Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sky is so tragically beautiful. A graveyard of stars.

.

The first thing Danny heard was the livestream.

He groaned, readjusting so that he could squint at the laptop perched precariously on his bedside table. Everything was how it had been when he’d fallen asleep. As much as he wished for it there were no new headlines, no proclamations of further knowledge. Just the same repeating loop of the disaster, with a smaller inline window relaying constantly updating scan results and radio static. The chat continued to fill with condolences and speculation, but again, it was nothing that hadn’t been there before he’d gone to bed.

He pushed back the urge to return to the comfort of sleep and sat up, throwing back the thin blanket and glancing at the dark sky through a gap in the faded grey curtains before slowly starting to fumble through his morning routine.

He was halfway through making a bowl of cereal when someone knocked on the door. He put down the box with a frown and crossed the tiny apartment, peering through the peephole before opening it with a groan. “It’s four in the morning.”

The man walked right past him, not bothering to remove his shoes. Danny sighed and closed the door again before heading back to the kitchenette. The apartment was dark except for the lights on the oven and microwave, and the dim glow of the laptop through the open bedroom door.

“Well, what is it this time?” he asked, ignoring the man who was currently feeling his way along the wall in the direction of the light switch.

“I’m surprised to see you up.”

There was a click and Danny squinted in the sudden brightness, sucking in a sharp breath and rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, well, none of us have really been sleeping much, have we?” he grumbled, opening the fridge and leaning down in search of the milk. The carton was light when he picked it up and he swished it a bit, trying to decide if there was enough before shrugging and deciding it would do. “I didn’t think I worked for you anymore,” he said, pouring the last of it into his bowl of cornflakes.

The man sighed, and in the artificial yellow light he sagged like he was melting at the edges. “Fenton.”

“Scott,” Danny responded, mimicking the weary tone as he grabbed his bowl and a spoon and headed for the couch.

Scott sighed and ran his hand along his face, the dry rasp of an unshaven jawline clearly audible over the soft hum of the livestream mingling with the old air conditioning unit. “You know why I suspended you.”

“No, I really don’t.” Danny’s spoon clinked against the bowl and he took his first mouthful, but it didn’t quite mask the bitterness that constantly clawed at the back of his throat these days.

“Really?” Scott moved further into the living space, glancing at the couch cushion beside Danny before opting to perch on the edge of the coffee table in front of him instead. “Be honest. You were the most promising candidate, and you performed the best out of all of your comrades. Why would you have been disqualified?”

The spoon crunched with his next bite and Danny winced, keeping it between his teeth as he looked up through his lashes. “You came here at four in the morning to talk about my demotion?”

Scott’s hand darted forward, snagging Danny’s elbow and tugging hard enough to dislodge the spoon. Its once perfectly smooth surface was now dimpled with clear impressions of his teeth as though it were made of putty.

Danny dropped it back into his bowl and glared.

Scott leaned back, his weariness lifting for a moment in a satisfied smirk before sinking back into sobriety. “You weren’t careful enough.”

His gut curdled and he carefully placed the bowl on the coffee table next to his former supervisor, the spoon rattling against the ceramic. He cringed back into the couch, clasping his hands together in an effort to quell their sudden trembling. His throat had gone tight, but he swallowed past it. “Are you going to turn me in?”

For a long moment the only sounds were the soft livestream and the gentle humming of the fridge, but then Scott sighed and ran a hand through his cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “In a manner of speaking, yes, but not to any ghost hunters.”

Danny clamped his mouth shut and sucked in several breaths through his nose, trying to calm his racing heart. He should leave, right now. Just phase right through the ceiling and disappear into the Texan night. Stop trying to salvage his dreams and just go into hiding, live a normal life, never bother with the extraordinary again…

Instead he stayed on the couch and waited until he could trust his voice not to crack. “How’d you find out?”

Scott shrugged. “Little things,” he said. “You were pretty good at fooling the monitors, but… it was just a little too good, you know? So I started looking into things, and watching you closer, and soon enough you slipped up. I didn’t know what I was looking at at first, but with the whole Masters thing it didn’t take long for me to figure you out.”

“I’m nothing like him,” he whispered.

“I know.” Scott leaned forward, bracing his elbows against his knees. “Believe me, Fenton, I know. If nothing else, you proved it when you saved the world without asking for a single thing in return — not fame, fortune, or even for ghost hunters to leave Phantom alone. And you proved it again to me when you stepped down graciously when I asked you to take a break from the program.”

