Dante (unfortunately) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foreverphantom) wrote2025-03-09 10:10 pm
foreverphantom) wrote2025-03-09 10:10 pm
HOT SAUCE: FLAMEO
Content warning: suicidal ideation, self-harm, gore, explicit murder/suicide
---
Vlad Masters sits across the room of a garishly decorated mansion, watching you worriedly. Yes, that's right. After the explosion...Vlad took you in. It's not like any of your relatives were any closer, and in the end he was right. The both of you understand each other better than anyone else could.
Soon enough, the shock wears off and you are left to deal with the fallout. The grief. Sure, Vlad is grieving too, but he didn't lose everything. He still has his home, his fortune. You don't even get to keep your hometown. Your old room, your old bed, the smell of the laundry detergent that Mom used--
You think maybe you should've died in the blast, too. The only reason they were all there in the first place is because of you, it's the least you deserve, and sometimes, you think everything that you were died with them anyway. You're not Danny Fenton anymore, you're just an empty husk. A bad omen.
Months pass, and you spend most of your time in bed staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes you cry and ache for everything you've lost and that's never coming back--not even as ghosts. It's just you, now, and there's no fixing this. Sometimes you want to crawl out of your skin, scream and set yourself on fire, try to get away from your own disgusting wretchedness. The only thing that stops you from actually doing it is lack of energy. And sometimes...sometimes you drift. As if your mind wants to get as far away from yourself as possible. Those are the nicest, you suppose--when you can just lose time without having to be there and experience your own blighted life.
When you stop coming down to eat, Vlad starts bringing meals up to your room and stays until you've finished all of the food, and then some. He tries to talk to you, but what is there to talk about? He makes you get up and take showers when you stop doing that too. It's aggravating. One day, when he comes in to rouse you out of bed, you finally confront him about it.
"Why are you even bothering?"
"Daniel?"
"Why bother with all this? With--making sure I eat, and take showers, and get out of bed. What's the point?"
Silence. For a moment, you think you've won, that Vlad has seen the futility of all of this and will leave you alone.
But then--
"Because, Daniel, that's what it takes to live." He says it so softly, like if he's not careful, the fragile words could shatter between his teeth as he says them. Something about it causes an ache to flair in your chest.
"Well, I'm tired, Vlad. I'm tired of living."
It's almost freeing to say it. But the air is sucked out of the room. Time seems to stretch thin like taffy between the two of you. You're curled up in bed with your back to Vlad, so you can't see his face, and you're just too tired to roll over and find out. That's fine. What does it matter?
"You don't mean that, Daniel." Vlad has never sounded older and more fragile than in this moment. Brittle. Scared.
You sigh. "I do, Vlad." Life now is just...an endless chore. The lead that permanently lives in your bones and the lump in your throat that never goes away. You are so tired of crying and hating yourself and missing people you have no right to miss. An endless cycle with no purpose. "I just...want all the hurting to stop."
You hunch under the blanket even tighter. Eventually, Vlad sighs and walks out of the room, leaving you to languish. Good. It's what you deserve.
---
You thought that was the end of that, but then a week later Vlad determines that you have to start school again, lest you fall too far behind. And, you know, he's hoping that school will get you back in the swing of being a person again. Not that you understand why, after your last conversation--you thought he'd understood the pointlessness to all this.
At least he lets you be homeschooled--you don't think you could stomach being around people anymore. But none of the effort matters. The schoolwork makes you feel filthier than ever, because isn't that how you ruined everything in the first place?
"Daniel." Vlad, in the doorway. You look up from the trigonometry worksheet you were supposed to be doing, but were actually just staring through. "Listen, little badger, I've been...thinking. About what you told me." He approaches, softly, gently, and sits down beside you. He looks you in the eyes. "About making the hurt go away. What if it was possible? What if you could just...leave this behind and move on with your life?"
"What?"
"I did some research. And I think I have a procedure that can...remove all these painful emotions and help you recover."
You don't want to "move on and recover," not when your loved ones can't. But...if this really does put an end to all the misery, that solves the problem, right? Even if it feels selfish. You can't keep going like this much longer; it has to stop, one way or the other.
