Danny Fenton opened his eyes and could see. This was important, but he couldn't quite remember why.

He took stock of his surroundings-quiet, dark, cool. He was laid out on one of the lab's steel exam tables. Or rather, one of the lab's steel exam tubs, the long, deep kind that reminded him uncomfortably of coffins. He thought he was alone, until he looked towards the stairs and saw Jazz, Tucker, Sam, and Valerie-frozen in mid-conversation.

"Wh-nngh." Scratch talking. Talking was a terrible idea. Who ever thought talking was a good form of communication should be fired and chased out of town.

"Hello, Danny." Clockwork's unmistakable voice resolved the question of what had happened to his friends, but his abortive attempt to look behind him woke up a whole grocery list of aches and pains. If talking was a bad idea, moving was the worst idea anyone had ever come up with ever. Period.

Clockwork floated up to the tub, bearing his usual enigmatic smile. "Don't bother getting up; I was on my way out."

Danny cast a confused glance towards his friends. The only source of light came from the Ghost Portal, its poisonous green color all the creepier for how still it was. But even discounting the poor angle he had of them, they all looked awful. Exhausted, hunched with worry, the familiar etch of genuine fear tugging at their mouths.

He wondered how long he had been down in the lab.

"Ah yes," said Clockwork, "I suspected the idea of a miracle cure coming from an anonymous benefactor would not sit well with you." He raised one wry eyebrow, as if to imply his use of the word suspected had been a small joke. It was always hard to tell with him. "I'll need that medallion back when I leave."

Danny glanced down at himself, half-afraid he'd see one of Clockwork's strange medallions half-submerged in his chest. His memory was syrup-sticky and full of holes, but he definitely remembered lovely little phrases like "molecular degeneration" and "raw ectoplasm baths," which called all too easily to mind Dani's close-call with complete destabilization. It was no small relief to see-feel-the medallion lying neatly on his perfectly normal chest.

Clockwork leaned over him, aging with his usual eerie speed from child to adult. In the hand not carrying his staff he held up an empty glass vial, about six inches long and tinged pink by whatever had been in it. "With some help from this you'll be right as rain in no time. Feel free to thank me at any time-although I wouldn't bother asking what I've administered just yet. Another time, perhaps." The ghost smiled not unkindly, his face wrinkling rapidly with age.

With a grunt of pain he couldn't help, Danny raised one arm to look at his gloved hand. Experimentally, he fisted it a few times. Stiff, creaky, but it moved when he wanted it too, which was a novelty all on its own. Yet he needed to be sure- even though he was Phantom, even though he was free of the unmistakable burn of blood blossoms. He forced his hand invisible. There was a slight strain, more of weakness than of hurt, but he could do it.

"Th-thank you," he rasped, letting his hand fall weakly to his side. Talking was still a terrible idea, but he had to ask, "Why?"

"Because," Clockwork replied as he reached for the silk ribbon around Danny's neck, "You're my responsibility."

The next time Danny woke, he was in his own bed, dressed in his own pajamas, looking up at his own ceiling as early morning light painted it gray. It was the first time he could remember feeling properly warm since-well, since whenever it had been that he'd found those ghosts outside the science lab. It felt amazing. He never wanted to get up, but he was pretty sure his bladder wasn't going to let him lay there much longer.

He had to pee. He actually had to pee.

It was funny, what you missed about being alive when you had a near-death experience.

Someone snored gently on his left. He looked and saw Jazz slumped in a chair, her fingers loosely stuck in a textbook of parapsychology. A fine curl of hair near her mouth ruffled with every exhale. He smiled and quietly slipped out from under the blankets.

Walking was tough, but not nearly as tough as he'd expected. His whole body was sore and wobbly, and he had never been more aware of his bones. So he maybe had to lean a little on the hallway wall once or twice when his lightheadedness got a bit strong. No one was watching to see him stumble. In fact, it seemed like everyone else in the house was asleep. He didn't flush the toilet and only turned the sink faucet to a soft trickle so as not to disturb anyone.

As he washed his hands his reflection stared back at him with sunken, washed-out eyes. His cheekbones jutted. His teeth looked too big for his mouth. He looked down at his hands and watched tendons he couldn't normally see shift under veins bright as blueberries. His wrists looked massive.

He dried his hands.