“You mean when you fired me.”

He sighed. “I didn’t fire you, I just sent you on leave.”

“Candidate astronauts don’t get leave from their pre-mission training,” Danny ground out, trying not to sound too bitter. “Are you seriously telling me that you kicked my career in the teeth only a few weeks before launch because you found out about my ghost powers?”

He leaned back again and shrugged. “I couldn’t let you go on that mission.”

“Why?” Danny snapped. Ice creaked through his veins and flushed his face and he fought it back, knowing that his eyes would already be glowing and his freckles glinting in tiny green constellations. He didn’t need to go full angry spirit right now, but the rising fury seeped from his core and snatched at his increasingly scattered thoughts. “You couldn’t let a hybrid go into space, is that it? I’m not good enough for you?!”

The sharp edge of Scott’s fear rasped against his senses and Danny stilled, his very breathing on hold as Scott shrank back. The movement was almost imperceptible but the taint of the man’s discomfort needled at his core, and Danny was suddenly keenly aware of Scott’s wide eyes, his rapid breathing, and the loud thumping of his racing heart.

Shame welled within him and Danny sank back into the couch, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Damn it! I’m sorry, I didn’t… I didn’t mean to, I just…” His eyes burned with a fresh wave of ice and he blinked rapidly, horrified when he saw that the sparse freckles along the backs of his forearms were now glowing as well.

Scott didn’t say anything, and Danny took a shuddering breath. The air was warm and felt tepid as he sucked it in, and he reminded himself to stay human. He waited for the ice beneath his skin to start to thaw, and for feeling to creep back into the tips of his fingers, before speaking again. “I’m sorry. Space… Being an astronaut… It’s…”

Scott took a deep breath too when he petered off. “No, I… I get it, Fenton. We’ve all been pretty stressed lately. You’re not the only one who hasn’t been sleeping properly.”

Danny shuddered and leaned his head back over the top of the couch. “I should have been there,” he choked, his core tight within him and as cold as the grave. “If I’d been on board I could have at least done something, instead of just sitting here and waiting to know if they’re even alive anymore!”

Scott sighed. “I know, and I’m sorry. If I’d just let you go anyway then maybe none of this would have happened.”

“You know, I tried rescuing them. I… I really tried, because there’s this map, you see, and it opens portals wherever and whenever you want to go, but it’s locked away and I’m not allowed to reach it. I don’t know why, but you have to believe that I tried!”

“So you want to rescue them, then?”

Danny bit down on his frustration, glaring at the ceiling through the blurry haze of his fiercely glowing eyes. “Of course I do! I’d fly out there right now if I was certain it wouldn’t kill me the rest of the way. I trained together with those guys for years . They’re… they’re like…” He broke off with a sound somewhere between a sob and a wretched keen, leaning forward again to press his fists over his chest as his core clenched painfully. His throat felt like it would close over, and it took several long moments before that static faded from his ears and he was able to breathe again.

When his senses seeped back he realised that Scott had leaned forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Sorry.” Danny ran his hands over his face, trying to keep himself grounded. They came away wet with tears that made his palms glow a soft green, barely visible in the washed out yellow of the ceiling light.

Scott patted his shoulder and drew away, standing up and heading for the kitchenette. Danny watched as he took a glass from the draining rack and filled it before offering it to him. Danny took it with a nod, trying to stretch his mouth into a grateful smile, and drank away the thick stiffness on his tongue.

“Better?”

He nodded, rising as well and putting the glass in the sink. “Yeah.”

“Good.” He clapped him on the shoulder again. “Get dressed.”

Danny glanced at Scott’s attire. The white business shirt with a pale blue pinstripe had more creases than tinfoil, and had been unbuttoned at the neck and rolled up to the elbows. “What, like a guy who’s been sleeping in his office for the past week?”

Scott raised an eyebrow. “At least I’m wearing pants.”

“Hey, it’s hot,” Danny muttered with a yawn. “Boxers technically classify.”

“Well, they won’t make the cut where we’re going.” Scott leaned against the counter and jerked his head towards the bedroom. “Go on, anything will do. Maybe your uniform, if it’s clean.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m on administrative leave.”

Scott shrugged at the unspoken question. “We have half a dozen of our best astronauts stranded in space with no way home. Your ghost powers or whatever they are have saved the world, probably more times than I’d care to know about. Don’t you want to work out a way to use them to try to save your team, and change opinions about your kind in the process?”

