AN: I have a bad feeling I'm going to get Danny out of character. I just know it. BTW, I want to murder this chapter. I wish it was a smoking hole in the ground, I really do. But before you read this… thing, I want to say "HOLY CRAP! 30 REVEIWS! AWESOME! 13 ALERTS AND 12 FAVORITES! I'VE BEEN C2ED! WOOT! THANKYOU, THANKYOU, THANKYOU! SQUEEEEE! HUGS!"

Aftermath of an Afterlife

Chapter 4: Between One Room and the Next

He wanted to leave…

Now!

But, he refused to move from the random room he'd picked to throw his stuff in. He couldn't leave, because Vlad was obviously planning something major. Between Jazz getting an all expenses paid trip to a summer-long college fair, the recent ghost attacks on Amity Park, the sudden appearance of several ghosts throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey that his parents couldn't refuse checking out (especially when the falling boxes caused some serious injury)….

And with the latest ongoing feud between the Fentons' and Mansons' adults that was triggered by some gossip the Mansons had heard from their rich friends, it was a pretty solid plot to keep the young teenager in the Wisconsin Mansion.

There was no way Vlad hadn't planned for an escape, either. So running was not an option. But sitting here in this mansion left to nothing but his own thoughts was not good for his mental health.

He was barely able to talk with Sam without her parent's monitoring, Jazz was busy with the normal smart rich people at that stupid camp, and the Foley's were off visiting obscure relatives and Tucker was along for the ride now that the Fenton grand cross country trip was abandoned.

He was stuck here with no one to talk to.

Sure, he could have tried calling Valerie, but Vlad probably had the mansion bugged and signals blocked anyway. And he didn't doubt Val was part of this evil plot.

He really just wanted to phase out of the outer walls and fly back to Fenton Works.

…But Danny couldn't leave a scheming Vlad Plasmius alone…

Lying in the far-too-soft bed, Danny still felt as if his blood was ever-so-slowly running cold. There was something to be said about Danny Fenton: he hadn't hated any single person in his entire life, but he didn't really consider Vlad a person. Not usually, anyways.

That man had proven himself to be the most sub human slime he had ever met. Cold, calculating, not warm or feeling. The only true emotion that he'd ever seen from the man was bitter jealousy. Only the fact that he seemed to hate so strongly was the only thing keeping the fourteen year old from coming to the conclusion that this man was incapable of emotion.

What bothered Danny was that his parents had been friends with this man. His father thought that he was the most wonderful person in the world. His mother had similar sentiments until their trip courtesy of the "DALV" group. Had he once been a decent person? Or was he just a little less twisted?

Why did the only person just like me have to be a crazed up fruitloop?

Now there was a depressing thought. Danny listened for a way to avoid the stream of endless thoughts that would keep going on and on without a distraction. It was like slowly going insane, and he already felt he was on his own. Vlad never helped him. Vlad made it worse, tried to push him harder and harder until he broke. That was probably what he was doing right now.

'Creep.'

He could hear his hated host pacing on the floor above him.

Talk about odd. Vlad Masters didn't walk like that. Don't laugh, the fourteen year old had never been able to hear Vlad walk unless the man was trying to impress someone, to make an entrance.

Obviously, the man was doing this to annoy him.

Two could play at that game.

Vlad Masters was an amnesiac, roughly forty, and now in charge of a little creep of roughly thirteen, who changes the temperate of a room by entering and plays a mean staring contest. This was the son of Vlad's college sweetheart who he had been in love with since he had met her, and the father of the little creep was none other then Vlad's best friend from college, and by all accounts his only friend.

That was a depressing thought.

And it didn't help that he couldn't remember when this relationship had started, or what he was doing when it happened.

It was odd, though. None of this looked futuristic in anyway. He just now realized that the future, judging by the Fenton family, was not what people had predicted. No one was running around in rubber suits with plasma guns! Well, Jack and Maddie were two for two, but they were Jack and Maddie.

