Chapter Text
Daniel James Fenton was born to die.
Some may believe everyone is born to die, but that is not true. Every person is born with a purpose of some sort, and that purpose is not death. That is what makes Daniel so peculiar. What makes his story worth telling.
His purpose in life, was for it to end.
As a young child, he was always curious about one thing or another.
When Daniel was four, and his sister, Jasmine - Jazz, as she had taken to being called - was six, they found a dead mouse on the slide in their yard. They didn’t know what death was, not really. They were too young for that. They took the corpse to their parents, who had been working down in their lab. That day, the two children were taught about death. They were taught a little bit about what could cause it - not much, as they were only young - and, subsequently, this led to their parents teaching the two children about ghosts.
Danny, though he didn’t know why, was certain that not everything his parents were telling him was true, despite usually being so sure that his parents, being adults, were all-knowing beings.
Jazz, being six, took to their words as though they were gospel and any disagreement would be blasphemous, though she was somewhat confused by the descriptions the two children were given about what a ghost was. She did not question it.
Though neither child would remember the day in a few months time beyond a vague recollection of finding a dead mouse, that day - for Daniel - laid the foundations of the pedestals his parents rested on, while for Jazz, it completed them.
When Daniel was nine, and Jazz eleven, their parents began to build a portal to what they called ‘The Ghost Zone’.
Jazz, by this point, did not believe in ghosts. To her, the concept of a creature living beyond it’s passing, beyond the point where the brain stopped working, was unfathomable. She did not know it at the time, but the pedestals she had once built for her parents had begun to crack. Danny, however, had placed his parents on grand pedestals, and any cracks that had formed were repaired, though the damage never seemed to fully fade. He still looked up to his parents as much as he ever had, believing entirely that their words were theory, fact, and therefore law, that they were comparable to gods, because he was a child, still naive to the fact that they were not omnipotent, or all-powerful.
A year later, when Danny was ten and Jazz twelve, she began to notice her brother’s oddities. Oddities that everybody else in Amity had brushed off, because the reputation of the Fenton’s was one of eccentricity.
Jasmine Evelyn Fenton was twelve years old when she began to study psychology. She initially did this because she wanted to learn why her brother Daniel was the way he was. She would forget that, within a few weeks. She would manage to convince herself that the reason for her studies was because she wanted to understand the effects of their parents' devotion to work was on herself and Daniel, compared to other families. The reason for her studies didn’t particularly matter. Regardless of her reasons, the effects of her choices would remain the same.
At the same time Jazz was interesting herself in psychology, Danny was adjusting silently to the way their parents would spend more time in the lab than with their children. He was already adjusting to fighting re-animated food, when his parents forgot that it wasn’t safe to leave samples in the same place as the food - something that was becoming more common.
Daniel James Fenton was born to die.
When Danny was fourteen, and Jazz sixteen, their parents completed the portal they had spent years building.
In the eyes of Jazz, sixteen and preparing herself to for the future, she no longer stood her parents on pedestals. To her, they were far-off figures, with flaws she could recognise, problems she could criticise. Her parents were akin to gods, Jasmine decided one day. You could beg, plead, pray for their help, and - if you were lucky enough to hold their attention - you could get it. She knew, logically, that her parents loved her and Danny. They just happened to love their work a little bit more, and that little bit made worlds of difference. Jasmine could devote herself to her parents, she knew, but they would never truly devote themselves to their children, and that was something that Jazz had learnt to accept. So, she didn’t devote herself to her parents, to beings who would never return the devotion. Rather, she devoted her focus to Danny - not in the way she once did for her parents, but in the way she wished they would do for her and for him. She studied hard, because she wanted to make sure she would always be the stability their parents forgot to offer to their children.
At the age of fourteen, Danny raised his parents on pedestals. They were cracked, held together by love, which would never fully repair the damage despite his attempts, and layers of paint, hiding what he refused to accept, that his parents did not deserve their standing.
His parents, Danny had decided, were like gods. They loved freely, they loved openly, and there was no sin he could commit that would take that love away. His parents would never stop loving him, but that did not mean they would interfere in his life, fix his problems. Danny was fourteen, and if he was asked to describe gods, he would describe a distant figure, loving but detached, who could be cruel or kind, close or distant, all on a whim that would affect the lives of their devotees. Danny would do anything for his parents, he knew. A small, traitorous part of his mind liked to warn him that they wouldn’t do the same for him - their love knew no bounds, but their work would come first.
His parents loved him and his sister, he knew. They just happened to love their work more, and that was their greatest flaw.
Maybe it was their fault that he was doomed to die, maybe not. Either way, it was unavoidable.