Disclaimer: I don't own Danny Phantom nor Full Metal Alchemist.

Dedicated to Wondrous Writer for his very calm and dignified manner of asking for updates XD

PS. Sorry about typos and stuff.


Chapter 1: A second start point.

There are many undeniable truths in life: The sky is blue, we are all going to die, and teenagers do stupid things.

Daniel James Fenton, fourteen years old, was no exception to this rule. Which is why he bent to the peer pressure of his two best friends and took his two best friend to an unsupervised tour to his parent's lab -which was filled to the brim with dangerous tools and unstable failed experiments.

The duo of visiting teenagers made a point to poke and prod everything in arms-length, and thanks to a higher power they didn't touch anything that exploded, crippled them or got them killed... that is until an hexagonal hole in the wall caught their sight.

Looking back on it in the future, Danny would know that what he did was stupid, but at the moment he was just too busy pretending he had an idea of what he was doing -despite the fact that he had long since perfected the art of tuning out his parent voices, and had no idea what anything in the room was.

That was just another thing that he would come to regret in hindsight.

The idea of coming down the inventor's basement was clearly stupid, but not as much as it was to go inside the Fenton Ghost Portal because of a dare. Sure, his parents' inventions never worked so far, but he knew that their failures were borderline lethal and highly explosive.

It were dumb luck and years of practice the ones that had prevented the adult Fentons from dying. However, as it was apparent -while Danny's world was reduced to a swirly green of excruciating pain- that the careless teen didn't have any of the two elements that kept his parents alive.

The pain that threatened to destroy his very soul vanished almost instantly, and Danny felt his body disintegrate and turn into ashes, and was fairly sure he would open his eyes to find himself in a hospital bed somewhere... he soon would discover that was not the case, and would come to wish fate would have been as kind.

A changed Daniel Fenton found himself in an endless white room that was completely empty save for an incredibly creepy purple-black door and himself. His now white hair brushed his forehead, and Danny could feel himself hyperventilating until he realized that he wasn't truly breathing. Panic hit him two-fold when he realized his heart was not beating on top of his lungs having drawn his last breath.

Daniel Fenton was dead.

He had become a phantom of his own self.

A high pitched scream came out of his throat, he didn't stop until his vocal cords got ripped and he coughed up blood, panicking further as he instantly realized it was now ectoplasmic green.

"This is not happening. Not happening, not happening, no no nonononNO!" Danny jumped to his feet, paced around in wide circles, screamed, and then paced some more.

It would be impossible to say how long he remained in his panic before he calmed down enough to stop and think. When he did however, he cursed. He cursed himself, his stupidity and kicked the non-existent air as it had offended him.

"I'm dead, I'm so dead, my parents are going to kill them when they know I came down into their lab... no, that doesn't matter, they can kill me, I'm already dead," he reasoned until realization downed upon him.

Danny was dead. He was a ghost. His parents hunted ghosts. His parents would probably find him and rip him apart molecule by molecule.

His spirit would probably end up being destroyed to the point he would not be able to properly have an afterlife.

It should be possible for a true ghost to feel tired, but Danny felt that he lacked the strenght to even remain standing. Wooblingly, he stumbled towards the only thing that would prevent him from falling to the white floor he was standing on: The Gate. The white-haired teen used his two gloved hands -which were opposite in color than the gloves the hazmat-suit he had donned was, and that had glued to his mental representation of his soul as a negative of the real one- to support himself to the purple door -a door made of a purple so dark it looked like black- and whispered with his forehead pressed to the engraved surface "don't let them find me".

The Gate, which had been dormant until then, shook as the twin doors inside of it moved inwards. Danny stepped back out of sheer surprise, and was greeted to a glimpse of absolute darkness that seemed to look back at him... which he soon noticed was looking back at him as a single pair of black eyes made themselves known.

A black hand slowly moved out and offered itself out to him. He didn't know what it was. He only knew he could not stay in the white expanse, nor he could ever go back home. Feeling like he was being offered a way out, he took the hand in his and shook it up and down.

