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It was a tough decision to close down the Fenton Portal. Jack had been close to tears about it and Maddie had to admit that she felt the same loss he did. It was their technological baby, the product of twenty years' worth of work. It opened up an entirely new world, it proved all their theories, it was a paranormal wonderment… but it was dangerous. A portal to the realm of the undead simply wasn't a practical addition to their children's home. Maddie had two jobs: a scientist, and a mother. And her babies' safety came first.
It only took a few hours to dismantle the portal, and it would have taken even less time if Jack hadn't been so emotional about it. But eventually it was disassembled, piece by piece, until all that was left was a heap of smoking metal. They had been thorough—there was no way anyone was putting that thing back together. It was an end of a ghost-hunting era.
Maddie wondered how her children would react to the news. Jazz would probably be ecstatic that her ghost-disproving efforts had finally gotten through to her parents and Danny had never cared for his parents' jobs. So their reaction took her a bit aback.
"What?" Jazz and Danny chorused, staring drop-jawed at Jack and Maddie.
"We took down the portal," she reiterated. "It was getting too dangerous to keep a doorway to the Ghost Zone in our own home. We were thinking of you two."
"Wha—but, but—" her son stuttered incoherently.
Jazz pushed past him. "Mom, Dad," she said in her voice-of-reason tone. "You've been working on this for decades. It's the culmination of your entire careers. You can't dismantle the portal!"
"We already did," Jack said quietly.
Danny finally stopped stammering long enough to say, "Buuuut what about the ghosts? How will I—you put them back in the Ghost Zone if you don't have a portal?"
Jack perked up immediately. "Simple, Danny, the Fenton Bazooka! That baby will give those ectoplasmic horrors a one-way ticket back to the ectoplasmic wilderness they call home!" He mimed holding the Bazooka on his shoulders and "shot" indiscriminately around the living room.
Danny visibly gulped and Jazz, for some reason, was keeping a tight, protective grip around his shoulders. "Something wrong, honey?" Maddie asked him.
Danny grinned widely and Maddie relaxed. "Nope, nothing wrong here. Why would I have a problem with you trapping every single ghost in the Ghost Zone?"
"Just making sure, hun," she said, relieved.
Despite his reassurances, Danny was visibly jittery for the entirety of the next week. Maddie couldn't help but worry. But her worries were forgotten on Thursday.
Why Thursday? On that day, she and Jack were on a ghost hunt. It had been a while—nearly a month—since their last one, and both were dying to try out some of their newest inventions. Jack was swinging the Bazooka to and fro with abandon, and Maddie couldn't help but get caught up in the action as well. Their tracker was going crazy with all the ecto-energy in the air. Soon, it led them to where the ghost boy was fighting a hulking mechanical ghost, again. Maddie smiled and motioned for Jack to give her the Bazooka.
Jack shook his head childishly and pouted, clasping the weapon like a teddy bear.
Jack, Maddie chastened in her head. She held out her hand impatiently, her eyes never leaving the ghosts.
Eventually her husband succumbed and relinquished the Bazooka. At the moment the ghost boy had victoriously sucked the other ghost into a metal cylinder—was that a Fenton Thermos?—Maddie took aim and fired.
She had always been an excellent shot.
A tiny green portal spun its way through the air and floated adjacent to the ghost before Maddie could blink. An echoing scream reached her ears as the ghost was sucked through. Then, she heard nothing.
"Mom?" Danny looked around, startled. Then he smacked his forehead. He'd allowed himself to get caught! Great. He had school the next day and it was already pretty late; if he didn't get back home soon, he'd fall asleep in class and fail his Astronomy test. So much for a career in astronautics.
Danny allowed himself to free-float for a minute in order to gain his bearings and survey his environment. Everything around him was black, barring the distinctive green streaks of ectoplasm in the distance and a couple drifting purple doors. He had never liked it in the Ghost Zone; it gave him the chills, and not just because of his Ghost Sense. He pursed his lips and squinted at the horizon. Was that—? Yeah, the Fright Knight's lair!
He sped towards it, but slowed as he neared the hulking castle. He knew exactly where he was, and readjusted his course accordingly. In minutes, Danny was just a doorway away from home.
Or was he?
"I know it's here," Danny muttered to himself, circling an empty spot of air. "It's always here. Where's the Portal?"
He froze when he realized the answer. His parents had taken the Portal apart days ago. There was no way out.
He was stuck.
