It is done! Clocking in at 4200-ish words, I have finally written the first chapter in my Danny Phantom fanfic (insert applause - or cricket noises - here). I'm not sure what sort of schedule it'll have in updating (at least once a year, is what I'm projecting at the moment). A slightly different version (without all the needed italics) is posted over on deviantArt (see my profile for a link), and status on coming chapters can be located at the bottom of my profile (see "status of current stories").

Disclaimer: Bahahaha... No.

Disclaimer the First: I kinda blame NebulousMistress for the base idea. Everything from there on, blame me.

Enthralled

Chapter 1

Chili Pepper

"Oh, look. The little loser ghost has a few baby helpers." It crooned at the half-human ghost boy, enjoying the contact and power it held over him, and positively relishing the insecurity that radiated off of the boy like cosmic energy from a supernova. It was just so... delicious. Oh, how it longed to have the boy under his thrall, if only because of the sheer potential the half-human held. As an imprint, it knew more than any other ghost how strong another ghost was or could become (one of the perks of being an imprint was the innate ability to gauge the strength of another ghost by the strength of the feelings they held towards their obsession; the stronger the feelings, and subsequently their obsession, the stronger the ghost), and this half-human had the potential to eclipse even the dread Pariah Dark.

This boy was scrumptious in a way Penelope wasn't. Where Penelope was like a bittersweet dark chocolate that was warm and gooey with a lingering sweetness that thrummed throughout its' entire being and made the imprint purr from the deepest depths of its' core, the half-human boy was a little red chili pepper, hot and sharp and spicy with an all-encompassing burning heat that tingled and vibrated every iota of its' being with such ferocity that was breathtaking.

It wanted the boy, to own him with such completeness that he did nothing without informing and consulting the imprint beforehand.

"Do not call me a loser!" Oh, the anger in that denial! The imprint's toothy grin widened even as it was shoved off of the boy. It watched with amusement as the boy – Danny, it reminded itself, because it wouldn't do to gain him for itself if it didn't call the boy by his preferred name like it did Penelope – prepare an ectoblast in both hands, much like the imprint had done moments earlier, and decided to do a test of the newly achieved foothold it had gained over Danny (the wolf bite to Danny's spectral tail was a much more successful endeavor to enthrall the boy than anything else), giving the ethereal teen a taste of the power it could give the boy if – no, when he submitted to the imprint. The ectoblast became much more defined, an almost blinding ray that enveloped and destroyed one of the kiosks in the department store.

The imprint surveyed the damage it had caused, and could feel the depression, guilt, and despair that was going to be created because of their fight, and was pleased to see Danny looking at his hands in surprise and confusion, no doubt because of the intensity of the ectoblast.

"Well, that's enough destruction for today." It said, reverting to its' natural form as it floated up towards the ceiling. It waved at Danny, reveling in the burning heat the boy was giving off as he returned to his baby human helpers. It didn't need to do anything more; it could already see the beginnings of a desire to destroy everything, to experience that kind of rush of power again, in the boy's eyes. It was only a matter of time until Danny came seeking the imprint for that rush of energy, needing to fulfill that aching desire that would eventually burn bright enough to make the ghost boy abandon his weaker human traits and companions. Until that time... it could settle for merely being Bertrand, Penelope's lowly assistant in the human world, and pet in the Ghost Zone. "Ta."

After all, what creature, living or dead, would expect the true mastermind to be a lowly imprint such as 'Bertrand'?

Fingers tapped atop the desk as Penelope Spectra read through the student files Ishiyama had given her, learning more about each teenager as hungry eyes devoured the words for her sharp mind to chew on and spit out the best way to inspire insecurity and misery in each individual. Manicured nails clacked impatiently as she felt the sands of time weather away at her, feeling her skin become wrinkled and saggy, her muscles begin to ache and bones start to moan. The clacking began to take on a rhythmic nature, and Spectra leaned back, eyes closed, as her fingers tapped all along the desk, imagining she was playing one of the many sonatas that her teacher had made her learn, her mind supplying the many notes of a grand piano none save her could hear.

