Okay now I wasn't actually sure what category to file this under. It's just fun Danny stuff. :D It's a mystery that's not really a mystery, an adventure that's not really an adventure. Just read it okay. There will probably be only 2 chapters, so I'll throw up the second half as soon as I'm done with it.

Chapter One

x - x - x

'If for some reason you're reading this, then these are probably the least of my medical worries, so let me clear any time-wasting confusion.'

No kidding, David thought dryly, humorlessly. There was nothing funny about this at all.

'Blood is red AND green? That's normal, unless it's leaking out of me.

45 bmp avg / 82 degrees avg

That's right. No, your equipment isn't broken.'

Kid had some messed up sense of humor. Was this his idea of a joke? David dropped the small silver dog tag onto the countertop next to the patient's cot, the rattle of the chain echoing strangely in the silent room. The silence pressed in all around him tangibly. It had been such a loud, loud night that now that the hospital was silent it felt wrong, like at any minute everything was going to start exploding again.

x – x – x

Earlier that evening David had been called in to work the graveyard. Not uncommon, but that didn't mean he was any less annoyed. The night had been like any other in the ER, really. A couple college kids with alcohol poisoning, a couple junkies faking pain and looking for a fix, a couple kids with ear infections and stomach viruses. One kid who broke her arm falling down the stairs. Nothing David hadn't seen before.

Then, sometime after one in the morning, some guy had wandered into the lobby, cradling a bloody bandage against the side of his forehead. David wasn't there but Tina from the front desk had told him all about it. It really was a dramatic scene, even for Amity Park where drama happened around every corner these days. Tina said he was stammering about ghosts- typical. All major medical emergencies had to do with the stupid ghost attacks these days. It was a never ending source of frustration for the staff at Amity Northwest Hospital.

After the first guy, a wave of citizens came pouring in. Over twenty of them, all injured. All spewing a story about a purple ghost. None of them were beat up too badly – it was mostly just surface stuff. One man had a shard of glass stuck into his shoulder though. David was glad he didn't have to see that one in person. He couldn't help but feel that white-hot fury he always felt whenever this happened, whenever there was a ghost attack that went too far. Of course he could always move away from Amity Park, forget about this place. But that wouldn't solve the problem. So he here stayed. Another day, another dollar.

As the patients were helped back in the order of most severe trauma, he had the feeling this night was going to be a long one.

As for the first guy, they had rushed him back to treat whatever head trauma he had attained, and found that it was really only a shallow cut on his forehead. Which was why all the doctors were baffled when he slipped into a coma fifteen minutes after his arrival. David had been in there for that part, since he himself had been assigned to the guy. Chris, the citizen had called himself, before falling into a coma. He'd seemed perfectly fine up until that point, and they could not seem to pinpoint any damage or any actual physical harm besides the small laceration on his face. His vitals came up fine, his scans came back negative. For all intents and purposes he was a healthy young man, probably in his twenties. So why wouldn't he wake up?

It was as David stood pondering his stats at Chris's bedside that the first explosion happened.

It sounded like someone had loosed a grenade in the front lobby. It was deafening and shook the walls and floor, sending David reeling into the blinking monitor by Chris's bed.

When he rushed into the hall he saw his fellow staff looking around as widely as he was, trying to figure out what happened. There was another shudder, smaller, that rippled through the floor, destabilizing everyone's balance.

David found himself sprinting down the hallway toward the lobby, toward the sound. God only knew why he was going toward the sound. He reached the giant double doors and made to punch in his key to unlock them, but at that moment something hit the doors like a train, crashing through them, splintering them like they were made of paper. He was lucky he'd been up against the wall or he'd have been flattened. Something was stirring amongst the shattered remains of the wooden doors. The thing sat up, no the person – or uh, the ghost sat up, rubbing his head. David blinked at him in shock, his hand still frozen on the number pad.

The ghost looked around, glassy-eyed, like he'd forgotten where he was for a moment. His glowing eyes found David's eyes, and David the doctor found himself in a staring match with Danny Phantom, Amity Park's most infamous ghost. For a second, everything was silent.

The moment was short lived, because an ear-splitting screech rent through the air.

"Can't a guy get a half-time?" Phantom muttered, rubbing his head again, as an enormous purple glob began oozing through the wide empty door frame. David was hit with a wall of smell that resembled sewage, or a landfill. He tripped over his own feet trying to back away, his heart ricocheting off the inside of his ribcage in terror. He saw blasts of green light lighting up the hallways as he scrambled to his feet to run away, to run and evacuate the patients from the nearby rooms, to warn all the doctors-

Another ear-busting shriek pierced the hallways. He could hear Phantom's low voice shouting back at the creature, the ghost, whatever the hell that thing was. David didn't know and didn't care whether Phantom was good or evil. Most people in this city seemed so caught up in that. Formalities. David knew plenty of doctors that were complete shitheads, definitely going to hell. All he cared about was that Phantom saved people, and deeds spoke louder than words in David's opinion. And right now he hoped Phantom's deed was to get that purple demon thing the hell out of his ER.

