Disclaimer: I own nothing

Note: This work is un-betaed. Please comment if you see any spelling errors. Also Please leave comments/reviews! They brighten my day

" A good father is a man who expects his son to be a better man then he was"

He's in Vlad's lab after the disastrode and he doesn't know what to think. But the facts on this paper are undisputable. He flies home numb to his feelings, he won't stay that way long.

He walks in the door and closes it so softly and walks in so careful as though he's walking on eggshells, as though he's afraid stepping too hard will shatter the floor he walks on and bring down the walls of the house he was raised in.

( lies all lies)

He walks into the living room and his parents glance up at him. He sees the concern in their eyes. They've always been able to tell when he was upset even if they didn't know ( or care a vicious part of him thinks) what was wrong. Though in this case, a blind man could see the dried tear tracks on his cheeks, the wind sweptness of his hair and the hollow dead

( dead dead dead a part of him laughs hysterically)

look in his eyes. He sits on the couch across from the people who raised him.

" Did you know," he asks in a horse whisperer.

"What are you talking about honey." his mother asks concerned.

He breaks into a bitter chuckle.

" Whats going on Danny-boy?" Jack asks boisterously.

" What am I talking about?" Danny whispers quietly almost questioningly. Looking at the floor like it holds the answers to the questions rattling around in his brain.

Then his blue eyes harden, they become cold, determined and look so very broken.

"What am I talking about?" he repeats looking them in the eyes.

( he pretends he doesn't see his mother's instinctive flinch at the green swirling around in them, he pretends he doesn't see her moment of fear, He pretends he's not thinking about how Vlad jokingly called them his scary eyes; and how never not once, not even when he went to the future and met a Vlad who had seen him destroy the world had Vlad been scared of him.)

I'm talking about how your eyes are violet and his are brown" He says gesturing to Maddie then Jack. He says it so matter of factly, so clinically detached.

"I'm talking about how your hair is orange and his dark brown." His voice gets even more horse now and they can hear the sobs as choking back. His voice is still a whisper: so quiet it might as well be yelling.

Maddie remembers when he got quiet. Right after the portal accident, she would find him sitting in there lab, on the floor in front of the portal just staring at it.

He never answered her when she asked what he was doing, just went upstairs, and more often than not she didn't bother to pursue it. She remembers the change in her loud boisterous boy who couldn't sit still for a moment and always had something to say.

She thinks about how at Sam's birthday last week her son who used to get up, dance, sing and be a social butterfly just sat there talking quietly every once and a while. ( She doesn't dwell on the fact that the small smile on his face was the most genuine expression shes seen in almost two years.)

She regrets every time she let him walk away. She looks at him now sitting as still as the dead( dead dead dead) and for a moment the scientist in her wonders if he really needs to breathe or if its just instinct at this point.

"I'm talking about how I have his blue eyes and his silver black hair. I'm talking about how he spent years in the hospital with his body changing but my transformation was seamless." he puts his head in his hands and brokenly whispers.

"So did you know Vlad was my father?" Jack is uncharacteristically silent, solemn almost. Maddie has glassy eyes.

"Of course we did," she whispers hoarsely, bitterly.

"I didn't know at first," she says hurriedly in a louder tone.

"But the older you got the more obvious it was" she looks up at him.

"Were smart Danny, " she said gesturing to her and Jack.

" But you're intelligence ... we paled in comparison. I saw him every time you smirked. Every time your eyes, his eyes lit up when you learn something new. When at seven years old you could name every constellation above Amity." tears are falling freely from her eyes down her cheeks. Danny is silent, head still bowed.

" How was I even conceived you said you hadn't even seen Vlad in years before recently?" He asks accusingly. Maddie sighs and glances at Jack whos refusing to look at her.

" He had just gotten out of the hospital and he came to see us. He stayed for two days, there was alcohol involved, a lot of alcohol. I woke up asleep hungover next to the bathroom toilet with no memory of what had happened. Neither Jack nor Vlad remembered anything so we brushed it off as a night of reliving the glory days and I went to pick up Jazz form her babysitter. We didn't even suspect anything had happened till years later." Her head is in her hands and her voice is hoarse.