Suddenly, Danny was not looking at a pair of eyes; he was looking into hundreds of eyes of all sizes and evil smiles popped around in a random pattern. Danny's free hand wrapped itself around the black hand on top of his other and pulled, trying to become free.

He was not strong enough.

Still, the hand didn't pull him in, even if it didn't let him go. It was just waiting. And Danny could feel something calling out to him from the other side. "I will come," his voice let out before he knew what he was saying, and hundreds of black hands wrapped around him greedily. He could feel the darkness involve him, consume him, destroy him and rebuild it as he was pulled into the black void he had given permission to pull him in.

He could feel his soul fighting to stay inside his ghostly body as uncountable hands tried to rip his skin from his bones. He felt himself almost loosing that fight before something akin to a tie could be reached and the pulling stopped. The knowledge of The Gate was endless, and the truth of a world of alchemy burned inside his brain over and over as knowledge forced itself into his mind, and gave him a headache that was more painful than the electric shock of the portal.

Soon after being forced to learn the truth about alchemy, Danny came to known all there was to be known inside of his black prison.

And with it came the knowledge that all the alchemical knowledge was worthless to him, for only the living could become part of the circle of life and reach the energy of the world.

For longer that he would ever known he became just one more of the children of the Gate: an unnatural soul in search of a body, floating in the darkness without purpose. The children that were barely more than black blobs of hunger and spite were just like him, and like them he was fated to tear apart the beings that recklessly came looking for The Truth of Alchemy and consume their bodies.

He was fated to become an homunculus.

Several fools opened the door while Danny stayed in the darkness: A man with a dark skin and white hair covered in tattoos, begging to get his fiancee back; a black-haired woman that had lost her baby, a couple of blonde kids... but none of the vessels they offered tempted him enough to battle their meat against the others. Danny didn't want to become a helpless mesh of blood inside of an incomplete body like the shadow who jumped at the chance of taking the woman's face.

He didn't want to settle for a piece of the living, not like the pale, long-haired kid that snatched away the arm of the oldest blonde kids that came as a pair (that particular shadow being one of the few with an actual body: for the woman that created him had handed the body of the new homunculus back to the door). It was because of that kid that Danny knew that it would better to chose a body that could be completely swallowed by the door: for the door was filled with energy that would allow a body to mature without the use of the crystallized mesh of souls known as the Philosopher Stone.

Danny knew it would be a long wait. A body being swallowed by the door was rare, but not unheard off. In fact, the younger blond kid that had come inside not too long ago was exactly that, but none of the shadows could actually claim a body whose soul was tied to another. Meaning, that Alphonse's connection with Edward (the one that allowed Al's body to snatch the nutrients the short-tempered blond gained by eating) protected him from being ripped to shreds and fed upon like a piece of meat tossed to starved wolves.

The body Danny would eventually chose to consume was as perfect as it was ironic. Normally, shadows simply lose their ghostly forms by choosing a vessel and becoming homunculi, but this one... it was the Danny from the other side of the door.

A fight between the shadows broke as they all attempted to make it to the scrawny, blue-eyed kid holding to the corpse of a brunette in a teal dress. Mother and child. A potential vessel and a clump of meat.

Not waiting for the kid to make a wish (or gain something in return from his would be deal), the starved shadows reached out to him, ready to rip him apart.

A wave of anger washed over the only green-eyed shadow (whose coloration was caused due the amount of ectoplasm mixing with his soul before he joined The Gate), and he pushed the creatures that dared prey upon the body that should rightfully become his.

The innocent child whimpered in fright as a single white-gloved hand reached out to him and pulled him. The abnormal soul of the body-less shadow and the soul of the living human resonated. They belonged together, even if they weren't parts of a whole. It was like a reflection belonging to that which was being reflected, and the two of them merged as the ectoplasm in the shadow's body changed the very DNA of the vessel.

