The chapter titles and introductory quotes in this story come from songs. Feel free to listen to them while reading! I spent a ton of thought picking ones that fit tonally with each chapter. Some inspiration was drawn for this story from Donnie Darko and Cowboy Bebop, so keep that in mind as you prepare for this rollercoaster through time and space.

Oh, and please keep your arms inside the car at all times. Thank you and enjoy the ride.

. . .

All These Things That I've Done

. . .

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier.

(The Killers, 2004)

. . .

Behind Danny the double doors of the library splinter. He drains a sip from the last dregs of his energy to force his body to do something which is normally easy for itㅡto slip into the space between atoms, intangible and untouchable one more time. He flickers, and knows with a cold sinking certainty that it will be the last time he pulls this trick until his energy reserve is back up above the Dangerously Low line. Flecks of painted wood fly (through the space where his body is supposed to be) into the dark vaulted hall, and one thought rattles in Danny's head like the marble left in an empty can of spray paint. The end, the end, the end.

He only has so much in him.

The doors splinter again. The crack rends through silence and echoes through empty rooms back and forthㅡgunshots glancing off towers of shelves. So much for the respect of public property. How many times have they accused him of unlawful destruction? Damned double standards. Damned everything.

Wood tears sickeningly. Every eighth hanging fluorescent has been left on and, when they all shake as one, dust comes swimming down into the narrow channels of light. He's never been truly fearful of his parents but he feels fear now, and stumbles onward. Taking the first unlocked door he finds, he barrels through it. Here he hits a flight of stairs that spirals upward four stories.

"For fuck's sake," he complains under his breath. His luck. Couldn't he have found the elevator?

Despite the racking pain in his ribs he plunges ahead. His company is the soles of his shoes slapping the steps, the steady drip drip dripping of ectoplasm down his arm onto the swirled marble. This library is one of the oldest buildings in Amity. Beneath him it sounds like those old creaking doors have finally given way.

When he was young he and Jazz and Mom and Dad would get into hide-and-go-seek tournaments that lasted hours. It always came down to harrowing chases in the endㅡwho could get back to home base without getting caught when their hiding spot was found. Jazz would always scream out if she thought her pursuer was closing in, if she thought she wouldn't make it in time. It was against the rules but she would scream anyway. She would always scream.

Time out!

Danny clutches the railing as a wave of nausea sweeps him upside-down. One summer he almost drowned at the beach when a retreating wave sucked him out to sea. He pushes away the memory like a plate of cold peas. The injury and the exertion are beginning to leave him weak and distracted and sick. As a ghost, nausea is something he rarely feels. But he feels it now.

He looks down at his hands, the green spatters outweighing the white of the fabric. He rips his gloves off; the fizzle, their particles decaying and scattering into the stale air. His hands are too solid. One foot moves in front of the other but he feels unspeakably distant from them. Detached. An outside observer. It all seems wrong.

"You're at a dead end!"

Danny trips, catching himself on the rounded oak banister again.

He chances one haphazard look over the railing and sees his parents standing at the bottom of the two stories he's climbed, framed and furious in the circle of steps, each with their weapon of choice slung over their shoulder. Jazz is screaming in two clashing memories. Time out.

His father speaks again, bass booming up toward the faraway ceiling, thunder from the wrong direction. "Give it up, ghost, we've got a shield all around the library."

"Oh, so I should come quietly?" Danny sneers, then falls into a fit of coughing. "Don'tㅡthink so." Faster than ever he resumes his ascent. Ectoplasm falls, fat drops marking his path upward, and his mind fleetingly likens them to breadcrumbs. At least I'll be able to find my way back.

The third floor is where the rows and rows of encyclopedias are stacked, where the medical volumes as heavy as children gather dust, where they shove the books published by professors that were only ever read by their students. Where the university slackers come to pull all-nighters before finals, studying all the articles they forgot to read. Where the A students spend the prime of their youth. There's no one here now, of course, as it closes early during the summer. There must be a Jazz-shaped ass print in one of these empty chairs.

Jazz.

Danny stops short, leaning on a table for support. This is all his fault. He should have gotten there sooner, should have protected her better. Should've been faster, should've hit harder… Shoulda woulda coulda. The guilt gropes at his heart like an icy fist but he knows he can't let it cripple him. The voices of his three closest friends are in the back of his mind, angrily insisting, "This wasn't your fault!" That's what they'd say if they were here. A small part of him can believe it, too. But his parents?

"Stop, Jack. It's somewhere on this floor."

The cold lasso of guilt morphs into the red hot reigns of adrenaline. A few thoughts whip through his head in rapid succession as the elongated shadows of his parents ooze across the floor from the entryway.

