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In the farmost corners of any house - in the spaces under the couch, in the gap between a table leg and a wall, in the empty frame of an open doorway - there are places of gathered dust and forgotten footsteps; overlooked, either by virtue of being hidden, or through comfortable memorisation. Places gone unexamined for weeks or months or years, having become so commonplace as to become blank spots in the eye of the resident.
The stairs leading down to the basement of Fentonworks are slats of metal riveted to the wall, yellow caution tape lining their edges. They are not particularly tall; they do not extend for so long as to become a passageway in and of themselves. The space between entrance and exit is barely enough to be considered a hall.
For as many times as the stairs have been traversed, it would be difficult to think of a time when someone stopped to look closely at the shadows underneath, cast by the fluorescent lights of the lab in long, uncomfortable stripes on the walls.
***
In his mind, Danny splits himself into halves, and thinks of himself in terms of twos. He is alive and he isn’t; corporeal as much as he is not; equal parts blood and ectoplasm, 1:1 ratio of ice and bone - printing error on the expiration date.
As much as he likes to think of this as the truth, it is not entirely accurate.
The part of Danny which is human (alive by ghost standards less so than by human ones) is present on the outside more often than not; during the day, he’s around other humans enough to need the security of his human form, and at night, it’s simply not safe to remain a ghost while asleep in his room.
(The asleep-at-night part is less important than the in-his-room part, here.)
Sometimes the warmth and weight of humanity is a comfort: it grounds him, and provides a… smaller perspective, to balance out the detachment of a bird's eye view. Other times, the part of Danny which is a ghost (alive by human standards less so than by ghost ones) baulks at the very thought of it. Those days can be hard; they linger over his shoulders like heavy chains, and every subsequent moment contained within flesh digs hard edges into his core. They’d be less difficult if he wasn’t actively hiding, but that’s not exactly something he can just pick and choose.
But those are far from his only states of being.
His pen hovers listlessly over the page before him - blank, so far. Stained slightly near the notebook’s spine.
Jazz had asked him to at least try journaling, and after being bugged for a week straight he’d finally given in, and admittedly, she has a point - it really has helped to be able to get his thoughts out. Something about organising them into words, apparently, according to his sister. Still, when it comes to this, describing his existence in a way that makes sense is…. well, it’s like- it’s-
***
That being said - to think of the corner under the stairs as a collection of walls and floor almost seems wrong for its overcomplication. So unknown by the human eye, to describe it in terms of deliberate construction assumes more than is true, and less than is necessary. Without direct observation, it is, for all intents and purposes, simply a space , formless: left alone to collect dust and stew in thought until such a time that the stairs are demolished or removed, and the air beneath is once again given the ability to breathe.
***
Two months after the portal accident, Danny enters the house from the front door and realises that the living room is longer than its corresponding wall on the outside. The furniture does nothing to suggest this; every chair and table, the couches and the TV, the shelves on the walls and the singular potted plant situated by the window - it’s all placed exactly as it was before, at least in relation to the walls. The difference in size is near impossible to detect; for all the vertigo Danny feels upon this moment of realisation, he cannot tell what exactly tipped him off, only that he knows with complete and absolute certainty that his house is ever so slightly larger than it was the week before.
(There will come a day when, in hindsight, Danny will realise that there has always been a certain level of… discrepancy in Fentonworks. Angles at odds with themselves, and shadows cast in unusual places - but who stops to glance at a misplaced shadow, really? Who would even think to look?)
It’s a month later that he meets Vlad, and finds that this isn’t an isolated phenomenon: Vlad’s mansion in Wisconsin provides a fairly normal facade on the outside, and even among some of its outermost rooms, but further in, there are parts of it which are just wrong, in a way that Danny can very clearly sense but is entirely unable to describe. The placement of his lab, in particular, should make sense but doesn’t, too big and with air uncomfortably dry; too close to the surface to feel so buried.
Vlad may not have died in his lab, like Danny did in his , but despite that, the locus of his portal feels so much more like a tomb - an expensive mausoleum, dressed up in chrome and fancy equipment, unvisited by any except its resident ghost.
(The parts of Vlad’s mansion which belong more to the Dairy King than they do to him are quite obviously haunted too, but in decidedly different ways, and - as much as Vlad himself would never admit this - with decidedly more power, even limited by space as it is. It’s a power likely borne out of sheer age. The space of a haunt bends to its owner, if they have enough control over it, and for a ghost, control and familiarity can often be one and the same; Danny figures this out in his own time, assuming, at first, that it only applies to his room. He never does find out for sure whether or not Vlad can do the same.)