Danny winced, but his core fluttered at the thought. “What do you mean, use my powers to save them?”

Scott folded his arms across his chest and raised a single eyebrow. “Exactly what it sounds like. You were fired because you hid your ghost powers from us. Now, the only way to get to space is for you to use them for the common good. So what will it be? Work with us so that you can try to rescue your friends, or stay here and swelter while you watch them slowly die on your livestream?”

Danny swallowed thickly as sweat prickled along the back of his neck. “Who have you told?” he whispered.

Scott shrugged. “No one. That’s your job, Fenton. Put on your uniform and get your butt into the office. The council started again an hour ago, and you’re going to march right in there and tell them that Phantom’s on the job and isn’t going to let anything get in the way of saving whoever’s alive on that damned ship. And if you don’t… well, maybe Lowes was right about you all along, and there really is no place for a half ghost to be hiding in NASA.”

He levelled Danny with a hard stare before pushing off the counter and walking out the door, closing it with a decisive click.

Danny stood there in the middle of his apartment, mouth agape and mind blank with the static fuzz of shock. He didn’t know how long he stayed there before finally shaking himself and heading into the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and tilted the laptop screen to a better angle, staring at the unchanging livestream as the same headlines looped over and over again.

First mission to Mars doomed to fail?

How long can NASA’s lost astronauts survive?

Persephone on a journey to hell, no rescue in sight.

The feed looped three times before he wordlessly closed the laptop and walked to the wardrobe, fetching his uniform from where he’d shoved the pile in the bottom of the closet. It was more wrinkled than he would have liked, but he put it on anyway before quickly brushing his teeth and finger-combing his hair. A quick spray of deodorant and Danny headed for the door, turning invisible at the last moment and walking through it like it wasn’t even there.

Chapter Text

The front doors of the conference building were locked, but there were lights on inside. Far too many to be security lights. When Danny couldn’t see anyone through the double doors’ inset glass panels, he eyed off the lobby’s camera and pressed closer, making a show of trying to jiggle the handle while turning the mechanism intangible so that it swung open at his touch.

He wondered if Scott had deliberately locked it so he had to use his powers to get inside, but figured that his supervisor wasn’t vindictive like that. He’d probably just locked it out of muscle memory or protocol. Danny knew it was probably a futile effort trying to hide what he could do at this point anyway, but habit and paranoia combined to keep him as secretive as possible until he was certain that people knew.

Cooler air rushed over him, offering slight relief from the heat outside. He’d been in here plenty of times before for different trainings and meetings, but Danny stood in the doorway and swallowed thickly. A trickle of cold sweat slipped beneath his collar, and he shuddered, rubbing clammy palms on his creased blue jumpsuit.

Muffled voices floated down the main hallway, and he sighed, swore under his breath in a language unknown to the living, and followed the sound.

While the thick wooden door might have made it difficult for anyone else to know what was being said beyond the low murmur of indistinguishable voices, Danny had no problem hearing every word from halfway down the hall. It sounded like yet another discussion of ways to somehow catch up to the stranded ship, but just like various mess hall conversations he’d had with other candidates and low-level scientists, it seemed that little headway was actually being made.

He stood before the door and raised his fist, taking a handful of short, sharp breaths as the gravity of the situation settled across his shoulders. He’d been doing so well at moving without thinking about it, but now his entire future was about to change and Danny’s heart stuttered at the thought of standing in that conference room and telling whatever powers that were in there exactly why he wasn’t on that ship right now.

He could already envision their lips curling in poorly-disguised disgust, feel the hint of horror that would surely swell as they realised what kind of creature had somehow wormed its way into their program…

He should just leave. Turn around right now and go back home, to people who loved him. Who cared about him. Who would support him no matter what.

He only made it a few paces back down the hallway before doubt pricked at his heart, and Danny wavered, leaning against the wall as his legs went weak. An image flashed through his thoughts, of floating untethered in a dark, empty void, abandoned to rot in nothingness. He blinked it away and clenched his hands into fists in an effort to stop them from trembling.

Leaving now would only trade one uncertainty for another. At least here, he could do something with his revelation. Here, he had the chance to save the people he’d come to love. They were his team, and they were out there alone and probably terrified, and…

His core hummed in agreement. Better here where he could do some good, than at home where he didn’t know what would come of it.

