Chapter Text
Contrary to what one might believe, being the master of Time doesn’t equate to being omniscient.
Time is not linear—instead, it's full of endless twists and turns and forks in the road. With every action, there is a reaction. Cause and effect. Actions and consequences. Every choice, no matter how small, affects everything in its path. In the world of the living, this has been named the Butterfly Effect.
Humans, like many other beings of complex thought, are their own conundrum. They are, somehow, both ridiculously predictable and surprisingly capricious. The freedom of thought that they are capable of is simultaneously terrifying and intriguing; their will can start and end civilizations.
Clockwork is one of the oldest and most influential ghosts in existence, an Ancient, and that kind of power is still inconceivable to them.
Danny Fenton is an anomaly. A quiet, supposedly predictable boy, he was supposed to live a productive life, graduate high school with above average grades, and gain two hard-earned degrees in astrophysics and engineering before applying to NASA, only to be denied due to physical abnormalities caused by extensive ecto-contamination. His birth, life, and death were clearly mapped out. Granted, there were always millions of possibilities, but the general course of his life was simple.
That is, until he threw a wrench in the time stream.
It was a series of anomalies, really. Danny’s parents had left him and Jazz home alone for the weekend, having been convinced by Jazz to attend a paranormal convention in order to get their minds off of the failure that was the portal in their basement. Then—he brought his friends home. Sam Manson and Tucker Foley, two other misfits from school, one of whom had been Danny’s best friend since the ripe age of five human years old. Danny'd always avoided risking his friendships by taking them home with him. Full of bangs and booms, weird smells, and dangerous equipment, his house was, first and foremost, a laboratory—it wasn’t built for guests.
But Samantha Manson was a persistent sort. Even further, she loved the idea of eccentricity. And Danny Fenton, being wholly and utterly himself, was always eager to please.
So, in retrospect, it maybe wasn't all that surprising when meek, people-pleasing Danny Fenton, completely consumed by what humans call a "crush", stepped into the newly built, supposedly defunct portal, died, and turned the time stream on its head in the process.
…
Danny wakes with his heart beating like he's newly fourteen, still alive, and just ran a ten-minute mile in Tetslaff's phys-ed class. He takes a few deep breaths—in, out, in, out. Gone are the flames, the suffocating smoke. He isn't there, not anymore–he won't ever be there ever again. He lays in his bed a while, waiting for the stinging of his eyes and the smell of burnt flesh to fade away and trying to pull himself back into the reality of his cool, dark room with the slate blue walls that he'd picked out himself when he was six. The glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling bring no comfort tonight, so he sits up. The room spins with the motion.
Wishing for the ringing in his ears to fade, he heads towards the bathroom that he shares with Jazz. He splashes cold water onto his face, hoping that the sound of the faucet won't wake her up—she's always been a light sleeper. The coolness feels good against his skin. His eyes glows a radioactive green in the mirror, the only illumination in the dead of night. That stark reminder of what he is is enough to do him in. Suddenly, the shadows that move with him morph into smoke. He can smell it in the air, acrid and pungent, the flames nearby burning against his tender skin. His body feels too warm, too heavy, and he can’t move fast enough to reach–
No. It isn’t real.
Making his way back to his bed, Danny wills himself not to stumble despite legs that tremble violently beneath him.
Practically throwing himself onto his soft mattress, he wraps the blankets around himself for comfort. It doesn't feel any safer. Danny knows that if he weren't half dead, if his body still needed to breathe, he wouldn’t be able to. It still feels like he can't. Trying to calm down, he hugs the blankets tighter, needlessly gasping for air between barely controlled, choked sobs.
If hunks of lifeless mass floating in space were sentient, Danny is sure that this is what going supernova feels like.
He's been envying the heavens more and more, these days. Stars don't have to worry about what their subsequent collapse will do to everything around them. They don't have to hold themselves together for anyone, either—their sole purpose is to simply exist. Once an older and larger star reaches the end of its lifespan, it dies. The destruction it brings is welcome, allowing matter to be flung in all directions throughout the universe. But Danny isn't a star. He is a result—a science experiment gone horribly wrong. If he thinks about it too long, he can still remember the feeling of electricity, like a thousand needles driving into him at once, running through his body; the feeling of being unmade and made again into someone – or rather, something– that should have been impossible.
He should have died in there for real, he thinks, not for the first time; then, at least, he wouldn't have to keep up the act.
And that’s what it is–an act.