As her fingers moved along the imagined keys, the world around her melted away, replaced with one where her exuberant personality and strong ideals were unbecoming of a proper lady. A world where housework was left for the slaves and women, and a housewife's duty was to ensure that her husband returned home after a long day at work to a house in order and doted upon by said housewife for the rest of the evening. The clacking nails lost their rhythm as Spectra began to stab her fingers into the wood of the desk, digging furrows into the dark wood as her hands balled into fists and started slamming into the desktop, scattering the files and papers into a disorganized mess. Her face contorted into a snarl as dark rings circled her eyes and spread into heavy wrinkles as her head jerked with her fists, sending her hair into a disarray, casting her aging face into shadow. Her shoulders shook as her chest heaved with great, deep breaths that were forcefully exhaled in growled pants full of badly repressed anger.

"Oh, sweetie, remembering your past again?" Bertrand floated into the room, a worried look on his 'face'. He landed on the floor, slithering around the desk, tendrils snaking out from his amorphous body and picking up the scattered papers, setting them on the desktop before crawling up the back of the chair and settling onto and around Spectra's shoulders. Immediately, the aging began to stop and reverse, the bone-deep weariness fading as her skin became taut and the fire of life relit in her eyes, the cold anger fading away. A pair of hands formed, snagging the errant strands of hair and pulling them back into place. "You know what that does to you."

"You weren't here." Spectra's voice was accusing, though it held no malice. "You know what happens when I'm left alone. Where were you?"

"I was..." Bertrand paused, considering. "Experimenting." He purred into her neck, nuzzling all along the back and sides.

"Experimenting?" Spectra tilted her head to allow Bertrand better access to her neck, shivering as wisps of ectoplasm sank into her skin, joining the cold fire that flowed through her veins and making her moan as it filled her with a breathtaking vitality that nothing else could cause. "Is that your new nickname for wanton destruction?"

"Oh, there was that too, my scrumptious little chocolate bar." Bertrand pulled away from her neck, moving so that he could look her in the eye. "But I was sinking my teeth into a new toy."

"Oh." Spectra became less responsive to Bertrand's touch, and her half-lidded eyes took on a dead look. "And what is the name of this... toy?"

Bertrand was all fangs when he smiled, amused at how much venom she was able to imbue that last word with.

"Our darling little half-human, of course." An arm appeared as Bertrand slid off of Spectra to settle on her desktop, his shape moving to become that of a thin person around the height of some of the more prepubescent freshmen. "Soon to be my rambunctious little chili pepper."

"You're so possessive." Spectra smirked, her voice becoming sultry as she leaned up against the imprint. "It's one of my favorite qualities about you, Bertrand."

"Why Penelope, are you jealous of Danny?" Bertrand's arms wrapped around her, meeting and melting together as Bertrand pulled himself behind her, reforming with his arms wrapped around her midsection. When Spectra didn't respond he smiled and said triumphantly, "You are, aren't you?!"

"Oh, please." Spectra waved him off, pulling away from the thrilling touch to lean against the desk, arms crossed. "What's there to be jealous about? He's just some kid with ghost powers. Rare, yes, but not completely unheard of."

Bertrand purred at Spectra's reaction, a throaty sound that turned into chuckling.

"Oh, but Danny's something else entirely." Bertrand said, reverting back to his natural form as he settled into the seat of the chair. "Mediums, psychics, and Loa aren't anything close to what he is – half-human."

"Yes, I remember what that frog of a hunter said." She said dismissively, waving a hand to accentuate her point. "One of a kind, as he called the boy."

"Oh, Penelope, you have no idea how true that statement is." Bertrand chuckled, and for a moment Spectra saw, not the amorphous spectral creature, but instead a tall man with sharp cheekbones and piercing blue eyes filled with cold humor. Pale fingertips attached to equally pale hands moved to ghost along Spectra's jawline, softly taking her chin in their grip and gently tilting her head towards him. The edges of his lips were tilted upwards ever-so-slightly in cruel amusement. "There has never been anything like Danny, and probably never will be. Penelope, I want him."