He waited until his legs didn’t feel so weak before moving back to the door and knocking before he could stop himself again. The voices fell silent, and Danny was keenly aware of the way his throat felt thick, icy breaths pressing against his ribs as he tried to hold himself in check.

He flinched when the door opened.

“Oh, good,” Scott said, holding it wide and ushering for him to enter. “Everyone, I assume you all remember Daniel Fenton. He was originally a member of Persephone’s crew before unforeseen circumstances prevented his continued participation.”

Unforeseen circumstances. He would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so serious. As it was, Danny’s throat felt like it would close over entirely as he stepped obediently into the room and waved mutely, not trusting himself to speak. He recognised the half dozen people here, although he hadn’t spoken to most of them much. They held various levels of high rank and were generally too involved with running different aspects of the space program to bother getting to know every candidate at a personal level. If he’d stayed with the program, he probably would have talked to most of them a bit more during the final mission preparations; but since he’d been axed before then, he couldn’t really place names to faces.

The man at the head of the polished wooden table nodded. He was the only other person whose name Danny instantly knew, although they’d never met. “Yes, hello, Daniel. I assume you’re the guest that Scott said might have a solution for our astronauts?”

Facing the director of NASA before the sun had even risen wasn’t how Danny had envisioned his morning, but as Carpenter sent him a wan smile he tried to push aside his catastrophising and just get on with it. “Yes, I…” his voice cracked and he cleared his throat, feeling ice sweep his face and ducking his head in the hope that they wouldn’t notice the slight green tint that would be flushing his cheeks. With emotions this high, it would be a miracle if he didn’t start outright glowing before the conversation was over.

Scott nudged the small of his back, directing him to step inside so the door could be closed. “Fenton has a bit of an… unorthodox suggestion,” he said when Danny didn’t move further. “To be frank it was my idea, but he didn’t say it was impossible, so I figured you should all at least hear it.”

Carpenter stepped to one side and beckoned him forward. “We’ll take any suggestions we can get at this point,” he said, and while his face was weighed down with lines of exhaustion, his eyes were kind, and there was no hint of negative emotion as they met each other’s gaze.

Danny sucked in a shallow breath and walked to the front of the room, every muscle taut as he fought against the ice that threatened to flood his veins. The journey felt both eternal and as though it was over in an instant, and then he was standing in front of a whiteboard that was covered in words and calculations that he probably would have understood if he’d been in a calmer mindset. He faced the room numbly, and despite the situation he felt a tiny spark of gratitude. Including Scott, there were only six people in here. That wasn’t a lot. He’d never actually done this before, but…

But…

He blinked, and somehow the lights felt even brighter as the silence stretched.

Scott frowned and tilted his head, and Danny met his eyes and locked onto them. He felt like he was drowning, like he couldn’t breathe, but to speak he needed air in his lungs. His distress must have shown on his face because Scott’s gaze softened and he nodded slightly. “Take all the time you need, Danny,” he said. “I know this is difficult for you.”

Danny closed his eyes and waited until his chest loosened enough for him to suck in a breath. “I… I don’t know where to start,” he confessed, opening his eyes again and keeping his gaze on his ex-commander. “I’ve never told anyone before.”

The room went so still that the loudest noise was the buzzing of the fluorescent light strips.

“Just start where it makes sense,” Scott coaxed, sinking back into a chair. Danny hadn’t even realised that he’d stood up. “You’ll be fine.”

Danny blew a breath out through pursed lips, glancing at each person in the room before looking straight at Carpenter. “I didn’t break any rules,” he said. “Just so that’s in the clear. Nowhere does it say that I couldn’t apply for the astronaut candidacy program.”

The man’s forehead creased with a slight frown, but Danny ignored the mingled curiosity and concern that seeped from everyone in the room.

“I can try flying out to them,” he said, forcing the words out before they could choke him.

A woman in a silky grey blouse that clung to her in the heat shook her head. “Oh, no, Daniel. Your offer’s admirable, but we don’t have anything that could catch up.”

Danny raked a hand through his hair and gave in to the urge to pace. “No, you don’t understand,” he responded, trying to keep his voice level, trying to keep his thoughts in line, trying to keep the ice down…

The lights flickered and he stopped pacing, facing the room again. The silent room, steeped in sudden fear, and Danny realised with sinking horror that everyone except him was shivering. He realised belatedly that his voice had started to echo, and wondered how long it had been since he’d taken a breath.