***
This is purely a microcosm of the larger whole: the nature of the haunted house, and its lifecycle deconstructed by time and patience. The space beneath the stairs is one and the same with the underside of the lowest shelf in a cupboard, with the top of a hanging lightbulb - with the empty tunnel behind the mouth of the portal, barred by a doorway which abhors the concept of closure.
***
Nearly a year after the portal accident, Danny finds that, through some instinct he can’t put a name to, he knows Amity; every street has its own, distinct name, and he doesn’t need signs to remember them all. Every building has a face attached to it, a resident with which to define it - or, at least, the ghost of a face, often in the most literal of senses. An abandoned building, left to grow unchecked, is, in many ways, a skeleton, and much like a corpse, it has every ability to become something more; to release itself into incorporeality, and inhabit the negatives left behind.
He doesn’t mind those ghosts, really, and he minds the haunted houses even less. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes, he can’t tell the difference between ghost and haunt, or if there’s a difference at all - but none of it bothers him. For a long time, he can’t quite figure out how to articulate why, especially considering he usually isn’t cool with random ghosts popping up in Amity without warning, but…
...Well, eventually he realises that they kind of aren’t? Doing that? It’s less a case of them coming to Amity, and more so that they are ghosts of Amity, which is obviously fine with him, because- well, because…
(Is Danny a ghost of Amity too? Is that why everything he feels about invading ghosts is so oddly, intimately personal? Is that why sometimes, in his dreams, he feels so, so much bigger than he really is?)
(Do the other ghosts feel like this?)
...it’s not like they’re hurting anyone, anyway. So it’s fine. They can stay.
(Why is it up to him who gets to stay and go?)
***
The second year post-mortem seems to pass much more slowly than the first, mostly because so much just keeps happening.
It’s like all the non-resident ghosts had been waiting during that first year, or maybe like they hadn’t known that it was an option to come and bother him. While he used to be able to go a week or so between major fights, with only small, semi-sentient ghosts to deal with besides that, now he’s lucky to have a couple of days to himself in a row. Not that it had been easy, before - Freakshow had been an ordeal and a half, and Skulker has always been among Danny’s least favourite menaces-of-the-week; not to mention Vlad, who seems to always know just slightly more than him about any given situation, but who also never has the inclination to actually be helpful for once.
For a while, he worries that it’s always going to be this way - that the ghosts will just keep getting stronger and more frequent and just more, and Danny will be stuck in a constant cycle of adapting to a new threat only to get his ass handed to him again less than a month later. That’s probably the reason why the gradual slide back into some kind of normal is something that he at first regards with suspicion; it isn’t until several weeks-turned-months of fights that don’t require horrible amounts of amateur first aid, as well as an off-hand comment from Kitty that the ‘novelty of it was wearing off’, that he starts to accept it as just… average. Nothing to be paranoid about. Everything sort of plateaus for a while.
Which is, naturally, right about that time that Danny meets Clockwork for the first time, and then he has another beast entirely to worry about.
(The thing which claimed to be him but wasn’t, which was not-quite-Danny, not-quite-Vlad, had been terrifying and awful and the worst experience of Danny’s existence other than literally dying, but beyond that - beyond the horror of Dan’s actions - there had been something terribly off about him; something empty. Dan was a force to be reckoned with, certainly, but ultimately, he had also been less than the sum of his parts. Subtraction, where there should have been substance.)
(The Amity of the aborted future had been empty, too. Not for a lack of people - although there had been less of those, as well - but… even as fast as everything had gone down, he couldn’t help but notice. Where were Amity’s resident ghosts? Where were the shades of the buildings? Where was its spirit?)
***
When a house is condemned and abandoned, it’s the softest parts that rot and the most brittle parts that break first. The windows go quickly, shattered one way or another by trespassers or simple disrepair. The curtains come next, exposed as they are to the elements, and mildew follows along all corners touched by damp outside air. Wood warps before concrete degrades; metal and plastic are beasts all their own, unwilling to disappear completely but not immune to their own kinds of disintegration - rust and embrittlement and other slow deaths. Even so, an abandoned house is still recognisable as a house or, at the least, as the lingering ghost of a structure. Even without its internal components, and yawning empty where there may once have been human presence, the surrounding skeleton remains, placeable by eye if not by feel.
***
Interacting with the portal on a semi-regular basis is a must, for Danny; even excluding full-on trips to the other side, he still has to empty the thermos after fights and patrols.
