Summary: A brief exploration into the character of Dark Danny.

A/N: Warning:--This fic is disjointed and loaded with purposeful grammatical errors. I did this so I could better capture the insanity that I believe defines Dark Danny's entire existence. Hopefully it achieved what I hoped it would. Enjoy.

Danny is fourteen when the tragedy occurs.

Fourteen-- a child. Just a little boy, really. One who is unaccustomed to loss, and anguish. He wants to cheat on a test, an inconsequential little test. But it seems so very, very important at the time. He is a child, after all. He knows nothing of the future-- not really. He only knows what he is told. He wants so badly to do well on that test, but he does not have the time to study. He's a good boy, though. A nice boy.

When he is caught, it is only reasonable to assume that the whole thing will blow over. He meets Lancer at the Nasty Burger with Mom and Dad. It isn't that big of a deal. Life will go on.

But then future-him shows up, and suddenly everything is a much bigger deal than he thinks it ought to be. He has to be dreaming.

He's too weak to stop demon-him, too inexperienced. Soon Mom, Dad, Jazz, Sam and Tucker are all strapped to a giant vat of volatile burger sauce (and some detached part of his mind thinks that ha ha ha this is ridiculous-- there's no way this is real). And then BOOM. Everybody is dead and ohmygod I killed them.

It is on that day, that very first day, that he becomes Dark Danny, even if he does not realize it until later.

It hurts deep down in places he didn't even know could hurt. His child mind is drawing the inevitable conclusion that this is all his fault. He can't figure out if it's because of the test or because of future-him or both, but it's all his fault. He can see it as plain as day. It hurts almost as much as the loss itself.

Vlad takes him in, and the detached part of his mind is laughing again. Sometimes the laughter bubbles over into the rest of him, and he finds his entire body quivering with it. His sides hurt from the intensity. It makes him sick. Vlad finds him afterwards and orders somebody to clean the mess off the floor. He hands Danny a damp face cloth to wash away the tears and snot. Danny does not know how they got there in the first place.

Vlad leaves Danny to himself, because he doesn't know how to do anything else.

And Danny thinks.

He thinks a lot. About the past and the future and how everything is pointless now-- his future is set in stone. He has lost his ability to make choices, and everything is preordained by some cruel fate that he cannot control. He does not realize it, but he is broken. His sanity has been fractured by his anguish. His child-mind is dealing with the pain the only way it knows how.

It isn't his fault, you see. Not really. It was another him-- somebody who is him but isn't him. There isn't a choice in the matter, so how can he be held responsible for it?

A few months pass, and Danny does not go back to school. Left to his own devises he spirals deeper and deeper into his depression. He has too much time to think-- too much time to feel --and in his mind reality is being broken down, examined and rebuilt.

It is not him who killed all of his loved ones. It can't be. It just doesn't make any sense. He's Danny. Danny is a good boy. He loves his family. He loves his friends. He couldn't possibly do something like that. The person responsible is future-him. And future-him can't possibly be him. So he isn't responsible. He's not he's not he's not.

Not my fault. Not my fault.

But he still misses them. Still aches deep, deep inside. And even though he has convinced himself that he is not the reason why they all are dead, that giggling, detached part of him calls him a liar.

Liar liar pants on fire.

But it isn't a lie. He wants to make that horrible, hurtful part of him disappear. It's too much. It hurts too much.

So he goes to Vlad and asks him to make the hurt go away. Danny isn't sure how Vlad will do it, but Vlad is smart and powerful and he'll think of something for sure. And when Vlad straps him down to the operating table and takes out those scary-looking gloves, Danny trusts him. The terrible part of his mind laughs again. Vlad sticks the gloves in and then--

Danny is looking down at himself. But it isn't him. It's that terrible, awful part of him that is always laughing. But now he's looking down at those blue, blue eyes that call him a liar and a child and a fool, and he realizes that the detached part of him was never laughing at all. It was crying. It was making him hurt. And now he can finally make it disappear.

So he does.

He tells himself that he is happy, and with that other part of him gone there is nothing to tell him otherwise. He believes it. He gets an idea.

