Chapter Text
Danny was having a rough day, even before the snake lady attacked.
Like, it was one thing to fall asleep halfway through the school day, get rudely awoken by some random ghost that he’d rather not be dealing with, and then realize that he’d missed a very important test. And yet, the universe always found some way worse to screw him over. Case in point: snake lady.
“You cannot run forever, half-blood! I can smell you!”
Danny screeched to a halt midair. “Excuse you, I do not smell.”
To prove his point, he sniffed his sleeve, only to immediately recoil. He had been flying around Amity Park for at least an hour, after all. But what the snake lady said confused him—how could she trace him just by regular teenage BO? As far as he was aware, being half ghost—or half-blood, as the snake lady referred to him—didn’t make him smell worse than anyone else.
“Half-blood” was definitely a weird way to say “halfa,” now that he thought about it. Even the strangest ghosts on his enemy roster, like Skulker, called him things that made more sense! Skulker called him “whelp” because of hunting…or something. It was on theme, at least. Honestly, it’d make a lot more sense if the snake lady called him “prey,” as terrible as that sounds.
Theming was important to ghosts, which reminded him that he’d been meaning to ask, “Also, do you know why my ghost sense isn’t going off around you? Like, did your powers distract it because you thought it’d be hiss -terical to sneak up on me like the overgrown danger noodle you are, or—?”
She lunged for his feet with a snarl, but his lower body instinctively shifted into a snake-like curl of dark ectoplasmic mist to avoid her claws. Maybe her power is making things more snakey, he panicked.
“ Enough of this, ” the snake lady hissed, lip curling to reveal pointed teeth that extended past her chin. Wait, since when were her teeth that big?! “I require sustenance that only a powerful half-blood like yourself can provide. Tremble before me, for I am the mother of monsters: Echidna! ”
Danny’s nose wrinkled. “And here I thought you weren’t nearly as bad as Skulker—the dude just wants my pelt. But you want to eat me? Yuck.”
Echidna swiped again, getting more frustrated with each failed jump as Danny’s anxiety spiked. Didn’t she know that she could fly? He considered for a second. Maybe she was a newly-formed ghost and wasn’t used to the whole “being a ghost” thing yet? But that couldn’t be right—even blob ghosts and ectopi (ectopuses?) could somewhat fly when first formed. Besides, despite being sickly green like a lot of ghosts, her scales looked startlingly solid…
Danny really hoped that Sam and Tucker would find him soon. Nothing he was doing seemed to stop her—his ectoblasts skidded off her scales and his ice only temporarily slowed her down. And based on the burning pain around his abdomen where Echidna managed to land a scratch back in the school courtyard (and simultaneously knock the Fenton Thermos out of his hand so he couldn’t capture her)? Well, he figured out that her talons were poisonous real quick. If his increased ghostly healing factor was having trouble against the wound, he didn’t want to see what would happen if a regular human managed to get swiped.
So, all he could do for now was stall and divert her attention away from civilians.
“Lady, I would taste like nothing to you! This is the Midwest”—she managed to claw at his now-reformed ankle in his sluggish state—“ ouch! We don’t use much spice here!”
“Why aren’t you dead yet?” Echidna fumed, chest heaving. “My poison should have killed you already!”
Alarm bells blared in Danny’s head, but he pressed, “Lady, my name is literally Phantom. ” Through slightly hazy vision, he made a grand show of gesturing at his glowing green eyes and phasing his body in and out of existence. “I am already dead.”
“Well, Phantom, you smell like demigod,” she sneered, slit eyes focusing on a point just beyond Danny’s shoulders. He didn’t risk looking behind him, head absolutely throbbing. “And he smells it too!”
Before Danny could parse out what she meant by that, a solid wall of muscle rammed him from behind, sending him skidding down all the way down the street until he was right outside an amalgamation of a regular suburban house and sci-fi nerd paradise. Truly a HOA violation in the making, there stood Fentonworks.
“Good boy, Sonny!” Echidna crooned off in the distance. Danny’s ears rang as he picked up her grating voice with his enhanced hearing.
Danny groaned in pain as the lion-snake creature (he shrugged off the strangeness easily—he had fought weirder) pressed against his ribcage. He also groaned at being so close to home. Danny really didn’t want his parents involved with Echidna, as he was beginning to think she wasn’t a ghost after all.
