A/N: Unedited and probably abrupt. It’s late and I need to sleep. XD

The Little Match Girl

by Shimegami-chan

Chapter 1

It wasn’t a good day to be a ghost.

Danielle Phantom ignored the knock on her door, placidly staring at a shifting green spot on her wall. If it wasn’t one problem it was another, she thought; moving silently as she rearranged her position on the chair. I don’t need any more trouble. Not today.

“Dani! Daaaaani Dani Dani Dani Dani!” a shrill voice cried out alongside the insistent sound, and once again Danielle was thankful for the reinforced, spectre-proofed door - something she had unabashedly taken from the Masters workshop so long ago, and installed in her little niche in the Ghost Zone. “Aren’t you home? Don’t you want to see me?”

No, she mentally answered, burrowing under her luminescent quilt. Klemper was the last person Dani wanted to see, in fact; given the options of encountering her villainous parent or dealing with the obsessive ice ghost, Dani would take Vlad any day.

Especially today.

Today was particularly notorious: it was one year to the day on which Danielle had first opened her eyes in the lab of the Masters mansion and found herself self-aware. It was a date she had memorized and kept with her, back when she still had someone she could call a father, and a real house to call home. And Dani didn’t want to admit it, but the fact that today was her birthday made it that much more lonely.

She was thinking about going to see Danny, if Klemper would just get off her porch.

True, her cousin was far busier than usual nowadays, between the strong enemies that had recently been appearing and his new girlfriend. Rationally, Danielle thought she shouldn’t interfere, but some part of her still wanted to leap up and shout Why did you forget about me? Why doesn’t anybody care?

Of course, it wasn’t Danny’s fault she had holed herself up in the Ghost Zone rather than hanging around Amity Park, helping him kick ectoplasmic butt. But even though she knew she was being childish - just because she was thirteen now, didn’t mean she had to grow up instantly, right? - Danielle couldn’t help it. She felt like she was intruding when she was with him, cramping his style. Amity Park was his town.

But Danielle had not been able to make Madison her town. Even when Vlad moved out of his mansion there, there was precious little for Dani to occupy herself. There were hardly any ghosts, she knew no one, and living on the streets wasn’t where she wanted to be. So she had taken what she could from the deserted mansion, and fled through the Portal into a place where she thought she might be better accepted.

After all, what could be a more suitable hideout for a runaway halfa than the Ghost Zone?

Unfortunately, that approach seemed to be proving less and less effective as time wore on. Every ghost in the place knew she was affiliated with Danny, and as most of them wanted to give him a taste of his own medicine, Danielle occasionally found herself the target of their attacks. The reinforced door had thus far been able to keep other ghosts out of her lair, but it just as often kept Dani in.

And Dani had to admit, she was starting to get cabin fever.

She sighed loudly; Klemper’s knocks had faded away. Untangling herself from the blanket, the ghost girl opened the metal door to her chambers, almost afraid to look outside, but it seemed as though the overfriendly spirit had finally given up and left. In fact, there wasn’t any activity visible in the Zone from her vantage point, a rare occurrence, what with her cousin forcing enemies back into the Ghost Zone on a thrice-daily basis. Maybe there was a big rip between the dimensions again and everyone went to the real world awhile, she thought.

She considered going to visit Danny while the coast was clear. It would never hurt to check. And besides…if everything’s cool…maybe we can go do something fun.

After all, she reasoned, Danny wouldn’t want her to be alone on her birthday.

It was late evening by the time Danielle arrived in Amity Park. She flew until she was exhausted, and then dropped stealthily to the ground and transformed into her human form not far from her cousin’s house. Maybe it was too late for him to go out on a school night, she thought. Or maybe he was even out, patrolling. Just in case he invited her in, Dani went into a grocery store and bought a little box of cupcakes, a pack of matches and a single pink candle out of her meagre savings. Then, with purchase held behind her back, Dani climbed the stone steps in front of FentonWorks and rang the bell.

A woman - Danny's mother, it had to be - opened the door, pulling back the hood of her blue jumpsuit. She looked just like Vlad’s holograms had depicted her, and it made the ghost girl a little nostalgic. “Hello there dear, can I help you?”

“Oh, uh…” Danielle shuffled her feet uncomfortably. “Is Danny here…?”

“No, sorry, he’s out on a daaaate,” Maddie Fenton said with a smile and an exaggerated sweep of her hand. “With Sam. I’ll tell him you came by, though. And you are…?”

“Just…someone he knows,” Danielle whispered, looking away. “Never mind, then.” She turned and fled before Maddie could press her further, going intangible before she’d even rounded the corner. On a date! The halfa girl couldn’t help but feel insulted. It was her birthday, and the only person she trusted didn’t have the decency to keep his schedule free!

Dani knew it was unfair to blame her cousin for the mishap, seeing how he had no way of knowing she would come. But blaming him felt better than blaming herself, especially today. She flopped down in the alleyway a block from the Fentons’ and tucked her head between her knees, sobbing until her eyes were red and puffy. It wasn’t fair that she had to be alone all the time! She hadn’t asked to be made in the first place, so why was she the one out on the street without a family? What good was it to be a half-ghost if you didn’t have friends on either side? Dani hated what Vlad had done to her. She even hated Danny for giving him the opportunity.

“I should have just let Plasmius melt me,” she mumbled, sticking the candle half-heartedly into a squashed cupcake. “Happy birthday, Danielle.”

Striking a match against the brick wall, Dani warmed her hands, feeling like the little girl from that sad fairy tale. She wondered if someone would walk by in the morning and find her still here, frozen solid. The idea gave her the shivers.

With the flame burning its way to the end her fingers held, Danielle lowered the match to the candle and lit it just before the flame extinguished itself. She held the cupcake up and looked at it. She’d never had a birthday before, but here she was turning thirteen - or so Vlad had told her, at least. So one candle would have to count for the first birthday she’d celebrated, not her age. She knew it was no good wishing, either, but Dani was feeling unabashedly selfish tonight. “I wish I had a family like Danny’s.”

Then, with a puff of blue breath, the candle winked out.

Somewhere not too far away, Danielle’s cousin Danny Fenton - otherwise known as Danny Phantom - was completely undeserving of her scorn. A new portal had indeed manifested and gone unnoticed by the Fentons’ scanners for quite some time, and now thanks to their negligence, the town was crawling with spooks - and not just your run-of-the-mill ectopusses, but dozens of high-profile, powerful ghosts, most of which had a personal score to settle with Phantom. Currently, he, Sam and Tucker were in the Spectre Speeder, outrunning both Skulker and Technus while several other familiar faces trailed behind. Danny had little doubt that the mob following them was far from the end of his problems; for every ghost that was tearing after the Speeder, another ten were probably lurking around Amity Park, looking to stir up trouble of their own. One of these, unbeknownst to Danny, was of course Danielle.

And another, also unbeknownst to Danny or his cousin, was Desiree, who had just heard the most tantalizing plea come out of thin air.

“So you have wished it…so shall it be!”

-to be continued…