So you sigh and say, "Yeah, okay."
It's not like anything can get any worse anyway.
But you're wrong. Because the one thing you're good at is making everything worse.
---
You're in Vlad's lab, strapped down to a table that, before all this, would have been terrifying. Vlad plunges the enormous glowing claws of the metallic gauntlets straight into your chest--the things meant to pull you and your ghost half apart, and get rid of all the pain and the misery in the process. And when he pulls them out--everything stops making sense. 'You' stop being a 'you.'
Now, you're a 'you' and a 'him.' You're impaled on the claws of the gauntlet, held up by Vlad. He's still strapped down to the table, looking as human as ever. And suddenly, looking at the you that's now a him, you're filled with such anger and loathing you can hardly stand it.
Even you wanted to get away from yourself--and now he has, leaving you saddled with all his baggage and not even whole. You'd never even considered that you could be disposable like this; just a sack of misery and guilt and awfulness that he can drop to the curb like so much garbage while he gets to move on and be happy? Without you? Because he's without you?
And Vlad, still holding you up by those stupid gauntlets, that stupid old man who had the audacity to think of getting rid of you in the first place, planted the idea in your--no, wait, his--head. You hate them both. And you can feel your own instability, just half of a ghost without an anchor, you know there's only so much time before you just fizzle out of existence. How convenient that would be for Vlad and him.
Well, you're not interested in convenience right now. What you want is to make them regret what they've done to you. And you can start here, with Vlad. You rip yourself off the gauntlets and throw Vlad against the wall. And then, while he's stunned, you pluck the gauntlets off his hands and place them on your own. It's time to give old Vladdy a taste of his own medicine.
You plunge the claws into him and tear out his own ghost half. Let him see how he likes it. And because you know both you and Plasmius are on borrowed time as unmoored halves, you decide to kill two birds with one stone--you phase into him and force the two of you together. Kicking and screaming, you drag Plasmius into some kind of meld, until the line between you and him falls away and instead of two separate halves, you are now a brand new whole.
You blink your eyes open and you see Vlad slumped against the far wall, and Danny crying and frantically trying to unbuckle himself from the table. Because you're not either of them anymore, you're someone completely different. And even though you're whole now, that does nothing to quell the overflowing anger.
You stand on unsteady legs (why are they unsteady, you've always been this height--no you haven't, you're supposed to be so much taller--but you haven't even hit your growth spurt yet--what happened to all your muscle) and approach Vlad, the nearer of the two, when you hear a dull thud. You whip your head around. It's Danny, having unstrapped himself from the table and clumsily trying to get up from the floor despite his heaving sobs and gasps.
Right. Danny. The start of all this. The one that wanted to get rid of you. A horrible wretch that you thought you could at least rely on to be there, until even he got sick of you. Forget Vlad. He's the one you approach now.
Danny scrabbles backwards clumsily until he backs up against the wall. Nowhere to go now, both he and you know it. Good.
"P-please! I don't--I'm sorry! Th-this was a mistake! This isn't what I thought it would be like--this isn't what I wanted!"
Something about that snaps like a rubber band in your head and you lunge for him. How dare he say that, when he's the one that threw you aside to begin with!! You didn't want this either, but it's not like that mattered to him! Well, now it's your turn to do what you want! And what you want now is to destroy him. You begin ripping him apart--molecule by molecule, just as your (his) father promised. Or at least, as close to it as you can get with your bare hands. Chunks of flesh, bursts of blood, you gouge him out piece by piece and throw him aside like he did to you. The both of you killed everyone you've ever loved, it's the least that he deserves. It's the least that a monster like you would do.
And then...when he's emptied out, just a caved out corpse covered in its own viscera, you look at the wreckage and feel...unsatisfied. It wasn't enough. It was too quick. It was too neat and easy and now he gets to stop while you're still here, boiling over with resentment and fury that has nowhere to go. How fair is that?! After all this, HE gets to rest, and you're stuck here with all this unfairness and nothing to take it out on!