'…Uh-uh, you went and mad yourself sad again…Dangit, Masters!"

"Jack Fenton and my precious Maddie Masters? Errr… Maddie Fenton," he murmured to himself, pacing the room he had waken up in, after having spent a good thirty minutes trying to find it again. He never was very good with recognizing his surroundings, so it was a miracle he had found it at all. But that was besides the point. "…Maddie Fenton…"

"It sounds wrong, doesn't it?"

"Yes, yes it does."

He didn't really care about the voices in his head now. Yes, voices. As in multiple ones. Vlad couldn't believe it himself. This one was the original voice, the only one he was actually able to carry on a conversation with. The others were more disembodied and seemed more like memories of unknown events. Some were people he knew, others seemed familiar, but he didn't know them. Or, he didn't remember.

Sometimes, a few seconds of memory would flash in front of his eyes, but it was never enough to tell what he was seeing. Sometimes it was as a flash of light, sometimes accompanied by a "Bonsai!" or "Bogus!" but it never made any sense. It was never enough to trigger anything.

'Well, there is the cold, spine-tinglyness of it, but… It's probably nothing…'

"Are you trying to be a complete moron?"

He probably was a complete moron. Afterall, Maddie and Jack? Why them, why each other? Why did Maddie prefer Jack to him? Why would Jack steal away Maddie? How could that have happened? There was that ever so small crush that Maddie had harbored once upon a blue moon ago (or, longer now, he supposed)… But had anyone seen this coming?

"Well…"

"Look at them out there chasing each other, laughing like that. I bet those two are just going to fall on top of each other and start making out at any second," said the girl sitting next to him on the bench, bitterness heavy in her voice. "Hold this; I'm getting my camera ready."

"What are you talking about? Harry, make-out? What the hell is wrong with you? Jack and Maddie? Please."

"What, you don't see the googly eyes they give each other all the time? You're clueless, Masters."

"Grow up, that's disgusting. Jack is too much of an idiot for Maddie. She needs an intelligent partner, not some moron who'll blow things up and ask for cookies."

"Wow, I never knew you actually had it in you to call your only friend an idiot."

"Please. Besides, Maddie is my friend too, and you're… well you're something. Besides Jack is a complete moron."

The reporter-in-training's eyes gleamed with the thought of some ensuing drama. "Those are fighting words, Vladdie."

"Come on, Harry, Maddie will never get with Jack. It's never going to happen. How can you see that as even a small possibility?

"That was two semesters before you lost your memory, idiot."

OK, so everyone knew. Boy, that made him feel so special…

Not that it answered anything.

It didn't matter if there had been some kind of attraction there. He wanted to know why it was there. Why had it blossomed into love? Why did they forget about him? Why did they betray him, leave him all alone. It made no sense. Why did they move so far from Wisconsin, Why did he stay? Why hadn't he done something to stop this; why on earth hadn't he tried to stop it?

Vlad Masters was not on the verge of tears. He was simply a scientific man seeking out answers as to how an unlikely phenomenon had occurred. He was not sad or losing it. He wasn't considering smashing that light either.

The lamp was not on the floor in many pieces.

If anyone has told you otherwise about these events is a liar who is simply bitter and jealous, and if you should see Vladimir Masters, please give him this person's name and address so he can respectfully discuss the evils of telling fibs.

Vlad sighed, throwing himself against the wall of what apparently was his own forgotten bedroom. He had not expected a muffled crash to come from the other side of the wall, however.

Examining the wall, he was unable to find any closet door, which mean whatever he just broke was in the adjoining room. He really didn't want to move, but after a few moments he sighed and pushed himself from the wall, and walked out into the hallway.

But he couldn't find anything in the adjoining room that was broken. And, again, there was no door leading to a closet, but he was pretty sure there was another room in between. This really wasn't his concern, but it was getting his mind off of other matters that he had not been near-tears over.