Once he got his bearings straight, Danny barely managed to phase through Sonny’s skull just as a maw of uncomfortably close teeth tried to bite his head off. He rolled out of the way and forced himself to float back up, breathing much too heavily to be considered normal for his ghost form.
Ancients, where was his backup?
“ Die, monster scum! ”
That voice seemed familiar, but it didn’t sound like English. No, surely not—
“That’s the ghost we want to tear apart molecule by molecule!”
No, yeah. That was—
“Meet the upgraded Jack o’ Nine Tails: now with celestial bronze!”
“ Honey , I thought we discussed changing the name—”
From out of nowhere, a burnished bronze replica of his dad’s face rammed into Sonny’s side, making the monster writhe in agony. And if that weren’t enough, the nine green grabber claws latched on Sonny’s fur morphed into bronze spikes, effectively digging into the golden hide. With an almighty roar, Sonny disappeared into a flash of equally golden dust.
Danny’s jaw dropped as he surveyed the scene. If his parents had half this level of competence on a regular basis, he’d be toast. Ghost toast.
Echidna then screeched, “Not my baby! How could you, you foolish mortals?”
Before she could leap at his parents, Danny instinctively shot his hand off to the side, half encasing Echidna's torso in ghostly blue ice and sending her careening to the asphalt.
He heard his mother gasp as she whipped around to find the origin of the icy blast, only for her to snarl and make the universal gesture for “I’m watching you.” She then mouthed, “ You’re next, ” before summoning a Fenton Anti-Creep Stick out of seemingly thin air. In the midday sun, it glittered with a supernatural bronze glint before one Maddie Fenton smacked it over Echidna’s skull with a sickening crack!
Despite all the frankly horrific things Danny had seen since becoming half ghost, seeing his own mother brutally beat down a snakey monster lady (who was definitely not a ghost, since last he checked, ghosts didn’t explode into fine golden dust that his parents casually wiped off glittering bronze weapons), took the cake. So when his armed parents came marching towards him, he knew he had to be gone yesterday.
Breath stuttering in half-undead lungs, Danny inhaled deeply and exhaled a thick icy mist, washing the street in a ghostly blue haze. His parents shouted their frustrations to the sky as he made his daring dangerous high-stakes escape by crawling like a wounded wolf through suburbia.
“Di immortales !” his dad cursed. Oh my gods, Danny subconsciously translated. “We almost had the ghost boy! Where did he go?”
“We’ll get him next time, Jack. For now, I’m just wondering where the ghost actually went. ”
Danny hissed in pain as he managed to detransform in an elderly neighbor’s newly planted rose hedge. Not his brightest moment, sure, but he was desperate for some solid cover. He hadn’t felt this disjointed in a battle for a long time—something was up with that Echidna lady and her…son? Danny shook his head. There was also something up with how his parents reacted to them. And “celestial bronze” sounded vaguely familiar…
The mist slowly cleared as Danny’s prominent ghostly aura was no longer there to sustain it. And with its disappearance, Danny suddenly felt like he’d been hit over the head worse than Echidna. He doubled over in pain, clutching his side. When he brought a trembling hand away, it was covered in blood with little ectoplasmic green flecks, blossoming out from the side of his red (now significantly more so) and white NASA t-shirt.
Yet still, he waited until his parents had retreated inside Fentonworks to start moving. Because while his parents sometimes failed to see the forest between the trees, he didn’t want to risk them putting two and two together given their sudden bout of competence with Echidna and Sonny. He desperately hoped that their violent problem-solving wouldn’t spread to figuring out his ghostly alter ego.
Bleeding and barely conscious, he knocked on the door.
His mom was the one who answered, hazmat hood flipped down and face contorted in pure horror at the sight of her baby boy covered in blood. Danny distantly registered his mom calling for his dad from the lab.
Danny weakly smiled, only for a coughing fit to warp his expression into a grimace. “Uh, I got caught up in the snake-lady’s attack on the school.” He clutched his side and his mom gasped at the wound. “She ended up chasing me halfway across town until I managed to get away.”
Only a half lie, Danny thought to himself. Sam always says that the best lies have a kernel of truth…easier to remember…
But that was the last thought he remembered before collapsing into his mom’s arms. In his poison-induced haze, a little too late he realized why that might be a bad idea.
Humans don’t have flecks of green in their blood…