Maddie gave a whooping scream of joy and tossed the Bazooka in the air, ignoring any safety precautions in favor of hugging her husband as tightly as she could. He returned the favor, leaving her gasping for breath, but they were both exultant. Their town was safe and so were their children—and they had just vanquished their trickiest foe! It was definitely a cause for celebration. And celebrate they did, staying out until the wee hours of the morning, careening the Ghost Assault Vehicle—er, RV—around town, going out to eat, even taking a trip to the bar. They hadn't had a night like that in years. Eventually, when it was almost morning and they were both completely exhausted, though still exhilarated, they drove home and rolled into bed.
But Maddie came to regret the late night when their daughter barreled into their room at eight o'clock the next morning, shouting, "Mom! Dad!"
Maddie groaned and pulled the cover over her head, ignoring her pounding headache and her hysteric daughter. Jazz just pulled the cover down again, shaking her awake. Eventually, she groaned, "What, Jazz?"
"Mom!" she said again. "I can't find Danny!"
Maddie sat up in bed at that, finally taking note of Jazz's pale face and shaking hands. All thoughts of sleep departed from her mind instantly. "What do you mean, Jazz?" she asked unsteadily.
"I mean I can't find him! He never came home last night! I've called Sam, I've called Tucker, I've driven by the park—"
Maddie climbed out of bed. "Are you sure?" Jazz nodded. "Wake up your father," she said with a sigh. Jazz overreacting was not unheard of. Her son was probably in bed safe and sound, or at least had just sneaked out to meet Sam and Tucker somewhere—despite her disciplinary measures, that was a regular occurrence. As Jazz set to the immense task of waking up Jack Fenton, who was snoring away under the blankets like a bear, Maddie left the bedroom.
She came to a stop outside Danny's room and, with a moment of hesitation, pushed open the door. It swung open with a creak, and she peered inside the shadowed room with a desperate hope. The bed was empty, the sheets rumpled, but that was normal for Danny. Otherwise, the room was in relative order. She checked his closet, his windowsill, even under his bed, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
Maddie clambered downstairs, calling her son's name, but only heard Jazz's distant voice. Danny was not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom, not in the lab, not in the yard. Jazz was right; he was just gone.
"Oh, man," Danny moaned, spinning around and trying to locate the Portal. "I need to be home, now!" He fretted for several minutes, staring at the place where the Portal should have been. "Isn't there any other way out of this place?"
After several moments of hard thinking, he snapped his fingers. "Plasmius!" He blinked and flinched. "If I wasn't a C student, I'd have remembered that a long time ago." Without another word, he hurried off to find his enemy's copycat portal.
He found the giant floating football, all right. But behind it was… nothing. "What?" Danny said.
"It's gone, Daniel."
Danny spun around to find his arch-nemesis floating glumly before him. "Plasmius? Where—what do you mean, it's gone?"
Vlad Plasmius sighed and rubbed his eyes with his hands. "The ecto-filtrator blew up weeks ago. I was going to take one of your father's, but…" He indicated the Ghost Zone around him. "I guess Jack got to me first. One of life's bitter ironies."
Danny looked at him numbly. "No…"
"I'm afraid so, Daniel. You and I aren't getting out of this ectoplasmic wasteland anytime soon."
Maddie spent the next day frantically combing the town for any hint of Danny.
"I haven't seen him since Friday," said Mr. Lancer.
"Not a word, Mrs. Fenton," Valerie said. "Have you tried his cell phone?" (She had; it was off.)
Tucker and Sam exchanged worried glances, chorused, "He's not with us," and ran off.
"Fenton? Why would he be here?" asked Dash at the Nasty Burger.
The worker at the arcade said, "Sorry, ma'm. No one here by that name."
Within three days, she had searched the entire town and there still wasn't a peep of Danny's whereabouts. Maddie was distraught, and that was an understatement. She and Jack came to the point of putting up "Have You Seen This Boy?" posters all around Amity and they were about to call the police to bleakly report him missing when there was a ring at the doorbell.
Her heart leapt, and she sprinted to the door and threw it open. But her face fell when she saw no one there but Sam and Tucker. She quickly ushered them in anyway, trying to be a good host to her boy's best friends. Their faces were grim and she was sure that whatever news they bore, it wasn't good.
Jazz came down the stairs too, gravely, and guided Maddie and Jack to the couch. "You might want to sit down for this," she said with a sigh.
"What—what are you kids doing?" she asked.
"First off," Tucker interrupted. "When was the last time you saw Danny Phantom?"
The Far Frozen was cold, Danny decided. Very, very cold. He was currently sitting in front of a blazing blue fire, sipping some kind of hot purple drink that was extremely delicious but still didn't manage to pervade the icy coldness that surrounded the realm. Dejectedly, he remembered his conversation with the giant snow beast that was one of his only allies in the Ghost Zone.
