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Danny felt empty. Except for a sharp pain in his chest, there was nothing in him anymore. Nothing mattered anymore.
Every since he'd lost all his loved ones in that explosion, he felt as if he had nothing to live for anymore. He spent all his time wandering Vlad's mansion like a ghost—the kind from those old stories, not the real ones. He stared into space and he either cried or tried not to.
He was so pitiful and depressed Vlad didn't even have it in him to gloat about Danny finally being his son.
He tried to keep up his old habits, school, ghost hunting, video games... but he fell off the wagon pretty quickly and took to just sulking around Vlad's place... his new home that felt like a dungeon, even though he wasn't technically being held prisoner except by his own lack of motivation to leave.
Surprisingly, Vlad didn't try to control him, didn't force him to go back to school, or to be normal, or even to train with him as his half-ghost apprentice or whatever it was he'd always planned to do if Danny ever agreed to join him. Danny supposed he must be grieving too, in his own way. After all—or so he claimed—he'd lost the love of his life in that explosion too.
It got to the point where Danny hardly ever left the house and almost never went ghost hunting anymore. Unless the ghost sought him out directly, he simply didn't care. Valerie could handle it. Or the A-Listers—once Phantom stopped showing up as often and the Fenton's were... gone, they all formed their own little ghost hunting team. They weren't bad, actually. They weren't great, but they weren't bad.
Amity Park didn't need him.
He was free to live his sorry excuse of a life, struggling to manage even basic tasks like showering and eating and even sleeping. He was free to ignore everyone and everything around him, shirk his responsibilities, and discard all the things he'd once enjoyed. He could do anything he wanted to but die.
Perhaps if he hadn't chosen to ignore the world around him, he might've seen the signs. The spike of ectoplasmic energy where the Nasty Burger had once been. The chill everyone seemed to get when they walked past the cordoned off site where it used to stand.
If he ever went into the town center, he might've seen the shades start to form, their silhouettes vague but hauntingly familiar. He might have heard it when they started to speak. When they asked after him. When they began to look for him.
He might have heard his parents voices calling after him again. "Danny! Danny! Where are you?"
He might have gotten to see his best friends' smiling faces when they saw him once more.
He might've even felt the warmth of his sister's hugs, hugs he'd often refused before her death, and that he so missed now.
But he didn't. And he hadn't. And he never would.
And after Vlad made good on his promise to remove his humanity... he never would.