Chapter Text
Danny didn’t fight as the latest set of agents dragged him from his cell. He hadn’t fought back for…well, time was hard to judge when nothing changed except the torture methods, but it had to have been at least a few months. His feet scraped along the tiles and he kept his eyes screwed shut to avoid the inevitable migraine he’d get from the blinding white hallways. The labs really weren’t any better, but at least there he’d be in too much other pain to notice a measly little headache. Small blessings.
There was a hiss from a hydraulic lock and Danny squinted his eyes open to get a look at the lab. It was impossible to predict exactly what fresh torture his parents and the other scientists had in store, but normally he could at least get a feel for the genre by looking at what equipment they’d be using. Recently, they’d just been putting him through various execution methods, trying to End him. It hadn’t worked, sadly. Apparently halfas were impossible to kill. If they crushed his core, his physical body would heal the damage, and vice versa. It didn’t seem like that’s what they had in mind today, though, because Danny couldn’t think of a single execution method that would require pods like the ones he was seeing.
They reminded him of the cloning pods Vlad had used when he was making Dani, just missing the front piece of glass. He hoped they weren’t trying to make more clones of him. Luckily, Dani was still traveling the globe and was pretty much impossible to track down, but the thought of her or any other future clones having to go through the experiments they’d done on him made him sick to his core. What if they destabilized like Dani had done? Danny shuddered as he remembered watching Dani and the others melting before his eyes. His parents didn’t know that they could use ecto-dejecto to stabilize clones and even if they did…he wasn’t sure they would.
Still, it was useless to fight back. The restraints around his neck, wrists and ankles prevented him from using his ghost powers and would shock him to within an inch of his afterlife if he tried. If that wasn’t enough, a thick muzzle made of the same material covered the entire lower half of his head. They’d welded it on after the first time he’d tried to use his wail to escape. He’d mustered enough power to collapse an entire wing of the labs, but the wail made him too weak to outrun the agents. It was the closest he’d ever come to getting out.
The agents tossed him into the pod and had started strapping him in when he heard the hydraulic lock again and he glanced over toward the door. Would it be his parents today or one of the other scientists? But scientists weren’t walking through the door, agents were and they were dragging someone with them.
Dani.
Danny tried to convince himself it wasn’t her, but the messy black hair, now matted into its ponytail, was far too familiar and the girl was exactly Dani’s height. He tried to yell, but no sound made it past the muzzle. The girl looked up anyway. Danny’s core froze as he recognized her terrified blue eyes peeking over a muzzle just like his.
They had Dani.
He didn’t know how they’d captured her, but right now that didn’t matter, all that mattered was getting her out of here. He thrashed in the agents' holds, punching and pushing them away with strength he didn’t know he still had as they kept attempting to secure him to the pod. He could hear Dani doing the same, but just like every time before, it didn’t matter. All they managed to do was delay the inevitable and within a matter of minutes, both of them were tied to the pods, unable to do more than blink as the scientists finally arrived.
Of course it had to be his parents.
“Alright Maddie,” Jack grinned and rubbed his hands together as he looked at them. “What are we discovering today?”
Maddie looked up from her clipboard to smile sweetly at him, “We’re discovering how to force a ghost to reabsorb a duplicate!”
Danny blinked. He couldn’t have heard that right.
“We know that ghosts who like to possess corpses like Phantom can duplicate themselves, but until recently, we believed that these duplicates were always identical and couldn’t exist for long, or get far from the primary ghost before being reabsorbed.” Maddie continued. “This specimen we discovered in Alaska, however, disproves this theory. First of all, it was very far from its primary ghost when it was found, secondly, over the months we’ve had it, it has never reabsorbed, despite being in close proximity. We are confident that it is a duplicate, however, since the DNA we harvested almost exactly matches the corpse Phantom refuses to let rest, with the only exception being that the duplicate possesses two x chromosomes, rather than an X and a Y. It just wouldn’t do if the earth were attacked by these things and they could create infinite armies with just a few ghosts. We’d be outnumbered immediately!”