" I told him. " Danny's had popped up with an audible whoosh.

" You were eight and doing a family tree project. You were supposed to see where your features came from. Me or your dad, and you realized that you didn't look anything like us, not really. "

Danny looks at his shoes. " You told me I looked like my grandfather" he chokes out, it sounds like he ripped the words from his throat, he sounds betrayed. She nods.

" So I called him. After that it was obvious, and we couldn't take lying to him anymore." Maddie's next words come out almost as if they were being ripped from her throat.

" He was angry, and he had every right to be. He yelled at me for a good two hours over the phone about " How dare I make this choice for him. " He drove all night, likely just to yell at us in person. " A bittersweet smile was on her face.

"He sat on that couch you're sitting on now," she says looking over to his left.

" Then you walked in. " she laughs bitterly

." You walked right up to him, and demanded he play with you." Danny rubs his temple at this.

" I remember that vaguely," he says quietly, almost straining, like he could force the memory to be clearer if he just thought hard enough.

" he looked at you as though he had never seen a child before like you were this experiment he was examining the results of. He sat they're entertaining you for hours. Even though he was dead tired, even though he probably hadn't slept in two days. He was kinder and sofer than I had ever seen him." she seems as though she's staring at nothing, but her eyes tell a different story. One of the regretful times long past.

( in a hidden part of the ghost zone a ghost known as clockwork looks at the parade from above and all the twists and turns it could have taken, he sees a boy called Danny Masters who lives in Wisconson in the summer and Amity during school. He sees a man now corrupt, mad, and floating through space, he sees him happy sane, and content training his son as they playfully shot ecto-blast at each other. He sees a beautiful future corrupted by selfishness, loneliness, envy, and lies.)

"He left when I told him it was bedtime. He was back the very next morning after you and Jazz had just left for school. He told us he would never forgive us for taking away his choice. He said not even he could take a child away from two parents who loved him and a good environment, a loving home. Claimed he didn't want to confuse you and it would be better for you this way."

( Sometimes Maddie wonders if this was an excuse, and it was Vlad's own insecurity about parenting. She remembers a drunken college night and hearing Vlad offhandedly mention how he would never have kids so he couldn't screw them up like his father had him.)

"He asked only for emails on your life, your progress, your health, and pictures. It was the very least we owed him."

Danny laughed hysterically. He laughed till tears for streaming out of his eyes and he was gasping for breath that he didn't need, then he was quiet.

" I never thought I would have anything in common with him. "Danny whispers in a tone, not unlike some distant cousin of bemusement.

" What do you mean Danny? " his mother asks softly.

"Neither of us will ever forgive you, " he said bitterly. The words made his parents- Jack in his mom flinch.

" You have no idea what I've been through it." they move to protest but then he raised a hand and they stopped.

" Don't say you do, you don't. You don't know what it's like to be fourteen, fourteen, and to have nightmares about your parents vivisecting you. Because they found out your secret. They found out you were a half ghost, they very thing they despise most in this world. You don't know what its like to have that nightmare come true."

Maddie and Jack flinch, ever since Danny came out as the ghost boy that day has haunted them, they remember assuming the screams he gave off before he escaped were the memory of pain; after all, ghosts weren't truly capable of feeling pain... Right?

They didn't think it was cruel, to them ghosts were merely animals. They pointedly don't think about how Danny hadn't come home for a week after that, how he woke up screaming from nightmares for months( how he still does) and how Sam, Tucker, hell even Vlad had either radiated repressed anger or avoided them for months. They especially don't think about how they didn't even enquire why, assuming it was teen angst and Vlad being Vlad.

(after all, if Danny had a dollar for every time his parents talked about how they would finish ripping apart that ghost boy molecule by molecule at the breakfast table he would be richer than Vlad. There's a reason he never ate family meals anymore.)