"The Infinimap," Frostbite had informed Danny, "has been stolen."
"What?" he'd shrieked.
Frostbite had merely shrugged in reply. "It is an artifact with a will of its own. Its home is here in the Far Frozen, but it often makes its way to all kinds of places in the Ghost Zone. Rarely is it in one place for long." Seeing Danny falter, he softened his tone. "Great One, do not worry. We of the Far Frozen will provide what we can for you, and I am sure that you will find a way back to your people soon." Danny remained silent and Frostbite eventually broke the stillness by handing him a cup. "Are you thirsty?"
Danny shook his head—his ghost form wasn't burdened by the obligation of most human necessities—but accepted the cup anyway. Seeming to realize that Danny wasn't in the mood for talking, Frostbite left him alone in front of the lair's fireplace.
Danny took another swallow of the drink as his thoughts drifted to home. How long had he been gone? Days? Sam would be worried sick… and his parents… who knew what they thought?
Maddie looked at Jack quizzically, but his befuddled expression held no answers. "The ghost boy?" she said, and paused. "We got him with the Fenton Bazooka a few nights ago. He's in the Ghost Zone." She thought for a moment, then her eyes widened. "But—he couldn't have kidnapped Danny!"
Sam slapped her forehead for some reason, but Jazz leaned forward. "Why not, Mom? Why couldn't he have kidnapped Danny?" If her tone sounded accusatory, Maddie was sure it was just her imagination.
"Because we dismantled the Fenton Portal, Jazz," she reminded her. "No ghosts are ever invading Amity Park again."
There was a silence for a reason Maddie didn't know. But suddenly the three teenagers huddled together, whispering sharp words and questions that Maddie strained to hear. She caught the occasional "Danny," but that was all, except when Sam protested aloud, "He wouldn't want this!" then quickly lowered her voice again.
"What is going on?" Jack asked, frustrated. At his words, as if on cue, all three of them leaned back and stopped their covert conversation.
"Mom," Jazz said. "We think Danny's in the Ghost Zone."
At this, Maddie's world shattered.
Further questioning of the kids proved fruitless. She and Jack were violently in denial and they did end up making that phone call to the police. More days passed, with no results. They tried to rebuild their portal, tried so hard, but it was a useless endeavor—the fragments were already scattered and broken beyond repair, and they no longer had government funding to pay for the expensive pieces and parts they'd previously taken for granted.
By the time a week had come and gone since she'd last seen Danny, Maddie was hopeless. Her baby was floating around in the Ghost Zone somewhere and she had no way to get to him. Sweet, innocent, blue-eyed Danny! What would he do without his mother? There were so many ghosts out there, Phantom being just one of them, and who knows what they'd do if they found him…
She was seized by impossible terror. No, no, he was still alive, he was okay, he had to be. A cold, heavy feeling sank upon her.
Madeline Fenton was a woman who rarely shed a tear, but she wasn't ashamed to admit that she cried long and hard that day.
The eighth day, Sam and Tucker showed up at her doorstep again, worry creasing both of their young faces. "Still no luck?" asked Tucker despondently the moment she, and not Danny, opened the door.
Maddie shook her head slowly. "I—" She swallowed hard. "I don't think he's coming back, Tucker," she choked out. The tears threatened to come again. She felt strong arms come up on her from behind, and she leaned into her husband's girth, holding on for dear life.
"I think we should tell them," Tucker said. Maddie turned her head in surprise to find that he was talking to Sam, who was shaking her head anxiously.
"Tell us what?" Jack said from behind her.
Tucker stepped forward. "Da—mphishphmsh!" Sam's hand had clapped over his mouth quickly, obscuring his words.
Maddie willed her eyes to stay dry as she crouched down until she was at eye level with Sam. "Samantha," she said. Sam's face reddened in embarrassment and fury at the use of her full name, but Maddie continued, "Danny is my only son. You've never been a mother—maybe one day, you will be—but I'll tell you now, a mother's love for her child is one of the strongest bonds there is on this planet. If you know anything—anything—about where my little boy is, whether good or bad, tell me now. It's the only thing I'm asking from you." Sam opened her mouth to speak but Maddie cut her off softly. "From one girl who loves my Danny, to another."
Sam blinked a few times, stunned, but slowly closed her eyes and let her hand drop from Tucker's mouth to her side. Maddie smiled, just a little, until—
"Danny is Phantom!" Tucker blurted out. All eyes turned to the boy, startled, as he prattled, "There was this accident a while back, with the portal, and he came out looking all floaty and dead, but then he wasn't, and he's been pretending this whole time 'cause he knew you guys would worry, and he was afraid that you would dissect him, but he knew you wouldn't, but now you've sucked him into the Ghost Zone with no way out, and who knows what he's doing in there?"