They had been relocating the patients' beds hastily out of that hall to the next wing, moving as fast as proper procedure could allow. The patients who weren't bed ridden had run away all on their own. All the while there were terrifying thunderous noises coming from that main hall, so very close to where they were. David found himself praying that no patients got caught in the crossfire, found himself thankful that there was no second floor in this particular wing of the hospital to collapse in on the first.

Nurses were running rounds on the patients, making sure IVs were still hooked up properly, making sure everyone was just okay when David came jogging in, carting yet another patient on a bed. He left the bed by the inner door and was turning around to go look for more people when the second major explosion happened. It was much, much bigger than the first. David felt his stomach drop out through his feet. He was sure there were still people in that section of the hospital. Some patients maybe, some doctors, nurses. No, no, no.

And for the second time that night, he found that he was running toward the explosion, like some sort of idiot with some sort of death wish. When he rounded the corner to the main hall, hoping to not come face to face with that blob of purple mucous, he saw what the source of the sound had been. This whole section of the ER had completely collapsed. The roof had come down in so many places. There seemed to be purple goo splayed out on every surface. He could no longer even make out the doorframe that had been here before, leading to the lobby. He could see straight through the shattered wall into the destroyed lobby, the flattened outer wall, and across the street to the gas station and the cloudy night sky.

Other than the shuffling sounds of settling rubble, the lobby, or what remained of it, had fallen eerily quiet. Where did the ghost go? Where did Phantom go? Well wherever they were, it wasn't here, and David had patients and coworkers to think about so he forced himself to snap out of it. More uninjured coworkers joined him as he searched frantically for people in the rubble. The settling dust and smoke choked him and he knew his wife was going to lay it into him for not stopping to put on a face mask. There were a few nurses, one or two patients. Thankfully nobody had been killed. Miraculously. Everyone still waiting in the lobby appeared to have run out of the hospital when the fight first broke out. Two of the nurses had been trying to coax a senile man out of his room and they had hidden under the bed when the roof collapsed in, which had saved them. He found a little girl hiding in the bathroom in the lobby – she didn't know where her family had gone.

As he was leading the little girl back towards the back wing, away from the unstable rubble, he heard Will, one of his favorite coworkers, swear loudly.

"Shit! David, get over here!" David passed the trembling girl off to a female nurse (probably better anyways) and ran over to Will, who was desparately trying to lift a portion of the collapsed wall next to the front desk in the lobby. "Help me out, David! There's a guy under here!"

David threw all his weight into lifting the cracked levels of drywall, which were being weighed down by a section of collapsed roof as well. They finally shoved it off to the side, revealing a crumpled figure on the tile floor. "Jesus," David said softly, as he and Will attempted to lay the man out flat, coughing against the thick cloud of dust kicked up by the settling wall.

He looked like he'd gotten the living shit beaten out of him, like some gang had jumped him. There was a massive bruise forming under his left eye, a huge cut running down the side of his neck. His black hair was matted and messy and caked with dusty rubble. But that wasn't the worst of it. His blue shirt was stuck to his chest in a sickening way, a huge dark spot pooling under the fabric. When David pulled the shirt up gingerly his breath hitched, seeing that there was a laceration about a foot long stretching from his collarbone down to the left side of his ribcage. It only registered on the subconscious level that the guy's shirt was for some reason uncut. More bruises and smaller cuts decorated his chest and his arms as well, and David was willing to bet once his jeans were off they'd see the same thing on his legs. The man was twenty years old, tops. David wanted to think 'Poor kid,' but he didn't let himself think that when there was a chance to save someone.

So they were rushing the man back, carrying him away to where everyone else was.

And they were quarantining him in a separate room, nurses speaking outside the mystery man's door in hushed voices. A brunette nurse stopped David as he was leaving the patient's room and asked if it was true, if they found a victim of the ghost attack in the lobby that was bleeding green.

David didn't answer her. He went back to the lobby, trying to find if this guy had ever been a patient at all. But he wasn't registered, not even on the waiting list in the lobby. Had he been here with someone waiting? Family, a friend? Did he get attacked by that purple ghost?

He went back to his new patient's room. The man was still out cold.

