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“You should tell her,” Danny says pseudo-casually while they eat. They’re on the roof of a building overlooking the city and a bowl of formless writhing blobs lays beside them, like rather unsavory looking popcorn.
They recline back on the layer of snow covering the city, neither heavy enough in ghost form to sink more than partway through it.
“What?” Dani pauses where she’s about to pop another blob into her mouth. She raises an eyebrow, already suspicious about where this is going.
“Valerie. You should tell Valerie,”
“Mmmhmm, tell Valerie what?” she asks, still not convinced. Danny turns to look at her, now rather confused himself.
“You… you like her, right?” he asks, turning an embarrassed green, “oh geez, if you don’t this is super embarrassing. I’m sorry! I swear it’s not my fault, Jazz--”
There it is. Danny wasn’t called oblivious for nothing. Dani knew what he was talking about as soon as he opened his mouth. She also knew there was no way he came to that conclusion himself.
“Relax. Ya. I like her. Also, I didn’t take Jazz to be a snitch.” Not that she ever told Jazz, though honestly, that makes it worse. Danny frowns at her.
“Jazz is many things, mainly a spaz, but she is not a snitch,” he says. He blushes even harder and Dani giggles to herself while ectoplasm splashes against her teeth. The salty metallic taste that really shouldn’t be as savory as it seeps into her tongue. “It’s a long story, but it boils down to me realizing you acted weird around her and Sam rolling her eyes and Tucker snorting and Jazz facepalming. I asked what was up, and Jazz told me I should ask you-- well, first Sam told me I should try walking around with my eyes actually open for once, and then Jazz said that. I was going to ask you, but… well, you talk in your sleep, sis, and for once I understood.” He blushes and looks away, sucking on his ectoplasm.
Dani joins him in his blush. They had been sharing a room since Dani came to live with him and Val two months back. She would have never agreed to that if she knew she sleep talked. She thinks back to the dreams she could remember from her time here.
She nearly chokes.
Oh, Clockwork she hops it was a one-time thing.
Danny coughs and they both look out over the cityscape in silence.
“Ya, anyway, before you interrupted me I was trying to impart some brotherly wisdom,”
“Oh, sorry, wise one, please do continue,”
“You should tell Valerie how you feel. You don’t let those kinds of opportunities pass you up,”
“Uh-huh, says Mr. Ambiguous-relationship,”
Danny brought his legs back to a lotus position and turned to look at her.
“I’m serious, Dani. I know you’ve seen a lot of death and you’ve come to accept it as a state of being, but I also know you haven’t seen it the way I have. You haven’t had it happen to you. You haven’t seen it happen,”
Dani swallows. The snow starts to feel too hot around her.
“It’s not a state of being. Not always. Sometimes it really means ‘gone’. Forever,”
Dani thinks back to the shadows that haunt the Zone. The screaming and the crying and the begging that encroach and disappear in random unpredictable cycles. For a moment she thinks about Miss Fortune, who floats around the Ghost Zone so covered in the scars of her human life that she needs no other clothing. She tells the future to anyone who asks, but only the bad parts. Dani thinks about Tsunami, who knows he will never fulfill his purpose because the family he strove to find died natural deaths three hundred years ago. He told her how the only thing he wanted now was to be with them. At the time, he laughed about how they were finally all dead and yet were still in a place he could not reach.
She tries to hang on to her cool composure.
“I’m not a little kid. I know what death is. What does that have to do with me and Val?”
The sun peeks out from behind some clouds for a moment, washing out Danny’s glow with its bright beams. He’s frowning at her and it’s in moments like these she remembers they aren’t as close in age as they appear, that he technically has a good fifteen years on her.
“Dani, when I moved in with Val, heck, when I told her my secret, I had to come to terms with something important: She’s human. She’s a breathing living human being. You’ve seen her working out. When she gets hurt, she stays hurt.”
Dani’s body didn’t scar, she wasn’t human enough for it, with skin more ectoplasm than meat (Danny’s did. She didn’t know if she liked or disliked that difference). When she first saw Valerie’s scars they impressed her. She thought they spoke of epic battles and rugged strength. She hadn’t thought much of it. After all, Danny had much of the same topography to his body, if less pronounced. A fact he proves by pulling up the helm of his top.