Of course, it was always possible that something inside the wall had shaken lose.

What if there was something walled in there? Like secret treasure or something! Ok, so it was a kidish idea, but still, thoughts of being famous and wealthy were…

Oh yeah, he was rich and wealthy. Or at least his future self was.

Unless… What if this wasn't his house in the future? What if, in the middle of the night they drugged him, knocked him out, forced him here in a Hollywood set, used make-up effects to age him, and then forced Maddie and Jack to pretend they were in love. And they forced Maddie to cut her hair, and once again used make-up magic to make them appear older. And they hired the little creep to pretend he was their son, and he was insane and sadistic and forced them to kiss, all in an attempt to freak him out, orchestrated by a freaky old woman and her twenty cats who wants nothing more then to watch twenty-year-old business students suffer emotional trauma, and she was watching all of this through the mirrors! They were actually one-way windows. No, It was all being filmed! And he had just accidentally broken a camera or a piece of sound equipment. In fact, he was probably hooked up to a device that was sending him messages; the director of the whole thing was speaking to him though an earpiece!

He wasn't an insane, voice-hearing nut!

"I'm not even going to go there."

He sighed. Maybe if he could figure out what had happened earlier, how his hand had managed to go though things, he could get to whatever was on the other side. He faced the barrier between him and whatever was there. Maybe if he concentrated he could go though the wall. After all, that wasn't so far-fetched in whatever mixed up universe he had found himself in.

But going though ways was insane. He was insane. What if he had imagined all of that before. What if he was hallucinating?

He shivered. He didn't like any of this. …Jack and Maddie in love, voices and hallucinations, and caring for their incredibly sadistic little creep of a son…

He dropped that line of thought and tried to concentrate.

'1…'

'2…'

'3…'

'And…'

He ran straight into the wall, and the next thing he knew he was on the ground. On his back. In the same room he had woke up in. With a splitting headache.

And, of course, a thin, pubescent boy was laughing his head off.

"Silence!" Vlad shouted at the little creep, though it seemed more like a reflex to him then something he said, feeling a very strange sensation surge though him. It wasn't painful, but it felt as if someone else stepped into his body for a moment. But as quickly as if came it was gone. It didn't matter, because the little creep had stifled his laughter. He was still smirking though, his feet going straight through the bits of what-was-once-a-lamp on his trip to the door, obviously still trying to hold in a giggle-fit.

Wait… his feet went right though all that glass? Wait...

No, no way. He was hallucinating again. He just had to get out of the room, that's all. He just needed to get out of that room.

"So then, who's up for pancakes?"

He didn't even know if he had any…

'It's my favorite food, I'm wealthy, I can afford this oversized hunk of I-hope-something-bad-didn't-happen-that-I-need-to-compensate-for, I can stomach living here alone, I'm in a bad mood, and it's the only thing I can cook without fire hoses and hazmat suits. We had better have pancakes.'

AN: Wow, that sucked. That sucked more then the suckiest thing to have ever come from the suckiest planet where all suck was first spawn. The entire chapter is trash, but I'm long overdue for an update. Writer's block has prevented this chapter from being anything like it was supposed to be. And the thing that kills me is I actually had a small break in my block earlier today, but for the first time in three weeks I was too busy to write.

Oh well, it's longer and not up to par with other chapters, but at least I'm not going to lose anymore sleep over this chapter.

And Vlad and Danny dialogue is extremely hard to write. That last bit with Danny watching Vlad run into the wall was rewritten several times to try to make it sound like a normal conversation between the two, but with Vladdie none the wiser. So, we get Danny too hysterical to speak. A cop-out, but considering I'm so tired I can't even remember the first three quarters of this chapter, or how to keep my eyes open….

Well, please review, and I'll try to get the next chapter out soon. I have ideas for that one that probably won't be 100 different then planned, and it's 20 less Fillerific