In the quiet that followed, Maddie and Jack both turned to face Tucker and said one word: "What?"
Danny was desperate. He had been wandering the Ghost Zone for what felt like forever, only pausing to fight with whatever ghost invaded his personal bubble or to enter the random doors and portals that seemed to abound in the otherwise empty landscape, searching for a way back to Amity. Each portal led to a different time and place. He'd already seen ancient Palestine, the War of the Roses, and a bit of 28 th century China, but nothing anywhere/when near his Amity Park. He sighed.
He was alone, mostly by choice. He wasn't going to even try to stay with Frostbite, not when a way out of the Ghost Zone could be just through the next door—He twisted the doorknob of a door coming up conveniently on his right and pulled it open, slamming it shut when he heard "The Redcoats are coming!" being cried only a few feet away. Messing with the time stream would not help him in the least, he was sure.
He'd tried time travel, of course, but Clockwork had refused to help. "Problems need to be solved in the present," Danny mocked under his breath. "Just because I have a magical time travel staff thingy doesn't mean I'm going to let you use it." Okay, maybe those weren't Clockwork's exact words, but they were close.
Danny had also searched for his friend, Wulf, in the hope that the canine would be able to tear a hole into the Real World. Wulf was conspicuously absent from the Ghost Zone, though, as evidenced by Walker having put "Wanted" posters for Wulf all over the Zone. Danny had a sinking feeling that he was hiding out somewhere in the human world, completely inaccessible. Another dead end.
Danny let out another sigh of frustration, then flew past the door, no destination in mind other than "home."
For a few days, he reminisced, he'd had a companion in his wanderings. Princess Dorothea had taken a break from ruling her kingdom when she'd heard that Danny was aimlessly traipsing the Ghost Zone as he looked for home. She had flown out to meet him the next time he was near her castle. He was adverse to company because of the homesick mood he was in, but was content to let her float by his side as long as she helped him inspect some of the doors and portals for a possible way out.
They hadn't talked much. Dora had tried to make conversation a few times, but Danny rarely replied, and she gave up. The rest of their time together was spent in relative silence.
"I am going back to my kingdom," Dora told him at the end of the third day.
"What?" Having grown comfortably used to her presence, Danny was startled.
"Phantom," she said. "You do not really want me here, do you? You need to do this by yourself."
It was the truth. He nodded slowly.
Dora smiled sadly. "It is all right, Phantom. I know a haunting-ghost when I see one."
He didn't quite know how to take that, and let her leave without another word before he continued onwards in his quest for home.
The baffling explanation to Jack and Maddie took hours, especially once Jazz came downstairs and began excitedly throwing in alternate names from the ones Sam and Tucker used ("Ghost X"? "Crate Creep"? "Lunch-A-Belle"?) and other little irrelevancies. Maddie's head was spinning and Jack was zoning out. Eventually, though, it was all over, and Maddie excused herself from the room and went outside to get some air. She took a shuddering breath. Her—son—was the ghost boy. Her sweet little baby boy was one of the most powerful ghosts in Amity Park. She wanted to deny it with every fiber of her being, but… the frightening thing was, it made so much sense. Why Danny was always getting in trouble at school nowadays. Why he was so tired after almost twelve hours of sleep. Why he'd be in his bedroom one minute, completely gone the next. Why, every time she talked to him about ghosts, he got as nervous as if she was going to shoot him any second. She put her head in her hands tiredly.
Ohhh, my poor, poor Danny.
It was a little green portal that Danny finally found, barely bigger than his head. He squeezed through it as best he could, letting his legs meld into a ghostly wisp as he pulled himself onto the other side with a grunt. In moments, he had slipped into the Real World. The natural sunlight blinded him, and he shook his head to clear it. He looked around to orient himself.
Before him, he saw the Nasty Burger.
For minutes, Danny could do nothing but gape. Then he let out a cry of joy, screaming until tears leaked out of his eyes. He was here! He was home! He flew higher and higher, laughing as he felt the oh-so-real sun beat down on him as he drenched himself by swooping through the floating clouds. Then he fell into a dive, navigating the town he knew by heart. He looked this way and that, soaring past Casper High, the library, the park, until he spotted two of the most familiar faces in the world.