Jack clapped his hands together, “So we’re going to recombine them!”
Jack and Maddie descended into technobabble, but Danny tuned them out. Recombine them?! But Dani wasn’t a duplicate. She was her own person with her own core, her own obsession, her own dreams! It wouldn’t work…it, it couldn’t work.
But what if it did?
A buzzing sound filled the lab and for the first time, Danny noticed the tubes and wires connecting his pod to Dani’s. They couldn’t do this! But there was nothing they could do to stop it as the machines powered up, ecto-green smoke filling the lab as the machines did whatever his parents had designed them to do. Or well, maybe. His parents had never been good at getting their inventions to work exactly as planned.
The buzzing was in his bones now and Danny tried to scream, but as per usual, no sound escaped the muzzle. The world felt like it was collapsing in on itself and even though it was far from the worst thing he’d experienced in the labs, it still wasn’t comfortable.
He was jolted out of his head by a soft thump as something hit the ground at his feet. The buzzing had diminished into a light tingling sensation that he ignored as he looked down. That…that was one of his suppression cuffs. What was one of his cuffs doing on the ground? He almost gave himself whiplash with how fast he looked at his wrists. Sure enough, one wrist was free, nothing but bruises and scraped up skin showing where the cuff had been. His other wrist still had the cuff, but either the cuff had grown or he had shrunk because all it took was a simple shake and the other cuff was on the floor. It was the same with the rest of the restraints and Danny slipped out as fast as he could. The only things left were the stupid neck collar and muzzle, but without the other suppressors, Danny was pretty sure he’d be able to break them off after they escaped. Already, he could feel gravity becoming optional and he flew for the first time in months, zipping the short distance through the smoke to Dani’s pod.
Dani was tiny. She looked to be around five or six years old and Danny only took a moment to think that answered the question of if he shrunk or the cuffs grew before he was helping her shed her cuffs. Nobody was shooting at them yet, so with all the smoke his parents and the agents must not have realized that the experiment went wrong yet. Danny grabbed Dani’s hand, turned them both invisible and flew them through the nearest wall. It only took a second before Dani got her bearings and turned herself invisible and intangible as well, allowing Danny to save a little of his strength, but she didn’t let go of his hand.
Soon enough, they flew through a wall that just had dirt on the other side, which meant they must have been in a basement lab this time, and they vaguely heard alarms start sounding as they continued flying away from the lab. Soon enough Dani started flagging and Danny had to acknowledge the exhaustion he’d been ignoring since he’d first seen her in the lab. He led them up to the surface and landed on the grass. They looked to be on some sort of hill, but all that Danny really cared about was that they were far enough from the lab that it looked like nothing more than a speck on the horizon.
“Are you ok?” Danny’s voice came out higher than it should be and slightly muffled from the now ill-fitting muzzle. He reached up with both hands and snapped both the muzzle and the collar in two, then did the same for Dani. She didn’t respond to his question, but she did start crying and launched herself into his arms, knocking them both down onto the grass, so he was going to count that as a win. “Heh, yeah, I missed you too Dani. I’m sorry. I…I didn’t even know they had you.”
“It’s not your fault.” Dani sniffled and rubbed her nose, “What happened? Why are we so small?”
“I don’t know, I was just grateful we were small enough to get out of the restraints.” Danny frowned. “Now that I’m thinking about it, the machine was designed to recombine us, right? Except for that we were never the same person, so I guess when it tried, we just kinda ended up somewhere in the middle. You’d be a baby if Vlad hadn’t force grown you, and I’m a teenager, so halfway in between that is childhood, I guess? I don’t know, my parents' inventions are always…unpredictable. The good thing is that I don’t think they saw us get younger with all the smoke, so they’ll probably be looking for teenagers, not kids.”
Dani hummed, “Harder for kids to survive on the streets though.”
“Yeah.” Danny looked up as the sound of a helicopter started up in the direction of the lab. “Are you ready to try though?”
Dani shrugged and stood, brushing the dirt off her knees, “Sure, why not? Let’s go exploring.”