Chapter Text
Danny nearly dropped his gummy worms as a black blur came screaming out of the sky and slipped beneath the leaf-strewn trailbed. The only trace it left was the plume of vapor billowing out of Danny’s mouth. He coughed and fanned it away.
“What the hell was that?” Tucker shouted.
“What was what?” Sam was walking obliviously backwards along the forested shortcut that wound between the neighborhoods of Amity Park. Considering the sharp drop-offs on either side of the trail, it wasn't the safest method of transit, but, to Danny's dismay, all of their senses of safety had become a bit warped over the past year.
At the back of the group, Valerie’s bottle of iced tea crunched in her fist as none other than Dan Fenton shot back up out of the ground a few yards ahead. He corkscrewed into the air, his hair threatening the leafy canopy, and stuck the landing. “I got it!”
Danny moseyed over and offered a gummy worm. “Got what?”
Dan opened his fist and revealed his cell phone. “Dinner at six-thirty,” he relayed.
Danny examined his ghost. The fumbled phone, the waver of uncertainty suppressed beneath his surface… It felt familiar. Danny projected a question in the shape of Maddie Fenton.
Dan crossed an arm over his stomach and nodded.
“Aw, really?” Tucker kicked a stray pinecone. “We were gonna watch a movie.”
“Which one?”
Sam laced her fingers behind her head. “I may have gotten my hands on an early release of Revenge of the Sith.”
Dan bounced into the air. “No way!”
“Yup, I’m amazing, I know.”
“Hey Danny,” Dan crouched midair and aimed his cell phone, “We could be Jedi.”
Danny laughed, “I don’t know, you look more like a Sith to me.”
“Okay, fight me, then!” Dan narrowed his red eyes and palmed the phone like the hilt of a saber. “You got nothing on the dark side.”
Danny very nearly reciprocated a battle stance when a spike of anxiety struck him from behind. He glanced back at the only friend he kept who didn’t know his secret. He reeled himself in and carefully said, “How about we have a fair fight when we get home?”
Valerie seemed determined not to show her nerves, but Danny could feel her buzzing like a kicked beehive. She crossed her arms and scoffed. “How could you ever have a fair fight with a ghost?”
The question was rhetorical, of course.
The smile creeping across Dan’s face revealed a will to ignore that fact. His teeth glinted, and his aura throbbed with intent as he slowly opened his mouth.
Danny’s muscles coiled.
“Well,” Dan began, and Danny sprang. His sneakers gouged the packed dirt with a furious leap, only for Dan to laugh and twirl intangibly away.
“Don’t you dare,” Danny hissed.
Dan’s eyes glimmered. “But it worked so well last time!”
“No it didn’t, it sucked!” Danny pounced again and missed.
“Only for, like, an hour,” Dan hedged.
Danny’s ghost had already decimated his foundation once this week when he spilled his secret to their parents. Danny could barely believe that he was threatening to do it again. Was Dan immune to the tension at home? In denial of the silence that hung heavy where chatter should fill the house? “Then why haven’t you talked to Mom and Dad yet?” Danny fumed.
Dan stopped dead. His aura contracted, and Danny reached, but an ethereal wall forced him back. Betrayal seeped through the cracks, and Danny suppressed an aching need to take back his words. He bore the weight of Dan's temper and planted his heels — but that was all he could do.
He had accidentally unearthed a smoldering rage that even Danny could feel the heat of, closed off as it was, as it melted his ghost from the inside. It dripped, directionless — or directed everywhere, especially inward. Danny's core trembled. He needed to be there with Dan, to be a ghost with him, not obfuscated by living skin that dampened his senses and grounded him. But he couldn't.
He was paralyzed by Valerie’s presence hovering in the corner of his eye. Her innocence of his ghost half was both Dan's hostage and the jailer of Danny's agency. As long as she was there, he was trapped.
He could feel her barely contained panic in the face of Dan’s animosity like a raw nerve twitching at every movement, a contrast to Sam and Tucker’s focused unease. A tremor cascaded through the ghost, and Valerie's fear spiked again. His wall was faltering, and pain was spilling out in jets and bursts. His silhouette began to froth but his eyes burned into Danny: present, if not entirely under control.
Danny didn’t want this. His core screamed at him to move, and as if in response, Sam took a decisive step forward. “Hey. Both of you, cool it.”
Dan pinned her with a burning glare.
"Val is here."
The ghost twisted towards the interloper in question, aura crackling and hair flaring in a spectral wind. His lips pulled back to bare fangs, and on the other side of the circle, Valerie's self-restraint shattered.
The huntress whipped out an ectogun from her discarded backpack and aimed it at Dan. His awareness inverted. A frigid gust creaked in the tree branches in tandem with the click of the disengaging safety, and an ectobeam erupted from the barrel of the gun. Dan's supercooled focus crystallized into icy resolve. He crashed right through the blast, straight into her, and disappeared beneath Valerie’s skin.