Can I escape this? ㅡ Injured. Powers are shot. Three floors up. They're blocking the exit!

Call for backup? ㅡ They're with Jazz. Why don't I have more friends?

Who else? Valerie? ㅡ Must be desperate to have an idea that terrible.

Tell them the truth, then? ㅡ Situation too tense. Wouldn't believe me. Wrong time.

So what the hell can I do?

Danny grinds his teeth and presses his back flat against the nearest bookshelf. He's been in much hairier situations, much more life threatening, but he's never felt quite as SOL as he does in this moment. This is one problem he won't be able to punch or lie his way out of.

"Come out now and we won't have to harm you," Maddie says slowly, and the way the words drag on as they leave her lips rouses some serious doubts.

So Danny slides left along the bookcase, keeping a sharp eye on the shrinking shadows. A protruding book strikes his shoulder and tumbles noisily down his armㅡhe barely manages to catch it before it hits the floor. The shadows stop. Danny holds his breath. A single drop of luminescent green that has been making its way down his jawline falls toward the bookㅡ

ㅡand stops.

The drop is poised in stark defiance of gravity an inch from the cover. Startled, Danny drops the book. But it too sticks in the air, like someone has taken epoxy and cemented together all the atoms in the room. Tentatively he reaches out to poke it where it hovers. It budges only slightly, sinking an inch closer to the ground as if through hardening syrup.

It clicks, then. "Clockwork?"

"Hello again." The familiar voice precedes his old friend's entrance, down through the ceiling.

Danny collapses backwards against the shelf in relief. "I don't think I've ever been gladder to see you! Okay, except that one timeㅡ"

"I am not here to help you escape." As he says this his countenance shrinks, his wrinkles and veins fading into the smooth skin of youth, his robe hanging looser and looser.

Danny pauses with his mouth hanging open. "But I… I mean, I could just walk out right now. While they're frozen." He peeks around the corner at his parents. He knows he shouldn't feel this ominous sense of foreboding when he looks at his own family. But he does. He does.

"Danny, time is… a strange thing."

Sigh. "So you've said." Maybe he could just turn and run. Would Clockwork drag him back just to make whatever point it was that he felt he had to make?

"We've arrived at a nexus."

"Nexus?"

"A crossroads of sorts. A divergence."

"So… What. Am I about to die?" Danny deadpans.

Clockwork regrows from a child into a young adult, and Danny is hit with a strange sense of déjà vu as the ghost of time looks him in the eyes in a rare moment of sharing his exact height. "You must take what I'm about to say very seriously."

Danny swallows. He can only nod, and press his hand back to his side to staunch the trickle of blood.

"The flow of time is ruled by cause and effect. Each event that happens causes every event that comes after it to happen. Some events cause next to nothing, and some cause more than others. From some causes stem so many possible effects that they can change the entire course of the river. Your accident in the portal was one such event. There were a hundred thousand alternate timelines where you never went inside, a million more where you died, countless others where your transformation took on a different nature… Are you following?"

Danny waves him off and gives a slack nod. "Don't mind me, just bleeding out over here."

"You won't be for long," Clockwork says, catching Danny's attention. "In every possible outcome of this event your injury is dealt with soonㅡthough the manner varies drastically."

Danny's hand is wet with blood and he wipes it off on his suit before putting it back. "Depending on what?"

"On you."

Figures.

"I will not sugarcoat this. The rest of your life depends heavily upon the direction this evening turns. Your actions tonight will decide the diaspora of your life, your relationship with your parents from here forward, with your sister, with your friends. Your health, both mental and physical, your longevity, the longevity of everyone you know, their lives, their happiness. Everything pivots around this night."

"Oh boy, and here I was worried!" Danny barks, slapping his forehead in a fit of hysterical laughter. "Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to keep the butterfly effect in mind while I'm getting shot to death."

"Yes, there are potential futures where you are shot."

"Thank you, Captain Helpfulㅡ"

"But there are others where you are not." Clockwork goes on, completely unphased by Danny's vitriolic reaction. "There is an optimal future. But you will have to compromise for it, Danny. You will have to compromise an aspect of yourself that you hold dear."

"Think you could stand to be a little more cryptic?" Danny spits sarcastically. "I'm catching on a smidge too quickly here."

"You will have to play the game."

...The game? What game? "But I don't…"

"Play the game, Danny. The rest will follow."

Danny looks up but Clockwork is gone. That heavy feeling is gone too, and abruptly the book falls from the air. He barely manages to catch itㅡjust in time for the single drop of glowing ectoplasm to splash onto the book's gold trimmed leather cover, directly into the capital 'A' in its title on the spine.

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

He's never read it, but in that instant he suddenly wishes he has. Bet Vlad's read it, he thinks bitterly. There's probably an entire chapter on manipulating the enemy.

