Negative Feedback (Danny Phantom Fic)

Chapter 25

Trigger warning: blatant Islamophobia, bullying, blood, and violence all appear in a particular scene in this chapter. If this is something you're not comfortable reading, let me know and I'll try to sum it up as cleanly as I can for you.

Everyone yells at each other a lot in this chapter... You'll see what I mean soon.

Also, I highly recommend listening to the song I've put at the top at some point during the chapter because it's relevant to the events in this part. Thanks~

RECAP:

Clockwork's grip tightened around the wriggling creature to finish it off. The dust blew away in an undetectable breeze, leaving the four teens shocked and obviously confused. No one said anything for what could have been an eternity in the ghost's timeless tower.

"I know you all have a lot of questions, and I will do my best to answer them without stepping over my boundaries," he said, finally breaking the silence. "Please, follow me."

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For a few seconds, nobody budged an inch. Nothing made sense: how had they gotten into the Ghost Zone in the first place? Why had Clockwork stayed so elusive this entire time? What was the significance of that snake he'd just pulled out of nowhere? Why did it disintegrate?

Then, in an out-of-character brave step forward, Camry broke the silence. "That snake... had been inside me, hadn't it."

All four pairs of eyes in the room landed on her, three being significantly wider with bewilderment and confusion. Clockwork, on the other hand, simply nodded. "It was amplifying your negative feedback in the hopes that it could manipulate you with greater ease."

"Somehow..." She paused, clenching one hand into a fist and holding it against her sternum. "I feel like I knew that, in the back of my head somewhere. A snake did this to me. I remember now."

"You remember what happened to you?" Danny gasped. "When?"

"Removing the parasite also removed its hold on her memories," Clockwork explained, his tone gravely serious. He extended his arm, the one gripping his staff, toward a huge clock face suspended in thin air. The hands and numbers on it disappeared to reveal a swirling green void that closely resembled the "sky" outside of his tower.

A dark scene illuminated by a green glow lit up the "screen," revealing a short figure creeping into the kitchen and holding a Polaroid camera in both hands. Though the shadows distorted her features a little, it was undoubtedly Camry. The real one, who had managed to stand up straight on her own, unconsciously held her breath in at the sight. She knew this moment all too well; why did she have to experience it so many more times?

Her hand rested on the oven door's handle all over again, and there was that wall of green flame followed by the enormous, ever-growing body of her assailant. With his enormous head and unhinging jaw, he could have easily swallowed her whole. She didn't technically have a heart anymore, but something akin to a pulse picked up in her ears and thundered through to her fingertips. It was coming, coming to get her, and she couldn't do anything except stand there and stare, on the verge of terrified tears!

The vision of her past ended with a bright flash of white light just as the snake was about to clamp its jaws around her. That rotating green returned to the clock face, and Clockwork turned back around to assess the teens' reactions. Stiff-jointed and shivering, Camry certainly had had the worst in reliving her trauma. The other three were at varying levels of shock, surprise, and, especially in Tucker's case, unease.