For longer than he would have liked, this sometimes proved to be… somewhat problematic. There was a time - a recent time, technically, even if it feels like so long ago, now - when Danny could hardly bear to look at the thing. Initially, the discomfort was a constant; after a month, proximity to the portal still made him nervous, but no longer brought back too-fresh memories of events better left unremembered. With time, as his confidence and sense of self grew, he almost stopped fearing it altogether. Usually, anyway. During the day, or on nights when anxiety wouldn’t come for him.
Not after dreaming, though. And never when he felt restless; never on the nights he couldn’t sleep. The fear always came back, those nights.
That was in the past. He stopped avoiding the portal when he realised he had nothing more to fear from it than from himself (which admittedly does present its own problems, on bad days, when false inevitabilities come snapping at his heels, but he’s been getting better about ignoring those thoughts, recently.)
To Danny, entering the portal sometimes feels like falling face-first into a mirror - eyes open and trained ahead, so as to catch the secondary reflections in his pupils.
Once, driven by two parts curiosity and one part sleep deprivation, he’d gone to the portal during a quiet moment and stared at it, and stared and stared and stared , until his eyes grew dry and tired and his core fuzzed uncomfortably in his chest. Finally, after what was probably too long, he had drifted forward, as though to enter it, and he had, but then instead of continuing on to the other side he had instead just…
...stopped. Waited, in the space between worlds. Sat quietly and took it all in.
It felt like-
***
The origins of the word ‘haunt’ are draped in concepts of familiarity and habit; to dwell, to linger, to indulge in - to be home. When a ghost haunts a place or a person with the intention to stay, they become an intrinsic part of the environment. When there is no ghost to do the haunting, but a house is haunted nonetheless, the act of becoming works in the opposite direction - an organic growth from basement to roof, fed either by the warmth of active inhabitants, or by the reality, absolute and total, of abandonment and condemnation. A memory speaking itself into existence.
***
-It felt like…
(Try as he might, over and over, with straining thoughts and a too-heavy tongue, Danny just never seems to have the words.)
It felt like coming home.
When he leaves the lab after emptying the thermos each night - and when he returns from trips into the Infinite Realms, and when he leaves the house altogether for any and all reasons - when he is gone, at the bottom of the stairs, a part of him lingers.
***
Things get kind of weird after Danny’s parents find out about him, even by his standards.
(In all fairness, most of the weirdness probably has more to do with what literally everyone else has to say about him, rather than his parents specifically, but he’s still not quite gotten to the point where he’s ready to tackle that situation, so. Nevermind. Doesn’t matter. He’ll deal with it. Eventually.)
The one major upside to this is that Danny no longer has to bite his tongue when confronted with subjects which would once have been strictly off-limits.
His mom’s lost car keys weren’t something he was expecting to be on that list, but, well-
“Have you checked the second door to the backyard?”
Maddie pauses in her rummaging through the couch cushions, and shoots him a confused look. “Second door to the- what second door? There’s only one door.”
“No, there’s definitely two,” says Danny, who’s pretty sure there must be a second door considering he had used it just last night.
“Danny, I think I’d have known about another door there by now.”
“Are you sure? I definitely saw it there yesterday. And last week. And-”
“Well it wasn’t there before, ” stresses his mom. “…Is this- does this have to do with-?”
“Ghosts? Oh, yeah, for sure.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried about… ah, ghost doors appearing in the house?”
In the past, Danny has taken offence to claims that he has a weird personality, but his first thought in response to this is that of course there’s ghost doors appearing in the house, they’re mine, and then his second thought is, oh, no, I really am that bad, aren’t I?
He decides not to voice any of that and what comes out instead is, “It’s a haunted house, mom, they do that sometimes. Also, I’m still growing.”
Which might be the worst possible phrasing of that.
Jazz, who had been studiously ignoring the conversation in favour of her book up until now, cuts in to say, “That might actually be the worst possible way you could have phrased that, Danny,” because apparently she can read minds now.
“Well how would you have said it, then?”
“I simply wouldn’t. You know, on account of not being a ghost. Or a house. Or a ghost haunting a house.”
Danny sticks his tongue out at her, but she’s already refocused on her book.
Then he pauses, and tilts his head in consideration, because- “Do you think there’s such a thing as a house haunting a ghost?”
Jazz just sighs at him. Rude.
“What are you two talking about?”
***
There is a point at which the physical location of a haunting becomes inextricable from the experience, the events, the soul of the place. It might start to learn the hallmarks of the living - it might learn to grow. Maybe its foundations will begin to lengthen or its stairs will take on different angles. Maybe, if it tries very hard, it will create its own language: creaks and settling wood and the strategic banging of pipes, a thousand meaningless nothings given weight and direction. A voice carried on drafts and floating dust.