In the bathroom doorway, he paused and listened. Downstairs, there was the whisper of papers being shuffled.

At the top of the stairs he paused and considered the weakness of his legs. Should he risk it? Walking sucked. Stairs would probably suck a lot more. He opted for a low hover and couldn't help grinning. Something so normal-well, for him-hadn't felt so easy, so natural, in-too long.

Sprawled out on the couch were Tucker and Sam, shoeless and bundled up in a pair of Fenton Emergency Blankets. They looked as tired as Jazz did, and light and noise came from the kitchen, so he left them to sleep.

Valerie sat at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee and studying reams of loose-leaf notes. Her hair was a mess, not bedhead messy, but the sticky-out way it got whenever she was stressed and couldn't keep her fingers out of it. She didn't see him until he cleared his throat.

"Danny!" she whispered, jumping to her feet. He didn't resist when she helped him to the table; he still didn't quite trust his legs to support him without a nearby wall.

Once he was seated, she asked, "How are you feeling?"

"Thirsty." She quickly poured him a glass of water from the faucet and brought it to him. He downed it in two large gulps, downed a second the same way, and gestured for her to sit after she gave him a third glass to sip. "Thanks."

"No problem." She sat down, discreetly shuffling some of the papers on the table aside, something he didn't miss but opted not to comment on.

"So, uh, how long was I...?"

Valerie bit her lip. "Nine days."

"Wow." He set his glass down and leaned back. "That's-that is a lot of lost time."

It was worrying to watch her school her face into an expression of wary curiosity. It looked too much like a doctor trying to figure out the nicest way to say he was going to die of brain parasites or something. "You don't remember anything?" she asked carefully.

"No-well, I mean I remember the ghosts at school, and I know mom accidentally dosed me with blood blossoms, but everything after that is kinda..." He grimaced, unwilling to spell out the gooier bits he could remember just yet. "blurry."

Her shoulders relaxed with a palpable relief. "Well I'll be honest, Danny, it was bad." She sobered, looking at the middle distance near his elbow, as if she couldn't help but remember something unpleasant. "Real bad."

"Tell me," he rasped. And because this was Valerie, because the bad air between them had long since been cleared, because they had promised that there would be no more secrets, she only sighed before setting her arms on the table.

She explained, detailing when prompted, how the blood blossoms had reacted within what approximated his stomach when he was Phantom, how his reactions had spread to his human half once he had begun to metabolize the flowers, and how they had prompted obviously uncontrolled ghost powers, even when he was unconscious. She told him how his family and friends tried everything they could before they had no choice but to get him to go ghost. She told him how his parents had modified the ecto-filtrator to completely clean the residual blossoms from his system. How it had stopped further reactions, but hadn't done anything for the damage already done. How thirty percent of his body, human and ghost, were irreparably burned.

"I didn't enter the picture until the fifth day," she said. "You hadn't been to school since the ghosts attacked, and your sister, Sam, and Tucker stopped showing up a couple days after." She shrugged. "I was worried, so I went to your house and saw-you were-" She bit her lip again.

"Soup?" He shrugged when she flinched. "Hey, I said it was blurry, not totally blank."

"Yeah," she said, and continued reluctantly. "You were getting pretty-soupy-by then. I got one look at you and then asked your folks where they kept the Ecto Dejecto."

"Because of Danielle." Danny took another deep drink of water, pausing to enjoy the cool feel of it as it slipped down his throat. "I'm glad you showed up when you did. Everything I heard-not much!" He hastily waved his hands when her expression tightened, "Just enough. You're right. I really was almost a goner."

"That's the thing, Danny." She leaned forward. "We all took turns monitoring you, giving you regular doses of Ecto-Dejecto and soaking you in raw ectoplasm after regular IVs stopped being any use. We helped your parents when we could, we-we scooped up bits of you that splashed out whenever you had a seizure-" She swallowed. "We were all doing everything we could, but we weren't curing you. Nothing worked, and no one knew if you would just lay there or if the next seizure would be the one that finished you off or-"

"Valerie-"

"And then yesterday, when we came downstairs, you looked at us and waved."

"Ha, that must have freaked you guys out pretty bad."

