So, this is only my second fanfic. I don't always get the time to write that I would like, so updates WILL be sporadic. However, because this idea has been bouncing around my head since June, and it won't go away, I won't be dropping the story. I'm sorry if it seems a bit dry, if you have some suggestions about how to make the story better please leave a (nice) comment and I will try to improve.

PLEASE READ THIS: This blurb just explains the context of the fic. It starts up about a month before Avengers does. Phantom Planet never happened, and Danny is fifteen at this point. His powers are all the same (ecto-blasts, freeze rays, super strength/speed and what I interpret to be fast healing). I own neither Danny Phantom nor the Avengers. Enjoy!

Skulker was after him, once again, this time testing some new sort of net. The fact that he'd had to fly around town, dodging Skulker's energy blasts, shots of goo, tranquilizer darts, and of course, the net, had kept Danny from being able to get the head off of Skulker's armor and suck him into the Fenton Thermos.

"Give up yet, ya tin can?" Danny taunted, corkscrewing around a shot that had come too close for comfort.

Skulker roared. "WHELP! I will have your pelt for my mantle; now hold still and your death will be quick."

Charging upwards after the young ghost, Skulker managed to get in a surprise hit, blasting Danny in the chest with an ecto-cannon. Danny flew through the air, somersaulting backwards through the clouds and instinctively going intangible in case an airplane was passing overhead.

He felt his body slip through a thick wall of metal and let his intangibility go a split second later, knowing that if he had gone through a jet there wouldn't be any others close by. Milliseconds afterwards, his back slammed into another wall of metal, leaving a Danny-shaped dent in the material.

Dazed, he stayed down for a moment, feeling for injuries. The stabbing pain in his chest when he inhaled meant broken ribs; his body was most likely scraped and bruised, but those would disappear in minutes with his accelerated healing. Other than that, he felt fine.

Gingerly getting himself to his feet, he prepared himself for Skulker's next line of attack, paying no attention to his current whereabouts.

"You cannot escape me, Ghost-Child."

Whipping his head around to see the source of the noise, Danny saw Skulker phase through the wall he had just come through. A high whining noise told him that he was about to fire the cannon again.

Before Skulker could react, Danny lunged forward and hit the suit's chin with an ecto-charged uppercut, making the head swing up on its hinges and expose its master. Quickly, he grabbed and uncapped the thermos that was strapped across his back and trapped the tiny ecto-blob inside.

"Better luck next time," he said to nobody in particular, chuckling inwardly. This was probably the thirtieth time he'd fought Skulker since getting his powers, and Danny never failed to get away from the metal monster and his disturbing desire to have his pelt on his wall.

Turning, he looked at where he had landed.

When he had felt himself phase through metal, he'd assumed that it was a plane, and that he had passed through it so quickly that he didn't feel himself go through the cabin. In reality, he'd never actually phased out, because the place was huge. Huge, however, was an understatement. It was the biggest aircraft Danny had ever seen. There were doors and hallways leading away from the spacious main room he currently occupied, and out the enormous glass window he could see what looked like a parking lot for planes of all shapes and sizes, with gargantuan rotors framing the asphalt. The outline of the entire thing had to be larger than ten football fields put together, and Danny was sure that there were multiple floors to the craft.

Looking around some more, he realized that there were more than fifty computers at the rows of desks in front of him, each with a person sitting in front of it. Directly in front of him was a large round table, with more people sitting around it.

All of them were staring at Danny.

Their expressions varied, and a mixture of confused, shocked, angry, and scared faces swam into Danny's view. The staring went on from seconds into minutes with nobody knowing what to do, until a red-haired woman gained her composure, whipped a gun out of nowhere, and pointed it at him with her finger on the trigger.

"Talk. Now."

Her voice was forceful and steady, and seemed to draw the others out of their shock. Several more guns were pointed at Danny, and for a few seconds the room was silent save for the clicking of the guns' safeties being turned off.