***
The keys do, in fact, turn out to be in the room connected to the second door. It ends up being a moot point, though, because his mom abandons all previous car-related plans in favour of figuring out how an entire spare room could be occupying the same space as the backyard.
Danny tries to tell her it’s there because it feels comfortable that way, but that just seems to confuse her more, so he makes an excuse about needing to patrol the town and goes flying instead.
***
Never let it be said that Jack doesn’t notice things.
Oh, to be sure, he can be oblivious sometimes; he knows that. And, yes, he can sometimes fail to pay attention to his surroundings, but isn’t that true of everyone, to an extent? Even at home - especially at home, in fact. If he can’t relax in his own house without having to keep an eye on every little thing, where can he? In the park? Somewhere around town - are you kidding? Don’t you know there’s ghosts in town?
And - well. There’s ghosts in the house too. One ghost, specifically, or… half of one. Danny.
It’s still a little hard to believe, sometimes. Harder to think about. Like looking directly at the sun.
As much as the initial realisation of what Danny was and all that implied had been a harrowing, brick-to-the-face reality check in terms of all their work on ghosts, all their theories and ideas, in hindsight, it’s… something of a relief, to know that they were wrong. He’s not sure what Maddie thinks about that - she’s always been more stubborn than him - but Jack’s glad to know that the only options for what comes after death aren’t limited to ‘unknowable void and/or theological afterlife’ vs. ‘evil spectre’.
Something else Jack is glad about is Danny’s recent surge in self confidence, thanks in no small part to the freedom he now has to simply exist in his own house, without keeping himself stiff and tense and solidly human. Strange as it is to come down the stairs in the morning only to find his son white-haired and otherworldly, it’s just so nice to see Danny relaxed again for the first time in what feels like far, far too long.
So. It’s all very cool, as Danny might say. Very interesting in a scientific way, he can admit. Very… very intriguing. Other synonyms for roughly that kind of concept, too, if only Jack could think of them.
But.
There is definitely something to be said about being a human living in what is unequivocally a haunted house. Even if the house is being haunted by someone you know and love. Even if that someone knows and loves you, too, and isn’t out to hurt you.
Some of the ways the house, er, changes are endearing, really - really! They are! Jack’s very endeared. He is. Danny doesn’t seem to realise he’s actually doing anything, half the time, but Jack notices when door handles that would usually stick glide open almost before he can touch them, and he notices the way that misplaced items will mysteriously become easier to find if only he mutters their names aloud.
But sometimes - and he would never say this to Danny, but sometimes - he catches himself thinking that being loved by a house can be terribly overwhelming. He comforts himself by repeating in his own mind that he’s not actually being watched, that it’s mostly just Danny’s subconscious and nothing more, and he very genuinely isn’t scared of his son, but. But.
Jack’s still human, at the end of the day. So are Maddie and Jazz - and Danny’s friends, too, as evidenced by the way that Tucker once mutters “Hey Danny? Have I ever mentioned how weird your house is sometimes?”, to which Danny replies, unconcerned, “Once or twice, yeah.”
(Jack becomes busy and leaves before he can hear the end that conversation, but unbeknownst to him it continues with Sam suggesting it’s because his house is haunted, which prompts Danny to say that it’s always been this way, and on some level, he’s right; Fenton Works has been ‘weird’, as Tucker puts it, for far longer than the portal has been in operation, albeit on a less noticeable scale.
So Sam says, “According to Frostbite, your portal’s ‘always’ been the way it is too, but that only opened a couple years ago. On our end. Supposedly. So...”
The trio don’t dwell on the subject for much longer - Danny cracks a joke about not time travelling specifically to make his house weird, and Tucker continues the bit by clarifying that he hasn’t time travelled yet, so hey, who knows?)
(It’s a joke, but Danny still makes a note to tell Clockwork to never let him do something that stupid in the future. He’s had enough time travel for multiple lifetimes, thank you.)
***
But sometimes, a draft is just a draft, and a creak is just a creak. A house may have its own way of speaking, but equally, it is the involuntary noises which hold the most overt examples of life - like an exhale after a satisfying stretch, like a mutter, like a sigh.
***
It’s late into the colder months of Danny’s third year as a half-ghost that he really starts to relax while flying; not just stolen moments during quiet patrols, but actual, deliberate outings where he slips intangibly through his bedroom window and just flies, often with no particular destination in mind.