Spectra was silent, watching as the vision of the dark-haired aristocratic man vanished and the more familiar form she recognized and identified as uniquely Bertrand replaced it. She considered what he was saying, and decided to humor him – for now.

"You always did know how to please a woman." She moved behind the chair, setting her hands on his 'shoulders' – it was always hard to apply such definitive terms to anywhere she touched him, since his physiology was subject to change on any given whim – before sliding down and across his body to hug him close. "Why should I have any reason to doubt you now?"

"When have I ever given you reason to doubt me, my delicious little chocolate bar?" Bertrand retorted, pressing his entire form into Spectra. "Besides, once you get to know Danny as I have, you'll want him almost as much as I do."

"Almost as much?" She purred, and fingernails dragged against his 'skin', creating flaking ripples that sank back into his form and left no trail. "If he's as delicious as you say he is, I may just want Danny all to my little old self."

"Only after I'm done with him." Bertrand chuckled, a dark purr that vibrated his entire form. "Now, what did you want done to celebrate your birthday this year?"

"Oh, I had the most beautiful idea involving those lasers we conned out of that frog, Skulker..."

Danny spun his fork listlessly through the peas on his plate, barely listening to the distant chattering of his parents as they tinkered away in the other room – most likely making some new weapon to destroy the 'evil' ghosts. Joy.

He so did not have time for that. He had more important things to deal with, like that creepy shapeshifting ghost or–

"Ow!"

Jazz pinching him in the arm.

"What are you doing?" He glared at her, anger igniting in the pit of his stomach and burning like cold fire through his veins, bathing everything from the tips of his fingers and soles of his feet to the very edges of the hair on his head in a chill tingle. Danny didn't like how right that felt, and how much it excited and energized him.

"Nothing." The word was almost a blur, it flew out of Jazz's mouth that fast. Danny almost wanted to press her for the truth (she was a really bad liar), but decided against it, going back to poking at the food on his plate.

...except Jazz was circling him with that strange look in her eyes that brought up memories of psychobabble rants, and was poking him in the shoulder.

"What?" Danny loved his sister, he really did, but she really needed to loosen up, like, a lot. And stop forcing her views of normalcy on his life because really, what part of their life was normal? What part of his life (afterlife? Whatever) was normal?

"Nothing." Jazz repeated (still lying; still looking at him funny), and Danny set his fork down, pushing the plate away. He wasn't really hungry anyway. He moved away from the table, aware that Jazz was following behind him, but ignored it. She'd taken to following Danny every couple of days to observe and analyze him so she could compare his life against that of the average teenager (news flash, Jazz: no one fits into the definition of average you're reading about!), and he'd had to resort to using his ghost powers to sneak away several times already.

Danny stalked past his parents as they worked on their latest invention (something called a Fenton Peeler, that he was filing under 'Avoid At All Costs), and discussed whether they were going to rip the 'evil' ghosts apart molecule by molecule or dissect the remains first. He lost Jazz halfway up the stairs after breaking into a full-scale run into his room, slamming his door shut as he collapsed against it, breathing heavily.

He loved his parents. This was something that would never change, no matter what, and not even his half-death in the portal had done anything to alter it. But hearing his parents talk about creating weapons that killed, were specifically designed to kill a species (are ghosts a species?) that Danny himself was a part of, scared him. Danny was scared – for himself, for each ghost he'd met so far (even his enemies, despite the fact that he'd thrown them back into the Ghost Zone).

Danny was scared of his parents. He... was scared of his parents, not for.

He'd known, of course, that since the portal had miraculously started working (a delayed response, they'd figured, and left it at that), they'd eventually start making things to capture ghosts. After the incident at school with the Lunch Lady, Danny learned that they had finally stopped studying the portal itself and had moved on to containment devices and traps. He'd thought that they would want to study ghosts, just like they'd done with the portal; that they'd want to catch ghosts, not kill them.

He looked around his room aimlessly before his eyes fell on the Fenton Thermos, laying forgotten in his backpack. It held his latest catches from his ghost hunt earlier in the afternoon, from before he went for ice cream with Sam and Tucker, and suddenly he didn't feel quite so eager to sneak down to the lab and flush them into the Ghost Zone.