He laughs at Vlad, scorning him. Now that he is happy again he can remember how much he hates the man. He reaches in and takes away Vlad's power-- makes it his own. He considers killing him

killing is wrong but I don't have a choice. If he dies then he was already dead. Future-me killed him. Not me. Never me.

but decides against it. There needs to be somebody else in the world who can remember Mom.

He flies away, and the ache that he shouldn't be feeling (because he is happy) flares in his gut. He grins and tells himself that he is happy again. But it doesn't work as well this time.

He shoots a tree as he passes it, and the pain eases a little. He finds out later that shooting at people and buildings is even better. When he can smell the dust and the blood and hear the screams, suddenly nothing else matters. He isn't happy (even though he is, because he says he is)-- he's angry. Angry at them for still having what he doesn't. When he's angry, the pain goes away.

Eventually, nothing but the anger is left. And he realizes (tells himself) that he can't possibly be human anymore-- humans feel pain and anguish. He's happy when he's angry, humans aren't happy when they're angry. They're happy when they're with the people they love-- when they achieve the future that they wanted.

His family is dead, and his future was not his choice. But, in his mind, he's happy.

And therefore he isn't human anymore.

That detached part of his mind is long gone, so there is nothing left to tell him that experiencing anger is just as human as experiencing pain. There is nothing left to tell him that he is a liar.

He no longer calls himself Danny-- but really, he still is Danny.

He continues to laugh and destroy, and he reads in his spare time. Piles and piles of books. He likes fighting with the other ghosts, so he doesn't kill any of them. He could definitely kill them if he wanted to. And anyway, if they were to die, it wouldn't be his fault.

None of this was his choice.

He has fun fighting other ghosts, but he especially likes fighting Valerie. He always did like Valerie. He makes out like it's him who has the power to decide whether she lives or dies. He knows that he doesn't, but she needs to think he does. Otherwise she may not fight him anymore.

He might kill her, but he doesn't want her to die.

One day, when the anger becomes almost unbearable (but not really, because he's supposed to be happy), he decides that Amitty Park needs to go. He uses his new voice power to destroy the ghost-shield, and lures Valerie out to meet him. Today, he thinks, might be a good day for her to die. Not that it's his choice or anything. But seeing her makes the anger go away, and even though it's fun while he's fighting her, afterwards he always feels something that shouldn't be there because I'm not human anymore.

And then past-him, Sam and Tucker show up.

But Sam and Tucker are dead. Even if they are alive in the past, in this unchanging future they are dead. Seeing them again makes him feel like he does after he fights with Valerie. He doesn't like it-- doesn't like these ghosts of the past haunting him. He tries to make them disappear. Humors them. They are just like he remembers, and that's no good at all. Past-him stops Danny from making them disappear.

That is what makes past-him the worst of all three. Because past-him doesn't understand that his future is predetermined. That nothing he can do or say will change anything. That he has no choice.

So Danny decides to show him.

He goes back to the past and does everything like it's supposed to be done. He shows past-him what future-him did, shows past-him that everything is going to happen the way it should because it has already happened anyway. Seeing his family and friends again, if he was still human, would have been torture. But he's not human. They're already dead.

He still exists.

He has no choice. Only humans have choices.

Then, just as he's about to prove this to past-him, Clockwork decides to interfere.

He tells himself that this can't be happening. Everything is going wrong. If the future doesn't happen like its supposed to, then Danny did have a choice.

But he didn't. He knows (convinces himself) that he didn't.

And then past-him traps Danny in the Fenton Thermos. Danny is handed over to Clockwork, and for a moment he is acutely aware that he had a choice all along. I killed them. I killed them all.

But then he tells himself that he still exists, and that means that he still has a chance of being right. If he is wrong (which he isn't), then he is responsible for the deaths of so many people--

Not my choice. Not my fault. Killing is wrong but it felt good and it wasn't my choice I'M NOT HUMAN ANYMORE--

He knows what he has to do.

He has to get out of the Fenton Thermos and prove once and for all the the future is immutable. If he doesn't, then he may have to admit that he is human, and that he is a mass-murderer, and that it is his fault that everybody he loves is dead.

But that can't possibly be the truth.

As long as he still exists.

Telling himself that he is happy, Danny's laughter echoes throughout the lair of Clockwork. To the ghost of time, it sounds more like he is weeping.