And David forgot about the purple ghost and Danny Phantom. For a little while, that was.

x – x – x

David was frowning at the sleeping patient, lost in thought, when Will came sauntering in.

"Staring at him won't wake him up," Will joked.

"No, I suppose not," he admitted, turning away and tossing his clipboard unceremoniously onto the counter.

"You find out anything in the lobby? Was he registered?"

"I don't know," David shrugged. Everyone had been accounted for, except for this mystery guy. There weren't any patients missing, but somehow they'd obtained an extra patient. Bizarre. He could only think that some thoughtless family or friend had left him behind when they fled the lobby. "But take a look at this," David offered, picking up the silver chain he'd just thrown on the counter.

"Heh, a dog tag?" Will laughed, taking it. "That's pretty damn useful."

"Not really," David sighed, "It doesn't say who he is at all."

David waited as Will read the cryptic message engraved in tiny italic letters on the dog tag.

"Well then," was all he said, handing it back to David.

"I know. I thought it was some kind of stupid joke. But what with the green blood- look here, I checked all his vitals. Bpm was forty, Will. And his temperature? This guy should be a freaking popsicle. He should be hypothermic. Dead. He's a whopping seventy nine degrees Fahrenheit." David let that sink in, watching Will's eyes bug out of his head.

"And he's-"

"Yeah, he's very much alive. Though his breaths are coming in at only eight per minute."

Will ran his hand through his curly hair, running it down his face, running it back through his hair. "What are we supposed to do with this? I don't know a thing about ghosts, and it's obvious this kid got attacked by that ghost or something."

"I'm not so sure about that," David responded, turning the dog tag over in his fingers. "Maybe he was attacked, but that doesn't explain these freaky vitals. Because how could that explain why was he wearing this?"

Will could only responded with a very frazzled shrug of the shoulders. It's not like David had expected him to know the answer anyway.

He stared at the boy's sleeping face. He looked so haunted. There were circles as deep as wells under his eyes. He might as well have been hit by a train, because that's what he looked like.

After Will's short visit nobody else came by the room to check on the mystery patient, or on David. Everyone else was so busy trying to bring some order back to the hospital. Most of the patients were slowly being moved to a different wing of the hospital entirely, out of the ER building, which was separated from the next wing (oncology) by a vast courtyard. It happened slowly, due to the separation of the buildings, but nobody ever came for mystery patient. He supposed it was because the mystery man still wasn't even registered – he wasn't even officially a patient. But David suspected it had something to do with the flying whispers of green blood. Everyone had seen it when they'd carried the man back here. Nobody wanted to contract some scary ghost illness, especially since that outbreak years back at the local high school, where a bunch of students had all caught some damaging ghostly bug.

A flood of doctors from the other side of the hospital had been pouring in to help though, along with many who were called in from their nights off. So David felt assured in the fact that he was not needed, and he stayed here in this patient's room, waiting for some sign that the Mystery Man was going to wake up.

If he had had his phone or his iPod or a book, or anything to pass the time, he might not have noticed. He would have been fiddling away playing Tetris or texting his wife to assure her he was fine (since this was probably on every news channel right now). But since he had nothing to do, he was slouched in a chair right next to Mystery Man's bed, and his eyes kept wandering from the boring unlabeled cupboards back to the man in the bed. He was examining the small cuts on his arms when he noticed. The ones that had been so small they hadn't warranted bandaging, like his other major wounds.

As David looked at them, he realized that slowly, but surely, they were healing.

His eyes widened, but he knew he wasn't wrong. Just ten minutes ago that cut there on his elbow had curled around the curve of his elbow perfectly. Now though, it was much, much smaller. Too much smaller to go unnoticed. And even as he focused in on it, watching it for five whole minutes, he saw with painstaking clarity that it was actively growing smaller. Now it was about half the size it had been when they'd first brought him back and bandaged him up.

What the actual fuck.

David rose from his chair robotically, his jaw hanging open. Living in Amity Park you got to see a lot of things folks didn't normally see – things like ghosts and all the strange occurrences that came along with them. But never in all his years as a doctor had he seen anything as astounding, or disturbing, as what was taking place on this man's skin. He almost wanted to un-bandage the big one, that chest wound, see if that was freaking healing itself too. But he thought better of it.

It was at this moment that the guy started to stir in his sleep. It started with a low groan. Then his head turned over and his arms came up slowly, gripping his head. More groans, louder. David stood frozen where he was- realized he was clenching his hand so tightly around the dog tag in his palm that it was digging grooves into his skin. The man was blinking his eyes, looking around the room with a detached and worried look. His eyes fell on David and widened suddenly, like a deer caught in the headlights.