Danny isn't human anymore. There is an emptiness in him now, a deep coldness burrowed in his chest. With each ability that he gains and each fight he fights, that feeling only grows. Most of the time, he can’t ignore his less than human traits. Out of instinct, he’d sometimes find himself sucking energy out of the air, tasting the emotions radiating off of people and feeding off of them like some sort of ghostly vampire. It scares him. At this point, the fear is just as much a part of him as the blood and ectoplasm coursing through his circulatory system. It’s the worst on nights when the dreams take over his subconscious and make him wake up with a distinct feeling of world-ending terror. He'd stopped calling them nightmares months ago, figuring that nightmares aren't constant. This is his reality now.
Dan was from an alternate timeline. Being allowed to see the future had ensured that he would never become him. This is a fact. It borders on ridiculous that Danny is still so terrified, but he is, and no matter how many ghosts he battles, no matter how many lives he saves, and how many times his friends congratulate him, he can't make it go away. Not the emptiness, nor the memories that cement the fact that he is no longer entirely human, that someday he will lose what little spark of life he has left.
He can't let the dread go no matter how hard he tries. Often, it takes him over, leaving him feeling like he’s backed into a corner at the strangest of instances, body tense, limbs numb, mind a thousand miles away yet right in the present all at the same time.
After what his friends liked to call the “CAT Incident”, the flashbacks started happening more and more frequently as the months rolled by, causing him to become irritable and jumpy and distracted. Once his friends started shooting him worried looks behind his back and treating him like glass, Danny decided that it was probably best for him to distance himself. He'd thrown himself into ghost fighting with fervor, stopped visiting them with injuries in the middle of the night, and learned to patch himself up. When he wasn't ghost fighting, he was doing homework, and when he wasn't doing either, he was getting stronger by training on his own.
His grades, which had been slowly rising as he learned to balance both of his lives, shot up within a few weeks. His parents had been so happy to see his progress report covered in B's with the occasional A interspersed for flavor; his dad had patted his back so hard that anyone normal would have fallen over upon impact—he'd had to force himself to seem winded—and his mom had tried to give him a kiss on his cheek, acting wounded when he'd avoided it. Jazz's reaction, however, is what stunned him.
Before finding out about Danny’s ghost-hunting, Jazz had loved to go on tangents about how Danny was “so smart and would be so successful if he just applied himself”. While she’d chilled out on the criticism when she realized what was on his plate, Danny still expected her to say something. Instead, though, she had simply studied him like a puzzle she couldn't solve, a searching look, before giving him a subdued hair ruffle, weak smile, and a “good job, Danny”, before heading up into her room with one of her AP psychology textbooks in tow.
When his mother had cooked a surprisingly edible meal of his own choosing for dinner that night, Danny couldn't help but sense Jazz's eyes on him, a worried aura pouring off of her like the smoke that met him almost every night.
That was weeks ago. Since then, she's taken to hovering over him even more than usual—checking in on him before bed time and asking him even deep, probing questions about his feelings than before. During the weekends, Danny finds himself using the classic excuse of going to hang out with his two best friends more and more often despite both he and Jazz knowing that it’s just that: an excuse. He barely even sees them at school nowadays aside from in the hallways.
Both Sam and Tucker had tried their best to get him to talk to them, but one can only put so much one-sided effort into a relationship before giving up. Danny wants to talk about it more than anything, wants to attempt to fill that ever-present hole in his chest and feel alive and secure and whole again… but he can never burden anyone with the knowledge of what happened that day. They don’t know the full story, but he can still remember the fear and revulsion that came off of them in waves the day they'd met his future self.
They can't know what he was truly capable of. After all, he'd give anything to not know himself.
...
The pull of the Ghost Zone is always stronger at midnight. It calls to gnawing hunger coiled within Danny, promising to feed it more than food ever could. It’s intoxicating. It scares him. Danny usually tries to avoid his parents' lab at night with the fear that, if he gets too close to the portal, he will never come back.
Tonight, though, he will give into that urge.
Danny’s been toying with the idea of disappearing, lately. It’s been getting harder and harder by the day to convince himself that he is protecting anyone by staying in Amity—if anything, the ghosts are coming after him, vying for what they consider his territory. It’s his own childish selfishness that had insured he'd stay there as long as he has. Danny has always hated change–he's let that preference for sameness cloud his judgment and his loved ones nearly paid the price.
He can't let it happen again.
