midsection, and he phased himself back human.
Danny reached out for him. It was a weak and stuttering motion, trembling green blood-splattered glove asking, begging, for contact. To be saved. To be taken back.
Danny watched himself with a look so raw and broken. He reached with the urgent desperate fear to not die where he lay.
Thank god he’d come back for himself.
“Oh, Danny, Honey, there you are!”
Danny startled. He spun, heart in his throat, and found those blue beetle goggles pinning him. A light smile brushed across his mother’s red lips. She snapped a glove on, then another.
“Breakfast is ready. I was calling you from the kitchen.”
Danny said nothing.
“And try not to be standing too near the portal, Honey. It’s not very stable right now. In fact the ecto-hazard exposure alone c—never mind. Breakfast is on the table. It’ll get cold soon.”
Still, Danny said nothing. He could say nothing. No part of his mind would come back to him.
His mother quirked her head.
“Are you… interested in staying? I’ll get you a suit.” His mother looked him up and down. He brow scrunched. “And…are you okay, Danny?”
Danny did not speak.
“…Would you like a suit?”
Silently, Danny nodded.
His mother stepped around him, nudging past him, feet clacking against the floor. “We still have that suit Jack got you. But I can try to see if we might have one smaller. I know it’s not—um—well-sized.”
Her words became distant echoes in Danny’s ears. He stepped closer, forward, until he was within close enough distance to brush fingers against the outstretched hand.
Tears welled in his green eyes, rolling down a face strapped down to the examination table by a head-strap. The reaching hand nudged closer, until his own curled gloved bloody fingers tapped against his elbow.
Danny said nothing. He stared down with icy horror in his own blue eyes, shot so wide as to almost be unseeing.
He did not take his hand.
“Here, I hope you don’t mind a white one—Danny step back!”
His mother gripped him by the shoulder and yanked him back. She inserted herself between them, protectively covering Danny, sharp furrowed eyes pinned to the examination table.
“Goodness, I forgot the arm strap is still broken. Jack still hasn’t fixed it from last time.”
Something unspoken passed between him.
The outreached hand curled back, and that unspoken something snuffed out the last little spark in his eyes. Tears clouded his sight, and his head tilted away.
Danny, standing, buckled at the knee.
“Oh—Danny!”
His mother turned as he hit the floor. She crouched and gripped him by the shoulders, ecto-stained gloves seizing tight, raised him up tighter, seeping that cold wetness through his clothes. She pressed him back against the wall. He stared forward, eyes trapped by the glowing trickle of ectoplasm that leaked from the dissection table in a steady plicking stream.
“Oh gosh, Honey I’m so sorry. It’s the ghost organs, isn’t it?” His mother smoothed his bangs out of his face, now soaked in sweat. She glanced back over to the examination table, and again to Danny. “They’re a bit startling the first time you see them but it’s alright Danny–
“Stop it…” Danny whispered, the first words he could force wheezing from his throat. He swallowed his nausea, and he spoke through his trembling core. “You’re killing him.”
“Oh… Oh!” His mother let out a little laugh, and she fixed him with her gentlest smile. “Oh Honey, no no this isn’t going to kill Phantom. Are you worried about him? That’s sweet, but he’s fine.”
Cold sweat dripped across Danny’s eye. He blinked. His whole body shivered like a leaf in the wind.
“It’s alright, it’s alright. Danny, I promise you it’s fine.” His mother pulled off her gloves and wrapped Danny close, pulling him into a hug as she rubbed his back. “This is shocking, yeah? But he’s fine. Phantom can regenerate.”
Danny stiffened.
“What?” he muttered.
His mother pulled back from the hug, now holding him firmly by the shoulders and staring into his eyes. Her expression was soft beneath her goggles. “Every time we dissect him, he comes back later just fine.”
Danny swallowed.
“And he doesn’t remember, either. I know this looks shocking, but there won’t be any lasting harm to him, Honey, I promise. Jack and I don’t know the exact science behind it, but that’s what we’re figuring out.”
Heavy clunking footsteps beat from the left. Danny did not turn to look. A swell of orange stole through his vision.
“Did I hear my name?”
Wet hair dripping, fresh jumpsuit from the laundry, his father stopped in front of him.
“Oh Jack, good timing. Can you take Danny upstairs? The ecto-gore scared him.”
Jack let out a deep laugh. “Ah, I remember my first time around ecto-gore. Come on Danny, let’s get you upstairs.”
Thick arms encircled Danny and lifted him like he weighed nothing. They were gentle, yet firm, lovingly careful in how they cradled Danny’s form. Jack turned, and he eclipsed the examination table from Danny’s sight.
“Thanks Jack.”
“No getting to the fun parts without me!” Jack belted back.
“Oh, I promise. I’ll just clear back some of the viscera for now.”
“You’re the best.”
“I know you hate that part,” Maddie answered.
Danny watched, eye to eye, as he was carried up the stairs. He watched, and he watched, and he soaked in all the splattered ecto-green that dripped cold from the table. He wondered just fleetingly if the examination table might be as cold as Walker’s jail cell. He wondered if that mattered at all against the white-hot hellfire of a scalpel slicing through flesh.
Danny made his decision.
He made the decision to never know.
He made the decision to never feel what his father’s gentle arms could do with a bone saw in their grip.
He decided selfishly. He decided like a coward.
He wrote himself off, because an injury like that was not survivable he told himself. He could not take that hand. He could not take that form. He could not remerge with that and survive. Physically. Mentally.
He’d written off the others.
He’d write himself off again.
It was all the same.
It didn’t matter.
He was him.
He was the real Danny, actually.
He was right here, after all.
And no one.
No one was coming back for him.
“You okay, Danny?” his father asked.
And that voice had already faded up the stairs, clunking away with his father’s footsteps disappearing from the lab.
It was now only his mother who stood close, who loomed with those beetle eyes over the table. Danny did not have the energy to fight anymore, to writhe against the straps holding him in place. There was no point. There was no saving him. His only salvation vanished up the stairs in his father’s arms.
His dim and deadened eyes watched, only watched, as his mother picked across the tools again. A glint of steel caught the light, soiled green with his light, his blood.
“Now then,” his mother said, in a voice sing-song, in a voice that loved him, in a voice that had been whispering sweet comforts to him a moment ago as she’d hugged him on the floor.
Danny could say nothing back to her.
He could not so much as muster the will to scream as her scalpel sliced him through all over again.