"We will find you," Jack says to the room. "You might as well give up." Hatred stains every syllable. "Save yourself the trouble." Danny knows exactly why they're so eager to find him tonight. (Jazz, screaming.) Danny shudders. She's okay. She has to be.

But he's not ready to go down yet. He's an animal backed into a corner, and any animal does desperate things in times like these. (Play the game.) Danny knows all at once what Clockwork meant.

A little piece of Danny Fenton dies right there by the bookcaseㅡa tiny piece he's hung onto desperately since the beginning of all this ghost businessㅡwhen he sacrifices the voice in his heart that insists he never become like Vlad, that he never play people for his own gain, especially people he loves. Some noble old-fashioned part of him always believed he could overcome without stooping that low. Not anymore. The voice silences itself as Danny lifts a wet, green finger to the inside of the cover of The Art of War and writes.

wasn't my fault

With that done he sets the open book on the ground and sneaks away to round the corner before they spot him. Then, taking the biggest leap of faith into his own dumb plan he's ever had to take, Danny reaches down the familiar dark well where his heart should be, all the way to the distant water, that faintest trickle of life. He plunges headfirst into it and out the other side.

With nothing but a bookshelf separating him from his parents, Danny reverts back to human.

White light scatters across the shelves, etching blocky shadows on the walls, refracting off the green glass lamp shades on the tabletops, turning the room into a three-second kaleidoscope. The blinding slice of pain that comes with the sudden return of human nerve endings (pain is so much more acute when he's human) sends spots swirling in Danny's vision, blending with the blind patches left by the bright flash of his transformation. It's so disorienting that he almost doesn't hear his mom shushing his dad.

"ㅡyou see that flash?"

"What was that?"

"Jack, it's disappeared from the radar!"

"But it can't have gotten pastㅡ"

"Jack."

The sound of ruffling paper tells him they've found it. Bingo. Her voice is much louder when she addresses Danny directly. "It doesn't matter whether you directly harmed our daughter." A low thud as the book hits the floor again. "You were there. You were involved."

You're responsible, he hears. Like always.

They round the corner at the end of the shelf into the local history section but Danny's already moved onto the next row, leaving behind another message. Appealing to their curiosity feels like luring deer with salt. He feels like a slimeballㅡlike Vlad. He's no longer sure at all this is what Clockwork meant. It feels wrong. It's not him. But there's no questioning that this is working. This time there's a longer pause when the book is picked up from the carpet, and Danny knows his parents must be puzzling over the now inexplicably red writing with increasing curiosity.

trying to help like always

doesnt always work out

At this point his parents fall into inaudible whispers. He uses the free moment to try and calm his hammering heart. Keep it together. The faster you beat the faster we lose blood, buddy…

Before his parents can come to an agreement he pushes himself upright and scrawls a message onto the endcap of the bookshelf. It's brighter here, indirectly under one of the emergency overhead lights, and he can see white glistening in the crimson ink. It feels macabre writing in his own blood, but hey, it's not like he's using it for anything else.

He grins as he writes this one. If he hasn't already snared them, he has now.

bet ur wondering bout the red

stay tuned to find out

Then he dances away, barely making it around the next corner before his parents occupy the space where he'd been seconds ago. If his parents see him like this it's game over. He can almost feel that direction physicallyㅡthe bend in the river Clockwork mentions so frequently. He can sense a waterfall at the end of that route and doesn't need Clockwork to tell him he needs to steer clear.

"Mads, I think it's toying with us."

"What game are you playing, ghost?" The most dangerous one. Her accusation becomes a demand. "How do you do that?"

She has to be talking about his little disappearing act from her scanner. He scribbles a message onto the next bookshelf before clambering his way up the side, sidestepping protruding encyclopedias as he nears the top. He chances a peek over the edge of the towering shelf when he hears his parents coming up on his next bit of text.

if you want to know

put down your guns

"Fat chance! Think you'll catch us with our guard down?"

"We're not that stupid," Maddie adds, sounding insulted.

"I only want to talk!" Danny yells back before realizing his mistake. Their heads whip upward and he barely rolls out of their line of sight. Then he's off, sprinting along the top of the shelf as large chunks of wood are blown away behind him, incinerated in a haze of acrid smoke. His hair brushes along the glass underbellies of darkened hanging lights. As he comes up on a lit one he panics and does what he does best.

(Punches its lights out.)

Sparks fly and shards of glass rain down onto the roof of the shelf, covering the fabric of his tattered red converse, slipping into the laces. He's so sick of running. This half-baked plain of his is backfiring with a helluva bang. If he starts veering dangerously down one of the infinite wrong paths, will Clockwork show up and steer him right? Shouldn't count on it. Always gotta do everything myself.