Sam, Tucker, his family… their lives are at risk. Walking the line between life and death is dangerous. Jazz sees it for what it is. He knows she does, with her worried eyes and her probing questions. Sam and Tucker, they'd never seen it as anything but a game, something to fill their mundane human nights with adventure.
But it isn't a game, not to Danny. He tried to pretend for their sakes, tried to make light of it in an effort to make the entire situation seem less alarming, but pretending is hard when the gravity of the situation is etched into his body itself in the form of a Lichtenberg figure–the accident left a jagged scar from his hand and across his chest and the nerve damage from the electrocution still apparent in the hand tremors and dystonia that never seemed to get better.
Life is a peculiar thing. Even now, in human form, his body doesn't work the way that it used to. He has to remind himself to breathe, a manual act, has to force his own heart to beat–even then, it’s noticeably slower, something he’d found out when he and his classmates had to check their partner’s heartbeats for a Health class assignment. Sometimes, when he’s tired or spacey, he forgets to ground himself, causing him to fall through solid objects and drop whatever he’s holding. Injuries don't hurt the same way anymore and blood is no longer alarming since he sees it on himself so often. Hunger is rare– he doesn’t seem to need much food to get by anymore. The weight of the human body, the steady thrum of his heart carrying blood through his veins, the way that his lungs expanded and contracted—he'd never noticed the little things that assured him he was alive until they were nothing but an act.
Growing up in a family of ghost hunters, Danny has never been particularly afraid of death. In his home, it’s always been a subject to be fascinated by. Near death experiences were seen as something to marvel at and growing up exposed to a variety of dangerous inventions ensured that being close to death was as common as food cooked in the lab on a Bunsen burner. It’s simply a part of the cycle.
Danny has never been scared of death, but being dead is different; the idea of becoming a ghost was something that disturbed him well before the portal. Between the way his parents talked about experimenting on ghosts and the idea of being trapped in a state of consciousness forever, it was something he always hoped to never become.
Regardless of this fear, though, Danny had tried to make the best of it. He’d kept his horror at what he had become buried deep inside of him, never to see the light of day.
Before he'd seen his future, he'd been able to ignore the alarmingly alien traits that becoming a ghost gave him. Now, though, there is no denying the fact that there is nothing human about him. There is a monster under his skin, right under the surface, and it is only a matter of time before it awakens and consumes him until there is nothing left.
Danny stares at the portal, mesmerized by its glow. His hand tightens around the navy blue duffel at his side—he'd packed clothes, food, ecto-weapons, some stim toys to fidget with, and not much else. He doesn't need anything that will tempt him to return, after all. This is the right choice, he reminds himself; he needs to protect them, even if leaving hurts more than a high caliber ectoblast fired directly at his chest, even if he can hear his core whisper stay protect family home safe.
He takes a step, then a second. He’s close enough to reach out his fingers and touch it now. A third. His hair rustles in the breeze whispering in from the other side. Another. He can almost taste the ectoplasm in the air, a hint of ozone, the beginnings of a thunderstorm. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. This is it.
He dives in head-first.
…
If Clockwork needed to breathe or, conversely, had ever been human enough to remember possessing a set of lungs, they would sigh.
When Danny stands himself in front of the portal that night, three wildly different scenarios present themselves. The first consists of him staring down the portal for a few human minutes before closing it, climbing up the two staircases to his room, and going to sleep. In this scenario, things largely stay the same for a time. He avoids his friends, keeps to himself, and eventually gets kidnapped by the Ghost Investigation Ward for experimentation and containment. In the second scenario, Danny spends a few hours in the Realms thinking things over before going back home. He walks back up those stairs, wakes his sister up, and asks for help. In this scenario, he opens up about his struggles, makes up with his friends, and eventually finds some sort of happiness again, however fragile.
This just so happens to be the third scenario.
As Danny roams the Infinite Realms, he begins to feel a tugging sensation on his core. Right when he acknowledges it, a portal opens up before him. Intrigued by that persistent tugging, Danny weighs his options. On one hand, he has no way of knowing where the portal will take him. On the other, anything is better than home Amity.
Danny shrugs to himself. It isn't like he had any other options, after all. Why not spend some time exploring?
For the second time that night, he enters a portal. Green, the color of ectoplasm, of his own ghostly eyes, engulfs his vision.
Unbeknownst to Danny, multiple computers in this new world send out an alert, causing several people to spill their morning coffee. The warning: a large tear in the space time continuum, followed by the arrival of a powerful, unknown being.
Clockwork hums in approval. This, like many of young Daniel's choices, is going to be an interesting one.