"Uh, hi?" Danny said sheepishly grinning confusedly and slowly raising his hands so that his palms were facing the group in the universal 'don't shoot me' position. Noticing that all the guns were ordinary ones that fired lead instead of ectoplasm, Danny turned intangible in case the group was as trigger-happy as the Guys in White. Speaking again, he asked "so, who are you guys?"

A tall, dark-skinned man in a black overcoat and an eye patch spoke. "That's none of your concern right now, is it? Now, unless you want to be reduced to a fine mist," he spread his arms to gesture to the massive amount of firearms trained on Danny, "I'd suggest you tell us who you are."

Danny nervously rubbed the back of his neck. Even if he was intangible, if the bullets went through him they could ricochet and hit somebody solid. And the group definitely looked like they would fire if he turned invisible or flew away. He didn't want to have to fight humans, either, and definitely not with broken ribs. That left him with talking.

"I'm Danny Phantom, ghostly savior of Amity Park!" he said, slipping into his more confident Phantom persona.

"Ghosts?" the man asked dryly, "You mean walk through walls, floating, spirit of a dead person ghosts?" He looked torn between amusement, and annoyance, and clearly did not believe the short introduction provided.

"Well, it's a lot more complex than that. You see, depending of their level of power, not all ghosts can walk through walls or float, and some of them were never even alive. Sometimes stray ectoplasm just gathers and forms creatures, so they're not all spirits of the dead."

Danny's longer explanation caused the room to be silent once more. Most of the people (Danny wondered what exactly they were doing in a gigantic flying building) just stared in disbelief. Taking this as his chance to leave, he grabbed Skulker's empty suit, phased through the floor, and flew off without looking back at the unfamiliar aircraft.

He flew through the clouds intangibly to cut down on wind resistance until he found a nice spot over water to destroy the suit. If he didn't trash the thing, Skulker would get it back and be hunting him within the week. Freezing it solid, Danny tossed Skulker's armor into the air and fired an ecto-beam at it, shattering the brittle metal. The pieces rained down like confetti and sank in the lake.

Satisfied, Danny flew back to Amity Park and into his room so that he could deal with his broken ribs. He had figured out long ago that broken bones could be set by concentrating on turning his skin invisible and intangible, and then re-arranging the pieces. Somehow, his organs would stay together rather than falling out of him, which he didn't ponder too much and simply accepted as a useful fact. Once set, his bones would heal within a couple minutes, and be back to normal within the hour.

After patching up his broken ribs, Danny did one last loop around Amity looking for stray ghosts. Finding none, he released an angry Skulker into the Ghost Zone and turned in for the night, glad that it was Friday and he could catch up on homework and sleep the next day.

The second that the self-proclaimed ghost had disappeared along with the suit of armor from the Helicarrier, it had been chaos.

At first, there had been a lot of shouting and general confusion. Luckily, no guns were fired, but Nick Fury's anger posed a much bigger threat.

"ROMANOV!" he roared. If any other agent had been called this way, they would've wet themselves. Even Natasha was slightly shaken.

"Yes, sir?"

"I'm cancelling your mission in Russia. As of now, your mission is that." Fury gestured to the spot on the floor where Danny had disappeared through. "I want to know who he is, where he came from, if he's dangerous, who he associates with. Get me everything you can on him. If his cat throws up on the carpet, I want to hear about it. Understood?"

Natasha nodded. She had been looking forward to the mission in Russia, but this one sounded more difficult, and she liked a challenge.

"Sir! I've got search results on the name the creature provided!" One of the many faceless SHIELD researchers was gesturing for Fury and Natasha to look at his monitor. As it turned out, the creature was telling the truth. The pictures matched up, and all of the online newspaper articles came from the town of Amity Park. There were even a couple fan sites romanticizing the ghost.

And all the articles coincided with Danny Phantom being the hero of Amity Park: there were pictures of him sucking ghosts into what looked like a thermos, pulling kids out of burning buildings, and even helping get cats out of trees. And article upon article detailed events that had not been photographed, like when Amity had been pulled into another dimension.

After reading all that the internet had to offer on the now heroic-seeming ghost, it was decided: Natasha was to find and observe Phantom, and if he was worthy, invite him to the Avengers Initiative.