"Why won't you just listen?"

"We don't negotiate with ghosts."

They're standing at the base some twenty feet below, aiming their guns upward with startling synchronicity. He can barely see and hopes it's the same for them.

"Aren't you curious?" he pleads. "How I do it?" Maybe appealing to their curiously isn't enough to stay their wrath. Danny looks at his dad while he says it, his lovable oaf of a father who's always been the weaker of the two when it comes to giving in to curiosity. True to Danny's hope, he begins to lower his weapon by a fraction of a degree.

But it isn't enough. There's the low whine of a charging weapon, the shrill rumble of combustion as his mother hikes hers farther onto her shoulder, goggles gleaming in the dark. "Of course we're curious. But we don't negotiate with ghosts. We don't need your cooperation to get our answers." Her last word is strained and drowned as she squeezes the trigger.

This time Danny isn't prepared.

The blast hits the edge of the shelf just beneath his feet, ripping upward like green hellfire and sending him stumbling backward, scarcely out of harm's way. But the shelf is too narrow and he steps back onto nothing. He's falling, as if in slow motion, clutching at burning books as they flutter after himㅡrealizing just a millisecond before his back slams into paper thin carpet that the entire shelf is falling too. Then his lungs are 's nothing but white. Green. Ringing. Eardrums, loud. Head. Wrist. Chest. Blood surging inside out. Crashingㅡthe shelf is crashing into the shelf behind him and as his vision swims back into focus he registers that he's landed on his back in a narrow aisle three feet across that escaped being crushed. Lucky day.

When the second shelf starts to tip with a creak like a shipwreck, Danny wonders which one of the total-fuckup, worst-case-scenario timestreams he's launched himself into.

"There he is," his mom calls out. Despite his balance and breath having not yet returned, he slips out from beneath the shelf and sprints away, racing the dominoing shelves as they crash one by one by one.

"Sorry, Clockwork," Danny mutters. In case he's listening. Who am I kidding, of course he's listening. "Never been very good at games." His hopes of enticing his parents into a fair conversation are dwarfed by the growing danger of actually dying. He's pretty sure he's lost nearly a half-gallon of blood by now. How much can a human lose before kicking the bucket, anyway? Three? Two? If his parents manage to hit him now, he's done for. Screw playing the game. Danny is getting the hell out of Dodge.

The last shelf buckles under the weight of all those before it and careens into the library wall. Windows shatter deafeningly and, several stories below, car alarms keen in protest. Paying no mind to the broken glass, Danny vaults onto the windowsill.

Enough energy left for a transformation. I can make it to that fire escape. It's only a dozen feet away. Then I can run down and escape the shield as a human before they can catch up…

...And any hope I ever had to gain trust from my parents for Phantom is out the window with me.

Danny pauses, angry, desperate, white light crackling around his waist. Ready to spill across his body and transform him. But it doesn't travel. His grip on the windowsill tightens. Why is this so hard? Broken glass digs into his hands, but the sting hardly touches his nerves. Everything is blurring, softening around the edges, growing lighter and darker and louder and louder and Danny can feel it again, stronger this time. That stupid river Clockwork never shuts up about. The infinite fractal tree, stemming onward from this point in time in every direction, forever and ever. And as he hangs poised here on the windowsill he blinks two eyelids heavier than a sun and when he opens them again he sees it.

A hair-thin string. A shimmer in the air, like that above a flame, barely distinguishable in the suburban night. As he watches it stretches out from his chest languidly, sentiently, tugging him toward the fire escape with the smallest of voices.

This way.

But as he looks on, frozen in fascination, he realizes there is a second, far fainter thread. This one twists around his chest. Unable to look away he twists around too, to watch it swim back into the room he's so desperately trying to flee. Only then does he realize that his parents are moving slowly. Their footfalls come only once every eon as they thunder toward him.

This way.

The gossamer thread shoots toward them and suddenly Danny knows what he has to do.

Matter lurches back into motion as Danny finally lets the light flash over him, blinding his parents as he transforms back. The whole room is twenty shades brighter with the aura radiating off his skin. But his parents recover quickly and before he can even step down from the window they're taking aim. His mind is blank. He blurts out the first thing he thinks of. "Time out!"

When they freeze he thinks for a moment that time has actually stopped.

But no. There's his father, cocking his head to the side, like a dog trying to figure out which direction a car is coming from. His mother raises her weapon, lowers it, and raises it again. But her finger is not on the trigger. It hits him. For the first time all night Danny has actually stumped them.

So he takes this golden opportunity of their mutual stunned silence to slide off the shards of broken glass and throw up his hands in surrender. To his credit, his voice is even when he steps forward. "I'll go with you."