[fanfic] "two and two halves" — danny phantom, gen, 1k

[deadfinch]

content notes: fanon-y, vivisect-y fentons, ergo child abuse. also, vlad is an adult man being really, really weird about a teenage boy.

♠

A family's still a family, even when they're strapping you to a dissection table.

♠

Vlad's been there the whole time, of course. He floats a half-breath from the back of Maddie's freckle-kissed neck, making all the little ginger hairs rise on her nape. She feels out for him like he's a spider, chipped-paint fingernails plucking at a nothing-string. Adorable, but she's not who Vlad's here for tonight. The same fingernails tap across a metal tray and curl around the end of an IV line. Midazolam, pethidine—oh, Maddie, you beautiful fool, you can't sedate a dead boy! She guides the needle into Daniel's vein with impressive accuracy, given how hard he's struggling against his restraints. He shouts things into the gag they've stuffed his mouth with, and his eyes, their spectre-green, are darting between his parents, like for the first time in his life he's seeing them, these grotesque extremists, and he's rocketing all at once through every stage of grief.

Daniel was on a routine patrol when they captured him, which is uncharacteristic—sloppy—and sort of tragic. The mistakes he made are correctable, with guidance. Vlad wasn't there personally, but he's been prepared for this moment ever since he dipped his toes into Amity Park's real estate market. He has cameras. Bugs, everywhere. He knows Jack and Maddie as intimately as the ecto-acne scars that dirty his otherwise-handsome face. He knew what they were going to do once they got their hands on the Ghost Boy; he always planned on swooping in and stopping the clock right before touchdown. He takes stock of his star player. The fear makes him look younger, and Vlad's imagination projects it, easily, into the halcyon days: toddling round-faced Daniel, crawling into his parents' bed in the darkest morning hours, photogenic little tears dotting at the corners of his eyes, saying "Mommy, I had a nightmare." The irony is sweet and soft, warm-middled. Daniel will have nightmares about this for years. Whose bed will he crawl into?

"We're going to put you into what's called a twilight sleep," Maddie says, voice ever so gentle. Of course it would be—of course she would be kind, even during this. "It'll help you calm down, but you'll still be awake. We're going to need you to talk us through what you're feeling, especially once we've moved onto your brain."

Daniel's muffled screams go frantic. Vlad waits, ticking off the seconds for his dim, delightful Maddie to realize—

"Oh, of course, you can't tell us anything; you're still gagged, silly me!"

Maddie pulls the gag away. Daniel's breath puffs out thick and frosty, and he's shivering all over. After a few panicked breaths he finds the air to say: "Who is it? Who's there? I can feel you. I can feel you!"

"He's insane, Maddie," Jack says. "Listen to him. He wasn't always this loony-toony. What happened to you, Inviso-Bill?"

"You happened to me!" Daniel shouts, his body in the force of that first word, his voice as dried-up as a raisin.

"He's just a little frightened, Jack. We need to go slow. We want him to cooperate," Maddie says, but Jack is shaking his head at her.

"He's a ghost, Maddie. You really think he's going to help us?" Then he reaches for the scalpel, and Daniel, understanding that he is moments away from the most excruciating of tortures, sucks in a deep, deep breath—

Jack. Always bursting in and ruining everything. Vlad thinks his grand entrance could have done with more build-up, but he has no interest in being subjected to Daniel's ghostly wail. The invisibility slides off of him. Daniel's breath stutters and his eyes widen in a way that Vlad finds frankly insulting; does he really think Vlad would be party to this? Then, with no time left to idle—he sees Maddie reaching for a Fenton Thermos and that would be unfortunate—Vlad makes quick work of disarming the humans.

Five minutes later Daniel's flying out with him, reluctantly, rubbing absent the shocked, angry lines on his newly-freed wrists.

Vlad expects thoughtless accusations, wifebeater-questions and sputters of disbelief. Daniel's quiet instead. He doesn't take his eyes off of Fenton Works, even as they're flying, and as the dome of contraptions on the roof become a tiny, silver star in the tumult of city lights. He follows Vlad through the pull of his ghost sense, which will become less accurate as the night settles into its chill.

Daniel asks, "Why did you wait?"

Vlad responds, "You needed to see how bad it was going to get. You wouldn't have believed it, otherwise."