Not having to worry about his parents is certainly a contributing factor to this; a year ago, he’d never have dreamed of being able to float belly-up between the clouds for nothing more than simple pleasure. And Valerie- well. They haven’t worked out an official truce yet, exactly, but she’s been… subdued, recently. Less likely to go after a ghost with as much passion as she once did. Danny’s under no illusions that he’s been, like, forgiven or anything, but her grudge has definitely been shifting a little, ever since…
Well.
It… probably makes sense that Valerie had toned down her hatred of ghosts after finding out that she used to date one.
(Danny should really get around to coming clean to her at some point; she gets curious, sometimes, asking questions about what it’s like to be a ghost, or ghost culture, or, if she’s feeling particularly bold, thinly-veiled attempts to figure out how much he’s changed, on an emotional level. Each time, the inherent lie-by-omission of answering without the full context leaves an unpleasant taste in his mouth.)
…He’s lost track of the constellation he’d been admiring. A cloud has begun to shift over his spot in the air, obscuring the stars - it would be easy to just fly above it, of course, but he’s been out here for a while now, anyway. He should probably start heading back.
He twists around and over, languid, continuing to hover in place for a moment as he shakes off the urge to just fall asleep right there, suspended by nothing but his will and the wind. As he does so, Danny looks over the surrounding buildings; in this part of town, at this time of night, most of them are either only half-there, or halfway more there than usual. A cat’s potential lays on a roof down the way, the suggestion of its tail swaying, its body the barest whisper of an animal, seen only by the witch-light backing its silhouette - a faint, ephemeral halo.
It isn’t the only one. Amity’s night-life, so to speak, is mostly comprised of ghosts - blobs and whisps more than any other, although that’s true of basically any high-ectoplasm environment. The shades of animals or common urban legends and tall tales tend to come out around now, too, although whether this is because they’re stronger at night or simply because they prefer it this way is unclear. For Danny, it’s both.
The not-quite-a-cat flickers like a candle flame in the wind, wavers, sputters, and then snuffs itself out. For a moment he thinks he can see embers on the wind, skittering across the rooftops, and his next inhale tastes of ash and rain.
***
The human body does not, after all, account for its processes being done consciously - the brain is fully capable of controlling these things with little input from conscious, deliberate thoughts. This is simultaneously where the case of the haunted house differs from the body, and where it remains the same: it may have the unique ability to observe its insides, and may even have enough self-control to alter them, but it does not - cannot - control those living within. The human residents of a haunting are as vital to it as the walls, and as unknowable to a house as a human’s brain chemistry is to the waking mind.
***
Danny doesn’t know if Ellie has a haunt. As far as he knows, she moves too often to establish herself in any one specific place, and even as close as she is to Danny, she still registers less and less as a ghost-of-Amity and more and more like a visitor by the day. Not in a bad way - Danny would never consider Ellie a stranger, no matter how much time she spends away, but she’s gradually becoming something Other in the same way that some of the ghosts that come through the portal are Other. Welcome, but not home.
It’s for the best. She seems happier, that way. More free.
He still thinks about asking, sometimes - if she has a haunt like he does; if she knows how this feels. Mostly, it’s curiosity that puts those questions on his tongue; partially (quietly, tentatively), it’s the desire for a second opinion from someone who gets it. So he thinks about asking - but doesn’t, at the last moment. Never does. The look in her eyes when she tells him about her travels is answer enough.
The questions go unasked, and unanswered. Danny tells himself that this does not bother him.
***
In the end, his journal doesn’t remain blank, but it’s probably not in the spirit of what Jazz had been suggesting. He ends up using it half for doodles, half for noting down which ghosts he’s fought recently, which ones he hasn’t, which ones he’s talked to or flown with or given permission to find permanent haunts within Amity. That last one’s been getting more common, recently. Maybe seeing the resident half-ghost get into spats with intruders is entertaining. Maybe he’s just free real estate. Either way, he doesn’t mind - if they’re spending their existence in Amity, he’ll protect them just as fiercely as he would any human.
The stain on the spine grows - it has a faint green tinge and seems to have the same effects as water damage without ever having been wet, as likely to have been the product of a ghost fight as it is to have been dip in a typical Amity Park puddle - Danny can’t remember which. He wonders if eventually the pages will become too warped and brittle to write on, or if maybe the ectoplasm will animate this, too, like it does to so many other things that probably wouldn’t otherwise be alive - like too many unfortunate dinners; like the countless breathing buildings; like the portal. Like Danny.
**********