The human Danny would never gain his wish to get his mother back, and the woman's body would be devoured completely (which was quite ironic, for the kid would normally have been the one to lose a part of himself and the woman the one to come back as an homunculus). On the other hand, Danny, the phantom, thrived. His new body was so compatible with his soul that he didn't suffer any adverse effect... none, save the fact that he couldn't leave until the door opened anew; for only The Gate granting a wish could make it spend enough energy to weaken the barrier that kept those inside it trapped.

Which only served to anger him further.

Danny's let out an inhuman angry growl escape his lips as he used his newly formed body to punch the inside of the door over an over. It was an useless effort, though: it remained unopened and unscratched despite his efforts.

The lack of results only served to anger him further, and he pulled the hair on the back of his neck. His now ungloved fingers brushed upon the abused skin that had recently gained the Ouroboros mark -which was hidden underneath his hair- annoying him anew.

It was weird. Danny never remembered being so angry in his life, but, as his consciousness battled that of the ex-owner of his new body, he felt his anger increase until his world was reduced into animalistic rage.

Danny was angry at his parents that forced him to a life of ridicule and mockery. He was beyond upset with his too-smart sister who made him feel inferior since he had memory. He hated the friends that manipulated him and caused his death. The jocks that bullied him, the pretty girls that never deemed him beneath them, the teachers that looked the other way while he was beated black and blue by the bullies of the school... Danny wanted to kill them all.

Memories not his own also have him seething in rage. An alternate Jack Fenton neglecting his family to search for the spirits, to the point his not-mother and not-sister starved due the lack of income. He loathed the ignorant villagers that could not tell apart alchemy from dark magic and turned him into a pariah only for trying to get his mother back. He also hated his alternate-mother from rejecting the kind, grey-haired old man who had loved her during two long decades of rejection and kept offering them a way out. The memory of that man, Vlad,... the one that showed him a light that was never to be his, made him want to go on a rampage; and yet, he was fairly sure he wouldn't harm him as much as the rest, if given the chance.

The newly former homunculus felt rage because of the way both Daniels' lives ended up due their own stupidity, while they tried all that they had for a bag full of nothing.

Still, the wrath he felt towards himself was almost as big: His two former selves were pathetic and weak, and had let others walk all over them and pushed them aside. On top of the hatred he fell from his old selves, he hated the being he had become: The tiny shreds of humanity inside of him (courtesy of the soul he had stripped of his current body) acting enough as a consciousness so he could hate himself from that which he had stolen.

Homunculus were not meant to have consciousness. But the body they came to own sometimes inherited a quirky reluctance not to harm certain people... that and grow attached to humans. However, the norm was not Danny's case: the moral compass of his host was so damn sturdy that even death would not chase away the idea that harming others was bad.

Danny truly hated the alchemist/doppelganger in him. And the alchemist/doppelganger hated Danny with the same burning passion.

...

Years continued to pass in the timeless void, and the door remained closed. Danny's cycles of rage and righteous guilt happened so many times that the two parts of his persona started to mix personality-wise; while his body began to split to the point that sometimes, only sometimes, he could feel his whole body turning almost human, wile others he seemed to be so completely full of energy that his body glowed, allowing him to see beyond his nose in the light-sucking void.

Then IT happened. The Gate was opened and the hoard of shadows turned their unfeeling eyes towards the sacrificial lams that would either feed them or take their place.

Recognition bubbled inside of Danny as this world's Jack Fenton appeared holding the grey-haired man that had tried to save alter!Danny from a live of mysery and neglect.

Danny wasn't too happy about that his father would destroy the man, but he was beyond caring about anything that was not taking his chance to run away now that he had a body to break out of the white limbo outside.

So he measured his time, looking the mouth of Jack open and close as insane words continued to pour as he stabbed swinged a knife towards the invisible barrier of the door. The shadows, noticing the free prey within their reach pulled him in arm-first as he completed the stabbing motion. "I WILL DESTROY YOU!" Jack yelled as the shadows laughed at his efforts. Danny, on the other hand, was not very amused. A man as daft as this Jack Fenton -any Jack Fenton, really- would never be able to come here, for he knew nothing about alchemy. The huge man must have this world's Danny's research, his research, to get to The Gate.