Then he asks, "Why rescue me at all? What's the ulterior motive?"

The question is so inconceivably stupid that Vlad struggles to articulate its response. With some effort, at last, he says, "No ulterior motive, really, beside the fact that there's a depressingly empty bedroom in my mansion, every wall covered in NASA posters, rocketship models on every shelf, just about every gaming console released in the last two decades..."

Daniel doesn't throw himself to the ground and prostrate before Vlad's attentiveness. Instead he looks up at Vlad, pupils pinpoint-narrow, and grinds his last baby tooth.

"You're really very lucky, you know, to even have a family. You can't imagine what loneliness I survived in my childhood. What I would have given, at fourteen, even to have parents who tortured me!"

"Good thing you're a grown man who can have basically anything he wants now, huh?"

"Even now, I'd do anything for a family."

"Don't you have a daughter? That you created? In a lab? With my DNA?"

"There are puppets, Daniel, and then there are real boys."

Daniel spits on the ground as a response.

Vlad will never understand why he insists on being so ungrateful.

"You set them up to do that," Daniel says then, as they pass over a blustering interstate, Vlad realizes to hide his hoarseness; Vlad thinks that if he were Fenton instead of Phantom his eyes would be red-rimmed and puffy from fought-back tears. (Vlad thinks that if he were Masters, he'd have nothing left to cry over but the occasional bruise from a gone-wrong ghostcapade. Somehow this is a fight yet unwon.)

"I'm sorry to inform you that they are capable of that, and worse, all on their own."

This shouldn't be a surprise to Daniel but it tugs on Vlad's heartstrings, anyway, to see that it is. They're mere blocks from Vlad's Amity estate when Daniel stops abruptly, drops onto some sleeping stranger's roof and flickers back into the human boy he wastes so much energy pretending to be.

"Oh, come now, it's getting late, don't be ridiculous—"

"I'm not going with you," Daniel says. "I'd rather sleep on the street every night for the rest of my life than spend a single night in your creepy, stalker bedroom."

Vlad quietly doubts that; one week of sleeping on park benches and spongeing down in gas station bathrooms will set him straight. But then he could go hole up with one of his little friends, or even Miss Gray, with whom he knows Daniel still shares a peculiar rapport—the boy is like a rare steak who longs for the company of bloodhounds. Stupid. It simply won't do.

"Do what you think is best, then," Vlad says. "Far be it from me to question the judgment of a panicking child!"

Daniel glares but takes his escape where it's been granted him, and backs slowly off the roof. He's all puffed-out, trying to make himself bigger. He doesn't understand that he looks half-dead, even to somebody out of the know: underfed; undertanned, veins snaking out bright and blue; tissuepaper skin over a frame of chicken wire. He'll never fill out, and it's a couple of years at most before people start to notice. It's no wonder all the little varsity meatheads have turned him into their personal Rock'em Sock'em.

His defiance is endearing, though. It's the sort of attitude you give a boy a belt over, but not Daniel—he needs it, all the spit and spirit, to survive. Like Vlad. The two of them: the first, last, and only. Survivors. Tribe relies on tribe. He will, of course, come to understand that. No matter Daniel's protests, tonight marks a sure step in a new and brilliant direction.

He waits until Daniel's disappeared into the web of suburbs before pulling out his phone. It's late, but Vlad enjoys many mayoral privileges; the chief of police is on speed dial, and tonight, Vlad informs him, they're going to be cracking down on Amity's homelessness problem. Tonight and the next few nights after. Put on a show, Vlad says. We need to send a message.

Skulker's just after. "Don't hurt him," Vlad emphasizes, "irreparably. He needs all his limbs. Just scare him—make him understand how dangerous it is, trying to sleep somewhere that doesn't have ghostly protections."

All his players on the field, Vlad swans on home. He shifts from Plasmius back into Masters and dons his red silks. He admires his many empty halls that lead to many empty bedrooms, decorated with cat toys and all the most discerning of sports paraphernalia but nothing else to indicate life. Compared to Jack's sad, cramped tinkerer's den, Vlad's estates—plural—are superior in just about every respect, except that there are no pictures on the walls, and no Little League trophies lining the fireplace.

He'd do anything to have a family. Not just any family—the right family. He'd do anything. He really would.

Somewhere out there, on the streets, he imagines that Daniel is having a terrible night.