He didn't want to see what other weapons his parents were building.

"Danny?" Jazz's voice drifted through his door, accompanied by soft knocking. The sound jolted him out of his thoughts, and he stood up, prepared to give her the standard response (that he was perfectly fine, and even if he wasn't, it wasn't any of her business since he was perfectly capable of dealing with his problems on his own) when he stopped.

Even though he was fourteen, he was still kinda... scrawny. Some would, and in some cases had, gone so far as to say he was a little too prepubescent for a high school freshman. It was annoying, since he'd turned fourteen this past winter, but for this...

It could work.

"Jazz." Danny opened the door, staring down his sister. "Not everything in life relates to your psychobabble. Yes, I'm going through some things; but you, as a girl," Danny stressed that word, hoping she'd catch his meaning, "don't ever need to know about them."

"Oh." Jazz replied in a small voice, and Danny watched with satisfaction as the implication sank in, and her face went white before going as red as a tomato. She averted her eyes. "Oh."

"Goodbye, Jazz." Danny stated, shutting the door. He listened as muffled footsteps started moving away from his door, and got fainter as their owner went down the stairs. He blinked, giving himself a small smile. "Wow. Gotta remember not to use that excuse too much."

He went to sit at his desk, poking the mouse and only paying half-attention as the desktop to his computer lit up with the symbol of some famous ghost-hunting business out in New York – the Ghostbeaters, or something like that. He faintly remembered being told stories of their exploits when he was younger (something about pink slime that danced to R&B and blowing up a giant marshmallow man), but dismissed them out of hand in favor of starting a game of solitaire and thinking over the fight he'd had with that shapeshifting ghost earlier in the day.

Holding his hands up, Danny clenched them into fists, then curled his fingers, placing both wrists against each other in a mock-up of the supercharged ectoblast he'd made at the end of the fight (without actually creating and shooting an ectoblast; something he'd worked very hard not to do since those first few days of accidentally shooting almost everything he touched), and shivered in remembered... something.

It wasn't pleasure and he certainly wasn't feeling squiggly echoes of it that made his stomach twist into knots and cause a deeply embarrassing problem that left him in no hurry to stand up anytime soon, Danny kept telling himself.

Danny fought past the embarrassing physical response and tried to remember exactly what he'd done that had caused the ectoblast to become... supercharged, for lack of a better word. He remembered how deep that ghost had dug underneath his skin with all those jabs at his skills and power, and how angry those comments had made him – especially when it called him a loser. He was not a loser; he was the strongest, and he'd prove it by beating all of them!

Whoa. Where'd that come from?

The thought was almost foreign, but it felt right; like Danny had always known, deep down, that that was why he fought all those ghosts, but now... it was like he was finally saying out loud something that should have been obvious to the world.

He was the strongest; and he'd prove it to all of them (especially Vlad, Danny thought darkly, remembering how easily the elder half-ghost had beaten him) in any way possible.

This wasn't something he could ever tell his friends, though; whenever he started going on about something that seemed completely normal to him (like flipping through the obituaries and imagining the different obsessions for some of the deceased), Tucker would find something really interesting to do on his PDA while Sam just gave him this weird look before changing the subject. And they'd stopped laughing at his jokes (although he was okay with that one, since before they'd stopped, both his friends would give him strange looks before letting out awkward, stilted laughter and changing the subject). It was like they were entirely different people than they were before.

Or you just aren't the same person you used to be, Fenton...

It was true, Danny was forced to admit. That first month after his... accident, he'd spent long hours staring at the ghost portal, thinking of dozens of 'what if's' – what if he'd never turned it on; what if it had really killed him; what if someone else had gone in to look – would they have become ghostly like him?

What if he wasn't as alive as he thought he was.

Stop. Thinking about what if's doesn't change what is. You're perfect just the way you are...

Danny nodded to himself, watching the computer screen as he rolled the mouse over the various cards, moving them from place to place. He was who (and what, the back of his mind whispered) he was, and that was enough to placate his fear and insecurities – for now.