“See this?” He points to a long diagonal gash above his navel. Dani nods. “Giant ghost... thing. I don’t really know. Point is, it had claws and it managed to get me and Valerie in the same swipe.” Dani lowers the next packet of ectoplasm she had been about to chomp on. “Valerie has the same scar in the same place,” he continues, maintaining eye contact, “Sam stitched mine up and rolled it with band-aids while I took half a bottle of Aspirin-- as a ghost, of course, don’t go doing that as a human. She did that after I flew Valerie to the ER.” He puts his shirt down and gives her a meaningful look. “What I’m saying is, Valerie is by no means delicate or incapable. But if a claw hooks around her intestine and pulls, she needs hours of intensive surgery to try and make sure she’ll be able to eat solid food again.” The ectoplasm in Dani's palm pops and splatters all over her glove and part of her exposed stomach.
Dani throws it onto the roof and stands up, eyes blazing green.
“Why would you say that?!”
Danny looks alarmed.
“Dani, I--”
“I know she’s human! I know she’s alive! I know she can die! But you know what? So can we. So can anyone! Tucker could be hit by a car tomorrow! Doesn’t mean I go pointing it out to you!” Angry tears blurred her vision. Danny’s eyes narrow.
“That’s not the point. The point is Valerie exposes herself to this danger and is aware of her mortality. The point is you may or may not have limited time. You should take it.”
Dani sits back down, knees drawn up with her arms around them. She knows she's overreacting, but she doesn’t want to apologize.
“I’m sorry, that was harsh,” Danny says instead. She looks away. “I only mean if you have someone in the world who knows you and means something important to you and cares for who you are, you should jump on it.” Dani bites her lip (and doesn’t make the obvious joke).
“Why are you so interested in getting us together anyway,” she spits out in a mumble, still refusing to look at him.
“Because I want you to be happy?” She can hear the confused frown in his voice. She knows he’s sincere, but she keeps on anyway.
“More like so you can live through it again. So that you can see yourself dating Valerie again without consequences,”
“What?! That’s crazy!”
“I’ve heard crazier,”
“Dani, I wouldn’t… just because we date the same person doesn’t make us the same person. Just because I liked her and now you like her doesn’t make what you feel less valid,”
“It might to her,” Dani finds herself blurting out. “What if she only sees you when she looks at me? What if I’m nothing but a cheap replacement?”
“I… I can’t speak for what Valerie feels, Dani, but with how much she talks about and fusses over you to me, I have trouble believing she sees us as the same person,”
Dani lifts her head.
“Really… she talks about me?”
“Oh ya, and the stories she tells don’t sound anything like me. Sometimes I think she forgets she’s telling them to me at all,”
Dani smiles into her knees, hoping he can't see it.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she offers.
“I’m sorry I scared you,”
“Didn’t scare me,” she says into her knees. Somewhere a car backfires. Danny hums, unconvinced.
“I’ve been having a hard time of things when it comes to finding someone who I can be open with in that way, and don't want you to have my problems.”
Dani spent most of her time in Phantom mode and in the Ghost Zone. Though she has a ‘secret’ identity in the time she’s spent here helping Danny Phantom and The Red Huntress, she’s never gone through the trouble of maintaining it or worrying about it being a barrier in a relationship, friendship or otherwise. She thinks of Danny’s limited pool of ‘datable’ confidants that pretty much begins and ends with Valerie and Sam (and maybe Tucker? She doesn't know, it’s never come up between them).
“Ya, I can see how the whole secret identity thing might get in the way,”
Danny flinches and a hand moves over his chest while he looks up at the gray sky.
“Ya…”
Things go silent.
Dani’s eyes dart to their bowl. One last pulsing blob sits in it. She sneaks her hand towards it, not taking her eyes off her brother. Right when she thinks she’s home free, the bowl jerks away from her.
“Hey!”
Danny smirks at her.
“Too slow!” He gathers the bowl to his chest and darts upward. Dani follows, zooming towards him while he ducks out of the way. She reaches for the bowl, but he puts one foot on her stomach, one hand on her forehead, and holds the other with the bowl far out of arm's reach.
“Haha, I’ve always wanted to do this!”
“Let go of me, you jerk!” she windmills her arms towards the bowl and gets nowhere. Then she gets the bright idea to turn intangible and falls through to the other side of him. She adjusts her position to face him again and lunge for the bowl, but he’s already ahead of her, flying away into the town.
“Oh no you don’t!” She speeds off in the same direction.
By the time she manages to tackle him onto another rooftop, he’s already pulled the ectoplasm chunk in half and is chewing obnoxiously on his portion. He smiles a goopy smile and she rolls her eyes but takes the piece he offers anyway.
Her brother is a dork. But sometimes he could be a wise one.