Kindred

Lichtenberg

Danny coughed. He knew that there were stronger ghosts in the Ghost Zone but most won't bother coming to this side of the veil because they couldn't care less. But sometimes...sometimes they came around just to mess with him. Times like these, Danny had to go all out. Times like these, he can forget about being human because humans had no chance to survive. It was the only way he could push them back to the Ghost Zone.

He never actually win these battles.

Only survive.

Danny shivered, trying to forget the feeling of that thing's hands inside him, touching his organs and playing with them like he's some toy. He coughed out more globs of blood. He's freezing even as the coolness of the void of space healed him. No...his human needed to come out.

There's a limit to how long he should stay ghost. If he stayed ghost for too long, he might lose his humanity completely. Just as if he stayed human for too long, his health will suffer and deteriorate. Danny's human side was fragile but precious. He wasn't ready to go all the way.

He's not Vlad.

Vlad was just a human with ghost powers. A human whose body mutated to adapt to the ecto-contamination that he suffered. He's just a mutant.

Danny...Danny died. Danny Fenton died in the portal. The Ghost Zone used his death to rip a permanent hole between there and here. Payment. A sacrifice. But because of the nature of his death, he also came back as a ghost. In the end, Life didn't want him but Death couldn't accept him. In the end, they compromised and created Danny Phantom.

He's stuck.

Danny sobbed, hating the conflicting emotion that always wrecked him whenever he felt death choking him and chaining but couldn't take him. Danny looked at the world below, so high up he could just drop down somewhere and be lost in another country. But...somewhere down there...there was a sanctuary waiting for him.

"And should you need a place to rest..."

Danny's dead. But he's a corpse without a grave. A dead without a funeral. A ghost without a haunt.

His parents theorized that Amity Park had become his lair, that was why all the ghost came through and attack them. They were wrong. Amity Park was a lair without owner. Why else would Vlad settled there as Mayor? Why else would the ghosts kept coming and bother him?

Because he had the greatest claim on Amity Park but Danny didn't want it. He just wanted to survive and then move somewhere. He just wanted to graduate and make a life outside the town that killed him. But his claim was greater yet he did not want it but still he stayed. Ghosts do not understand this. They wanted to chase him away so that they could settle there and claim it. Vlad made use of his reluctance to claim it to settle there just so he could try and steal his mother or kill his father. Better if he could do both.

"And should you need a place to rest..."

Elsa's voice beckoned him. He could have gone to Tucker but his grandmother's there and Danny knew that having a strong ghost around her would hasten her death. That was why he told Tucker to put many ghost deterrents around his home. It didn't matter that Danny can't come visit. His grandmother came first. As for Sam...he couldn't do it. He couldn't be in the same room with her alone for long.

He didn't hate her but his dead side couldn't stand her.

His own home had not been home since the day he died.

"And should you need a place to rest..."

Danny landed outside her veranda. It was very, very late and she was deeply asleep. He can hear her calm breathing and he didn't have it in him to wake her up. Still, he did not move.