"Sam!" he shouted. "Tucker!" Danny laughed again at their astonishment, dropping to the ground like a stone and sliding to a stop. He threw an arm around both of them and pulled them close, saying nothing but overexcited gibberish as they asked him where he'd been, why he hadn't gotten back sooner. He restrained himself from sobbing the way he needed to. He could smell the smoky residue that always seemed to surround Sam ever since she had gotten on her incense kick. He could hear the almost inaudible mechanical whining of Tucker's PDA. It was unbelievable, these little things he'd forgotten about them, the things he thought he'd never experience again. He grinned and grabbed Sam's hand, then Tucker's, and took to the air without a word. His friends screamed in surprise.
"Danny, where are we going?" Sam had to shout to be heard over the wind.
Danny smiled back at her widely and proclaimed, "Home!"
It had been three weeks.
Three weeks spent fiddling half-heartedly with the Fenton Portal with the knowledge that it was impossible to fix, or maybe even recreate. Three weeks of sitting in her and her husband's room, shooting temporary portals into the air, crying for her son but hearing no reply. Three weeks spent tracking down any non-Danny ghosts with abandon, shooting them into the Ghost Zone.
Sam and Tucker had helped and were surprisingly adept at ghost hunting. Together, they caught dozens of ghosts, each one weaker than the next. Maddie vaguely recognized the Wisconsin Ghost when they trapped him early on, before Danny'd gone missing, along with a few others that the teens named for her—Technus, Desiree, Kitty, the Box Ghost, an Ectopus.
But none of the ghosts they found were Danny.
Anyone who heard the news of Danny's disappearance offered their preemptive condolences. She wanted to tell them that he was alive, he had to be, he'd be coming back soon. But the thing was, she wasn't sure herself.
Until that day, the first day of the third week. That day, she looked out the window to see Danny, her son Danny, sprinting to the door with Sam and Tucker in tow. He flung open the door and leapt into her arms with a delirious grin on his face, squeezing her tighter than even Jack ever had. She heard him laugh and she laughed too, breathlessly. "Danny?" She hardly dared believe.
"Mom!" he said back and buried his face in her shoulder, laughing until she felt tears soak through her jumpsuit. And immediately, as if drawn by magnetic force, Jazz and Jack and Sam and Tucker were all there too, clustered around her and Danny in a gigantic group hug. And Maddie could do nothing but hold him, stroke her baby's head, never wanting to let him go again.
It was a natural portal, he explained once the hug and welcomings and "I missed you"s ceased. Some portals sporadically opened from the Ghost Zone to the real world—into random places and random times—and he'd managed to find one that would lead him back home.
"You have the Fenton luck gene, son!" his father bellowed proudly and slapped him on the back.
"Yeah," he said. "I sure do."
They all ate dinner together that night, even Sam and Tucker—Maddie was sure to make a salad as well as hot dogs. During the meal, she noticed, Danny ate every bite of food, even if it was green-tinted and glowing. He chewed slowly, savoring every bite. He didn't talk a lot, either, but he hung onto every word of conversation as if it was the last thing he'd ever hear. She tried to place the expression of pure joy on his face. It was… reveling.
They talked a lot, especially about Phantom. Jack and Maddie had so many questions about the science of it all—did it hurt to transform? (No.) Did he have ectoplasm instead of blood as Phantom? (Yes.) Did he age in ghost form? (No.) Was he ever attacked in the Ghost Zone? (Yes, but he managed to keep himself from getting hurt too badly.) Did he have any ghost friends? (A couple.)
Eventually, Tucker and Sam had to leave—and the intimate good-bye hug Sam gave Danny didn't go unnoticed by Maddie—and Jazz went to bed. Danny was left on the couch in the living room, a smile still on his face as he tinkered with the Jack Fenton Action Figure someone (guess who) had left on the cushion. Maddie sat next to him lovingly and just looked at him.
He had his grandfather's nose. His face was round and full. His hair was pitch-black as always and his eyes were still huge and sky-blue, if they looked a bit duller than before.
"Danny?" she murmured.
He looked up immediately. "Yeah?"
"You tired, hon?"
He seemed to relax. "I guess. Why?"
"I dunno. You just look a bit," she stopped to think. "older." It was bizarre, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. He carried himself a little differently, spoke a little differently. "You said the natural portals could go through time?"
He glanced at her through his bangs. "Yeah," he said again.
Maddie paused again, thinking. "And that you don't age in ghost form?"
Danny just nodded.
"Danny…. oh, Danny," she protectively pulled him closer to herself as trepidation settled itself in the pit of her stomach. Before she even asked, she had a guess as to the answer. "How long were you really in the Ghost Zone?"
Her son was quiet for a moment. He avoided meeting her eyes when he finally answered, "A hundred thirty-three years, two months, five days, eight hours... Give or take."