Nightmares about them running experiments on you in the lab. The lab that's right below your bed. You don't know what it's like to be fourteen and being in constant fear in your own home. You don't know what it's like to be fourteen and think you're the only one of your kind. You don't know what it's like to die." the last word is said with so many things bitterness, resignation. resentment.

( and no matter how much he denies it, just a hint of longing. For if he were really, truly dead then at least he would belong somewhere not this half-life, half-death he lives now.)

" And then, then you find out that you're not alone. That there's someone like you, another halfa. But you get scared, because he hates your father, because he's trying to care about you, and it's just too much too soon. Because you're afraid.

(afraid of yourself most of all, afraid of what you're capable of.)

You're afraid of anyone trying to care. Afraid of ulterior motives and pain and trust( he mean betrayal, something he's felt the sting of one too many times) and you can't.

You just can't do it right now, because you're 14 and you're dead, and you're still trying to deal with that.

And to have someone there, who understands and cares it's just all too much. So you fight and you become bitter enemies. Then he dies, we'll not really. But he leaves in a way he can never come back from. And you're alone again.

And then-then you find out that he left you everything. Every mansion, every business, every cent. And you try to find out why. Why he did this. You were enemies. Nothing more. Right? But then why did your bitter enemy who you hated, who you thought hated you, leave you everything.

Then you come across a box of letters all addressed to you. All trying to explain that you're his son.

( What Danny doesn't say is how the most recent ones were full of half-mad ramblings of a broken man, he does not say how the first of them was the one that left the tears tracts on his face, tears for a man he never knew, and all that was left of that man, that good man were words on a page. He does not say that he mourns the fact that the broken man is how the world remembers him.)

Saying the everything he did he thought was best for you that he wanted to give you your best shot so he left you alone. With people, he knew loved you. He left you alone to a happy normal life. And he apologizes." he says the last word almost unbelievingly with a chuckle at the end

" He says he loves you and that no matter what you do no matter what you say, or what parents you love he will always love you. That even if he's not your dad, you'll always be his son." Danny stares at them with a look of such anger such betrayal and something else hidden there-something that you should never see on a child. A look most seen on soldiers of war who are just so tired and want to go home but can't because the battle may be won but the war's not over. Because this is his job, his responsibility. Even if it means sleepless nights and broken bones( thank god for his fast healing) even if it means the weight of the world on a child's shoulders. No, the wars not over.

( will it ever be Danny thinks sometimes)

" So no," Danny says angrily.

" you don't know what I've been through. You don't know what it's like to be alone. To find out that you've been fighting your father since you were fourteen. I know now why he hated you" he said gesturing to Jack.

" I know why he wanted me to be his son. Why at first he always pulled every punch and critiqued my form when we fought. He was making me stronger with every fight even though he knew he could destroy me any moment. Even though for so much of my life he was more powerful than me but he always held back. It frustrated me to no end when he did that like he thought I wasn't strong enough to fight him. Now I know he just didn't want to hurt me. He wanted to teach me. Now I know he didn't become obsessed with the idea of me being his son. I was his son. And we had a connection that I will never have with anyone else living or dead. Because in the ghost world most ghosts have an Elder who takes them under there wing. Someone from the Ghost World to teach them our culture, our ways."

( It didn't escape Maddie or Jacks notice that Danny referred to himself as a ghost first and foremost but that's a story for another time.)

"I couldn't have one, because there was no other ghost like me so he became my Elder. Even if I didn't want me to be, and he wasn't only my Elder. He was my father. I understand now why my core settles when I'm around him. Why it felt almost physically sick when we fought. It was because my ghost half knew instinctively that he was my father, and I was his son, and it was wrong to fight him. I get it now." Danny says brokenly.

" And it's too late for me to tell him. It's too late." He looks up his eyes hard cold, but brimming with tears all the same.

" And for that, " He says his voice breaking, trembling; he swallows and his next words are clear and steady. The silence after his next words fills the room.

"I will never forgive you."