"Let him go!" A short blond demanded, and instantly Danny's eyes zeroed on him. The kid was fairly familiar, since they got so little people knocking on his door. Danny smiled at his own bad, mental-pun and continued to observe curiously as the kid began getting pulled in along with the father of his body.

It took little time from Danny's conscience to butt in and he felt the impulse to save the kid... but he wouldn't just yet. Not until Jack's body and soul got in so the man would take his place inside hell. It wouldn't take long to happen anyway, and Danny called forth all the energy he had managed to save inside of his body, wrapping himself in a small field that seemed to generate it's now wind.

Danny's feet took off of the ground and he flew forwards -something he hadn't known he could do-, and used his stretched, gloved hand to push the blond that was being pulled in with a second to spare before he would be lost to the other side. The blond screamed in pain as the shadows screeched in anger at the lost meal, filling the place with the annoying noise that made Danny growl in response. Gold eyes met green as the homunculus looked down to his burden.

The eye-encounter didn't last long, for enraged hands tried to pull the two back in. As a mean of gaining time, Danny kicked the corpse of the man he had come to know as Vlad into the Darkness, and barely give it a thought as it was swallowed all into the darkness.

"You ok?" Danny asked the blond out of reflex -and not really minding the answer- but he found that the kid was out cold. "You are welcome," Danny sarcastically replied to the unconscious kid.

Then, without any warning, the world around him vanished as the world of the living pulled back the blond, taking certain green-eyed passenger along with him.

Danny would come back to his sense to the backlash of dimension traveling with a face full of dirt:The body of the homunculus was currently sprawled in a transmutation circle. As green eyes opened, he got a good look into the gold ones that stared back to him.

Feeling his body weak, and knowing he was unaccustomed to the gravity suddenly pressing at him on all sides, he got up, resignedly decided to pay revenge upon the townspeople when he was back at full strength.

Light wrapped around Danny as he called what little he had left of energy and he moved towards the canopy of trees; his oddly-dressed frame shone as bright as the moon for those in the ground, but he soon fell down out of their sight. A light unexpectedly formed around him as he, for the first time, lost all the energy in his body. The light forming around his belly traveled up and down and, before he could say ghost, the body of one the long dead Daniel Fenton was sprawled on top of a pile of fallen leaves.

Thunder menacingly sounded in the distance as green eyes blinked open for a moment and he found himself looking to a drooling fat man with a big nose and a curvaceous, black-haired woman with a gorgeous face.

"Can I eat him, Lust?" The fatso put his chubby finger inside his mouth, looking at him like a child would look at a piece of candy.

"Not this one, Gluttony. This one is one of us." She knelled down to caress the pale face of the now-raven-haired, "Pick him up. Let's take him to Dante."

"Yes, Lust."

Rays and thunder continued to fill the sky with promises of doom for the world of the living. Rain would be soon to follow, and any trace the humunculi traveling in the forest would be cleaned by the fallen drops. It still wasn't the best time to have a confrontation with the Fullmetal Alchemist.

TBC


.


AN: Hi there everyone! I hope everyone enjoyed it! I don't know how far I plan to get this now that is no longer a oneshot, but I wish to point out is going to be irregularly updated if anything, and that I need to re-watch the FMA anime before even attemtping to come up with a plot. So far, this is the story told on Danny's side... Also, I wan't your opinion on this: I have been considering to make Vlad come back as an homunculous too. I wan't to know your opinion before I try to come up with a plot. As far as I see it, Vlad would be a perfect Greed, and since the one in cannon is eventually killed and doesn't play that big of a role, I think I can pull and interesting AU with Vlad in it.

So... Vlad or no Vlad? The dynamic between Danny and Vlad is something that I enjoy, but shall not be exactly like in the DP universe simply because Danny is sort of bad, and he is going to be Wrath in this fic.

I hope you liked it, and MERRY CHRISTMASS!