You grip your hair (fire? It's fire now?) and tug on it as you scream. You can't hold everything in, you need to do more, destroy more. And so, like a comet, you burst out of the lab, destroying Vlad's mansion in your wake, looking for anything that you can take these feelings out on before you tear yourself apart.
---
Vlad Masters sits across the room of a garishly decorated mansion, watching you worriedly. Yes, that's right. After the explosion...Vlad took you in. It's not like any of your relatives were any closer, and in the end he was right. The both of you understand each other better than anyone else could.
Soon enough, the shock wears off and you are left to deal with the fallout. The grief. Sure, Vlad is grieving too, but he didn't lose everything. He still has his home, his fortune. You don't even get to keep your hometown. Your old room, your old bed, the smell of the laundry detergent that Mom used--
You think maybe you should've died in the blast, too. The only reason they were all there in the first place is because of you, it's the least you deserve, and sometimes, you think everything that you were died with them anyway. You're not Danny Fenton anymore, you're just an empty husk. A bad omen.
Months pass, and you spend most of your time in bed staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes you cry and ache for everything you've lost and that's never coming back--not even as ghosts. It's just you, now, and there's no fixing this. Sometimes you want to crawl out of your skin, scream and set yourself on fire, try to get away from your own disgusting wretchedness. The only thing that stops you from actually doing it is lack of energy. And sometimes...sometimes you drift. As if your mind wants to get as far away from yourself as possible. Those are the nicest, you suppose--when you can just lose time without having to be there and experience your own blighted life.
When you stop coming down to eat, Vlad starts bringing meals up to your room and stays until you've finished all of the food, and then some. He tries to talk to you, but what is there to talk about? He makes you get up and take showers when you stop doing that too. It's aggravating. One day, when he comes in to rouse you out of bed, you finally confront him about it.
"Why are you even bothering?"
"Daniel?"
"Why bother with all this? With--making sure I eat, and take showers, and get out of bed. What's the point?"
Silence. For a moment, you think you've won, that Vlad has seen the futility of all of this and will leave you alone.
But then--
"Because, Daniel, that's what it takes to live." He says it so softly, like if he's not careful, the fragile words could shatter between his teeth as he says them. Something about it causes an ache to flair in your chest.
"Well, I'm tired, Vlad. I'm tired of living."
It's almost freeing to say it. But the air is sucked out of the room. Time seems to stretch thin like taffy between the two of you. You're curled up in bed with your back to Vlad, so you can't see his face, and you're just too tired to roll over and find out. That's fine. What does it matter?
"You don't mean that, Daniel." Vlad has never sounded older and more fragile than in this moment. Brittle. Scared.
You sigh. "I do, Vlad." Life now is just...an endless chore. The lead that permanently lives in your bones and the lump in your throat that never goes away. You are so tired of crying and hating yourself and missing people you have no right to miss. An endless cycle with no purpose. "I just...want all the hurting to stop."
You hunch under the blanket even tighter. Eventually, Vlad sighs and walks out of the room, leaving you to languish. Good. It's what you deserve.
---
You thought that was the end of that, but then a week later Vlad determines that you have to start school again, lest you fall too far behind. And, you know, he's hoping that school will get you back in the swing of being a person again. Not that you understand why, after your last conversation--you thought he'd understood the pointlessness to all this.
At least he lets you be homeschooled--you don't think you could stomach being around people anymore. But none of the effort matters. The schoolwork makes you feel filthier than ever, because isn't that how you ruined everything in the first place?
"Daniel." Vlad, in the doorway. You look up from the trigonometry worksheet you were supposed to be doing, but were actually just staring through. "Listen, little badger, I've been...thinking. About what you told me." He approaches, softly, gently, and sits down beside you. He looks you in the eyes. "About making the hurt go away. What if it was possible? What if you could just...leave this behind and move on with your life?"
"What?"
"I did some research. And I think I have a procedure that can...remove all these painful emotions and help you recover."
You don't want to "move on and recover," not when your loved ones can't. But...if this really does put an end to all the misery, that solves the problem, right? Even if it feels selfish. You can't keep going like this much longer; it has to stop, one way or the other.
So you sigh and say, "Yeah, okay."
It's not like anything can get any worse anyway.