The look Valerie gave him made him regret opening his mouth. "Danny, it isn't funny. You weren't just hurt, the blood blossoms completely destabilized your molecular structure, burned your core ectoplasm and a lot of your internal tissues, gave you seizures, paralyzed you, blinded you-"

"Caused me indescribable agony and made me puke up like thirty pounds of my own guts, blah blah." He gave her a pointed look. "I know Val, I was there."

"Danny Fenton," she snapped, and her voice was as harsh as it had been in the days when she had wanted to see Phantom a green smear on the asphalt. "You were dying, and then all of a sudden you just got better. Danny, what happened?"

He sighed. "Clockwork."

"Excuse me?"

"He's a ghost. The super powerful and irritatingly enigmatic kind. Master of All Time kind of powerful. Sounds threatening, I know, but it's rare to see him outside the Ghost Zone. You have to go looking for him if you want his help."

"And why would he want to help you? Most ghosts aren't real big fans of Phantom, in case you hadn't noticed."

Danny ignored the jab. "He's-I guess he's kind of like a mentor to me? He helped me out with-with a problem awhile back, and ever since then he's been willing to lend me a hand when things get too bad for me to handle on me own."

"What kind of problem?" Valerie asked suspiciously.

"The kind with reality-changing results. Never mind that though, it's old news."

"Danny-"

He held up a hand, hating the tremble of his too-skinny arm. "Later, Val. I promise."

"I'm holding you to that." She set her elbows on the table. "So tell me about this Clockwork guy. What'd he do?"

Danny shrugged. "I'm not sure, actually. I know he gave me something. I woke up down in the lab feeling-well, like total crap to be honest, but a lot better than before. He was on his way out, but he made sure I knew who saved my butt."

"How magnanimous of him," Valerie deadpanned. "So why didn't we hear the Ghost Portal activate?"

Danny tried to laugh, but all he could muster were a couple wheezy exhalations before his chest hurt too much. "Hello, Master of All Time? You think a guy with a title like that needs to bother with the Ghost Portal?"

Valerie pursed her lips. "You're right. I don't like how threatening that sounds."

"I can take you to his Tower sometime if you wanna meet him. Trust me though, there's no way you can get the jump on him, I've tried." Danny sobered, staring at the condensation slipping down his half-empty glass.

"What's the matter?"

Danny's brow knitted and his mouth thinned. "He said something before he left that's bugging me."

"What'd he say?"

"I asked him why he saved me, and he said that-that I was his 'responsibility.'"

"I don't like the sound of that either." She leaned forward again. "Can we trust this ghost?"

"Yeah." She raised her eyebrows, a textbook example of dubiousness. "Yes, Val. I promise we can trust Clockwork."

"Okay, okay!" She smiled, and then quickly had to hide a yawn behind one hand.

"Looks like you need some shuteye too," he said with a smirk.

Valerie stubbornly shook her head. "I'm okay. Besides, I promised your folks I'd keep an eye on you if you woke up while they were still out." She returned the smirk. "You know, make sure you didn't do anything stupid?"

Danny wheezed laughter again, already sounding a little bit more like his old self. "Who, me?"

"Yes, you." She began to gather the papers on the table together, and Danny couldn't help but catch glimpses of x-rays and neon green photographs amid the computer printouts. His stomach clenched, and he decided that later was a better time to look at his own inside-out anatomy. Much later.

Valerie's laughter subdued, and her eyes rested heavily on Danny. "Seriously though, Ghost Kid, you doing good? You really scared us."

He raised his hands and summoned a ball of bright green energy between them. "It's too early to say 'never better,'" he replied, bouncing the ball in his palms, "but I think I'll be ready to 'accidentally' burn down the stand Jazz bought those blood blossoms from in a few days."

She rolled her eyes. "No arson until you get a clean bill of health from your folks."

He let the energy disperse harmlessly and held his hands up in self-defense. "Have you met my parents? The common cold is practically cause for quarantine. I know I'm not going anywhere for a while." He stood, gripping the table for balance and waving Valerie off when she made to help. "I'm alright, just starving."

"I figured." She punched him lightly in the arm. "Sit your bony butt down, Ghost Kid; I'll make you a sandwich. Just don't get used to this."

Danny sat down gratefully, happy to be awake-happy to be alive-at five o' clock on a Thursday morning. "Thanks. Um, anything but tuna?"

Author's Note: And that's it! Title is from The Faint's "Take Me to the Hospital."