"Danny?" His dad's voice traveled through the closed door, following several quiet knocks. The doorknob twisted, and his dad's face peeked in. "I'm coming in."

Danny closed the game (he was losing anyway) and twisted the seat of his chair to face his dad.

"Look, I'm not gonna work those cardboard cut-out targets down in the lab for you, Dad." Danny started, cringing as he remembered when they'd had him do it with the net launchers. "I thought you were gonna make it so that they were automatic?"

I did." His father replied, voice strangely quiet. In the back of Danny's mind, warning bells started going off. "Your mother's setting up the software part to test the Fenton Peeler. But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

Why is Dad so... awkward? Danny may have just been a C student, but he was smart enough to keep that from slipping out his mouth (again, something he'd been working on since he blurted out that denial about being a ghost several weeks before, when Paulina had accepted his proposal to the Spring Dance).

"Son..." Dad began awkwardly, his voice quiet, causing the warning bells slowly got louder. Dad was never this quiet. "Your sister mentioned that you were going through some... changes."

Oh. Oh, no.

She didn't...

"Well," His dad coughed, looking just as awkward as Danny felt, and he couldn't keep the growing horror from appearing on his face. "Your mother and I thought that I should tell you that what you're going through is perfectly natural."

It was official: Danny was never using that excuse again.

Ever.

"It was horrible." Danny told Sam and Tucker the next day as they walked to class.

"Oh, come on." Sam rolled her eyes. "This is your dad we're talking about. It can't have been that traumatizing."

"There were things, Sam." Danny told her, a haunted look in his eyes. "Graphic things, with pictures and diagrams. I've seen things that I can never un-see."

Tucker cringed, nodding in sympathy to Danny's plight. Without warning, Mikey walked right into Danny, knocking the two to the floor.

"Dude, watch where you're going next time." Danny's told held no malice, since the both of them were frequent targets of Dash's temper. Mikey sighed out a half-hearted apology, before going back to wandering the halls, knocking into several other classmates as he went. The act made Danny take a really good look at what was happening around him, seeing several of his classmates (and a ton of upperclassmen) wandering the halls with deadened eyes, shoulders hunched and heads down. "Geez, what's with everybody?"

Ms. Spectra had a ghost pet. Or had a ghost possessing her. And they were sucking all the happiness out of the entire school.

Danny almost couldn't believe it, but after seeing Paulina (and later Sam) turn into dragon ghosts because of a haunted necklace, very little surprised him anymore. But the point was, together, Ms. Spectra and her assistant (Bertrand, a whispered voice echoed along the far reaches of his mind) were driving the entire school into the ground – and were about to kill Jazz.

He wasn't sure which part he was more upset about – that they were going after his school, or that they were going to kill his sister. He didn't really want to find out which it really was, but it didn't stop him from wanting it to be the 'killing his sister' thing.

All throughout his fight with the shapeshifting Bertrand, he could tell that the ghost was holding back (but so was he, the voice purred), and just couldn't find it in him to really beat it. When he saw an opening, Danny sprung on it, uncapping the thermos and pressing the little button on the side, pulling Bertrand inside it (he refused the feeling of guilt and betrayal that that action had stirred in him, afraid of what it meant) before going at Spectra as hard as he could. But when he tried to recreate that supercharged ectoblast from the day before, all that came from his hands was a normal ectoblast – and a nagging sensation that he was missing something extremely important to give him the boost in power he needed (that he wanted, his mind supplied).

Danny had saved Jazz in the end, and was taunted by Spectra before she was defeated (by Jazz, of all people, wielding the Fenton Peeler) and sucked into the thermos with Bertrand, but he still felt like something wasn't right about the situation. He felt like he'd betrayed a close friend, and was burdened with guilt over it.

Don't be guilty, the voice purred in his mind, you did what you needed to do; nothing more, nothing less.

A distant, very small part of his mind recognized that the voice that had taken residence in his head wasn't one of his own creation, but the solace and comfort it gave him quieted that rebellious part before it could take hold.

Within the confines of the thermos, wrapped around Spectra to keep her from aging beyond death, Bertrand purred.