But you're wrong. Because the one thing you're good at is making everything worse.
---
You're in Vlad's lab, strapped down to a table that, before all this, would have been terrifying. Vlad plunges the enormous glowing claws of the metallic gauntlets straight into your chest--the things meant to pull you and your ghost half apart, and get rid of all the pain and the misery in the process. And when he pulls them out--everything stops making sense. 'You' stop being a 'you.'
Now, you're a 'you' and a 'him.' You're impaled on the claws of the gauntlet, held up by Vlad. He's still strapped down to the table, looking as human as ever. And suddenly, looking at the you that's now a him, you're filled with such anger and loathing you can hardly stand it.
Even you wanted to get away from yourself--and now he has, leaving you saddled with all his baggage and not even whole. You'd never even considered that you could be disposable like this; just a sack of misery and guilt and awfulness that he can drop to the curb like so much garbage while he gets to move on and be happy? Without you? Because he's without you?
And Vlad, still holding you up by those stupid gauntlets, that stupid old man who had the audacity to think of getting rid of you in the first place, planted the idea in your--no, wait, his--head. You hate them both. And you can feel your own instability, just half of a ghost without an anchor, you know there's only so much time before you just fizzle out of existence. How convenient that would be for Vlad and him.
Well, you're not interested in convenience right now. What you want is to make them regret what they've done to you. And you can start here, with Vlad. You rip yourself off the gauntlets and throw Vlad against the wall. And then, while he's stunned, you pluck the gauntlets off his hands and place them on your own. It's time to give old Vladdy a taste of his own medicine.
You plunge the claws into him and tear out his own ghost half. Let him see how he likes it. And because you know both you and Plasmius are on borrowed time as unmoored halves, you decide to kill two birds with one stone--you phase into him and force the two of you together. Kicking and screaming, you drag Plasmius into some kind of meld, until the line between you and him falls away and instead of two separate halves, you are now a brand new whole.
You blink your eyes open and you see Vlad slumped against the far wall, and Danny crying and frantically trying to unbuckle himself from the table. Because you're not either of them anymore, you're someone completely different. And even though you're whole now, that does nothing to quell the overflowing anger.
You stand on unsteady legs (why are they unsteady, you've always been this height--no you haven't, you're supposed to be so much taller--but you haven't even hit your growth spurt yet--what happened to all your muscle) and approach Vlad, the nearer of the two, when you hear a dull thud. You whip your head around. It's Danny, having unstrapped himself from the table and clumsily trying to get up from the floor despite his heaving sobs and gasps.
Right. Danny. The start of all this. The one that wanted to get rid of you. A horrible wretch that you thought you could at least rely on to be there, until even he got sick of you. Forget Vlad. He's the one you approach now.
Danny scrabbles backwards clumsily until he backs up against the wall. Nowhere to go now, both he and you know it. Good.
"P-please! I don't--I'm sorry! Th-this was a mistake! This isn't what I thought it would be like--this isn't what I wanted!"
Something about that snaps like a rubber band in your head and you lunge for him. How dare he say that, when he's the one that threw you aside to begin with!! You didn't want this either, but it's not like that mattered to him! Well, now it's your turn to do what you want! And what you want now is to destroy him. You begin ripping him apart--molecule by molecule, just as your (his) father promised. Or at least, as close to it as you can get with your bare hands. Chunks of flesh, bursts of blood, you gouge him out piece by piece and throw him aside like he did to you. The both of you killed everyone you've ever loved, it's the least that he deserves. It's the least that a monster like you would do.
And then...when he's emptied out, just a caved out corpse covered in its own viscera, you look at the wreckage and feel...unsatisfied. It wasn't enough. It was too quick. It was too neat and easy and now he gets to stop while you're still here, boiling over with resentment and fury that has nowhere to go. How fair is that?! After all this, HE gets to rest, and you're stuck here with all this unfairness and nothing to take it out on!
You grip your hair (fire? It's fire now?) and tug on it as you scream. You can't hold everything in, you need to do more, destroy more. And so, like a comet, you burst out of the lab, destroying Vlad's mansion in your wake, looking for anything that you can take these feelings out on before you tear yourself apart.