She stumbled with the impact, and her shoulders thumped against the packed dirt of the trail as she fell. For a sickening moment, Danny watched her fingers claw at the air, her back arch against invisible bindings, her legs scramble for purchase that wasn’t there. Her throat released a sound that might have become a scream if it weren’t cut off with a wet choke as soon as it began.
All at once, Valerie’s form slumped against the forest floor.
Danny didn’t breathe until her chest rose with a slow inhale and her body dragged itself upright. Her hands dusted last year's leaf litter off her skirt with care. The gun was neatly tucked away in her abandoned backpack, and her feet carried her a safe distance to take a seat on a worn log at the edge of the trail. Her eyes glared a vivid red. Valerie’s arms crossed over her chest and her voice spoke: "You're going in time-out."
Danny's transformation exploded out of him in a flash of white. Valerie was his friend, and Dan had broken a cardinal rule: friends don’t overshadow friends. He slammed into Valerie’s body with the force of an avalanche, meeting Dan on the intangible plane and driving him out of his unwilling host. Danny’s vision was tinged green with outrage.
The two ghosts tumbled through the air until Danny jolted them to a halt with an unforgiving jerk on the front of Dan’s hoodie. Dan hung limp with shock, and Danny’s voice reverberated with the layered thunder of a shattering glacier as he screamed, “What the fuck is wrong with you!?”
Dan shrank beneath him. Behind Danny, Valerie scrambled backwards, eyes fixed on the two ghosts. Sam and Tucker stood guard beside her, faces painted with accusation and disbelief respectively. Danny followed his ghost's line of sight and nearly crumbled then and there.
Dan did this, and Danny was responsible for him. He’d made a promise and he failed.
“But — but she,” Dan stumbled over his defense.
Danny turned back to him. “You,” he shook him again, “are going in time-out.”
He opened his thermos. Dan didn’t resist the tractor beam as it pulled him in.
Danny squeezed angry tears out of his eyes. He didn't want this. He should have done everything differently; at home, at school, with Valerie —
He curled over the tightened cap and tried to breathe. Breathing didn't feel quite the same as when his heart was beating — when breath was required — but it helped to calm his thrumming core anyway.
His core.
Valerie.
She had seen. Suddenly he was hyper-aware of the low voices behind him punctuated with short panicked gasps. Danny turned, dripping dread instead of sweat, and cast his glowing green gaze over his shoulder.
Sam and Tucker were kneeling on either side of a hyperventilating Valerie. She was sprawled on her back and staring at him with a black heat he had never seen.
"Valerie…"
"You," she croaked between gasps.
"I can ex—"
"You!" She jabbed a shaking finger at him, and Danny recoiled, clutching the thermos closer to his chest.
"Danny," said Sam, "I think you should go."
His entire body was pins and needles. He was no longer breathing. Danny nodded numbly and flickered out of the visible spectrum.
"Danny, please…"
Dan hovered at the far wall of their bedroom while Danny sat cross-legged on the bed, back turned like a physical wall between them.
"Danny, she — you saw! She had a gun, she —"
Danny sprang into the air and slapped his ghost's reaching aura aside. "She always has a gun," he shouted. "She always shoots at us. You should have just taken the hit, like we always do!"
"But I didn't even hurt her, I was careful!"
Danny drew a mangled breath. "We don't take people's autonomy. Not our friends, not ever. We don't."
"But she could have hurt you!" The room felt hot even as frost collected on the window panes.
Danny's face crumpled. "That doesn't matter!" he pleaded. "How could you forget?"
Dan shook his head. The ghost used to be Danny, but he had forgotten a lot of things. He had to, to keep going, but now at Danny's behest, he searched — and there it was: the echo of past Obsession, his selfless need to protect an entire city of people, all of whom were His. It was faint, but extant, and terribly out of reach. It would brand him if he got too close, he knew.
Dan coiled back into himself and let the feeling fade, but Danny had seen. The ghost felt the edges of him, sharp with judgment, and Dan allowed the blades to cut him as he reached back. He projected love onto his other, impressing that the two of them together were the most important thing in the world. Danny most of all.
"No." The knife edge turned back on its wielder.
Dan wanted to soothe him, but Danny was already closing himself off and simmering in guilt. Dan reached with light, instead, and met Danny's eyes for the first time since he had released Dan from the thermos. With shaken determination, quieter than human ears could have perceived, Dan said, "You're more important."
This was the ghost's one truth. This was the foundation of his being.
Danny turned away.
The ghost slipped backwards through the closed door into the hall, alone. A creaking threatened to unmoor him; he snapped towards the noise, but it was just his sister's door cracking open, the edge of her face, the blaze of her orange hair — and Dan fled. Down through the floor, down into the lab. His parents were there and he couldn't look at them. The portal doors were shut. He nearly screamed in frustration when another portal, swirling blue, opened in front of him. Dan shuddered with relief, and tumbled through as he finally let himself fall apart.