“It’s okay,” Scott coaxed through chattering teeth, and his breath fogged as he spoke. “J-just start at the beginning, and maybe breathe a bit?”

Danny gripped the edge of the table, and tiny frost flowers bloomed at his touch. He took deep breaths, forcing the cold back down, and then stood straight again once he was satisfied that his ghost was locked away. “When I was fourteen years old I was in a lab accident that turned me into a half ghost. I can use my powers to speed up a rescue ship. It’d let me fly out there to reach the Persephone, and hopefully anyone who’s still alive, so please let me try this, and… don’t call ghost hunters to dissect me.”

For a horrible, breathless moment, nobody moved. Then the woman in the grey blouse blinked and visibly shook herself. “You’re joking.” Her breath slipped through her lips like mist.

Danny’s gut churned as he shook his head. “No, I… I don’t…”

“Oh, no, the half ghost thing makes sense, since we’re suddenly sitting here in a freezer. ” She gave him a pointed look and Danny quailed, struggling to make sense of what was going on as his core reeled under the sudden onslaught of intense emotions from the people around the room. “What I don’t understand is why you think we’d trust you to fly off into space on what, your word that you’ll bring them back?”

“They’re his team, Joan,” Scott snapped, rising from his seat as she did so that he stood between her and Danny. “He’s never shown disloyalty.”

“So you want another Masters?” she growled, throwing her hands out wildly. “Or what, we spend millions of dollars to send him out after them and he just melts into a puddle?!”

Danny flinched and held up his own hands. He swallowed hard against an urge, whether to vomit or to transform he wasn’t sure, and everyone’s eyes snapped to him. “I’m not like that,” he insisted. “I swear, I only want to help my team.”

It took several moments for the ensuing silence to be broken by Carpenter’s sigh. “Everyone sit down,” he rumbled. “You too, Daniel.”

Numbly, Danny sat in the seat at the head of the table. The worst of the adrenaline was starting to seep away, and his eyes itched with tiredness. He resisted the urge to rub them and instead folded his hands loosely on the desk.

“Now,” Carpenter continued, levelling each person with a stern glare, “we’re going to talk through this just like any other option.”

Danny took the moment to parse through the emotions in the room. Joan’s distrust was clear, and there was the undercurrent of horror, but other than that he didn’t sense much beyond general surprise and curiosity.

Having stared each person down, Carpenter nodded to Danny. “It appears that we all have a lot to discuss. Since you seem to be the man of the hour, let’s get started. We’ll break for breakfast at eight.”

The high-backed leather office chair made Danny feel incredibly small. “I don’t even know where to start,” he confessed. “Like I said, I’ve never told anyone before.”

The man’s dark brown eyes were steadying. “Let’s start with what exactly you mean by half ghost, and go from there.”

He nodded, trying to ignore the building headache behind his eyes and forcing himself to breathe. “Right. Makes sense. I guess it all started with the portal in my parents’ basement…”

Chapter Text

“So,” Eri Coelus said, dropping down onto the bench beside him, “you ready?”

Danny shrugged and gave his neck another pass with a sweat towel. “To do more push-ups?”

The guy laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, you know what I mean.”

Danny grinned in response, hoping that it looked confident instead of nauseous. “Can’t wait.”

Coelus’ smile faltered and the hint of a crinkle at the corners of his dark blue eyes faded. “Hey, you know we’re all rooting for you, right? We’ll be right behind you, too.”

Danny reached for his water bottle as an excuse to break eye contact. He nodded, swallowing past the sudden lump that caught in his throat. “Yeah, I know.” He took a swig of water and put the bottle back down, absently twisting the towel in his hands.

“They’re alive.” He tapped a loose fist against Danny’s elbow. “You’ll save them, I’m sure of it.”

Danny took a shaky breath, tilting his head back and blinking against the pressure building behind his eyelids. “Yeah,” he said again, and the fluorescent lights left streaks across his vision. “I just wish I could have saved them earlier, y’know?”

He thought he felt Coelus shrug, but all he could see in his peripheral vision was the guy’s short blue-black hair. “Well, it’s not like there’s any other way to reach them. Sounds like you’re the only person who can do this.”

Danny bit back the retort that there were other ways, but that for whatever reason, they’d been withheld from him. He’d already fought with Frostbite until he’d screamed himself hoarse, and Clockwork’s lair was nowhere to be found. The infi-map could have fixed this entire issue so quickly it was laughable, but instead, he was left to deal with it on his own.

It was so unfair, and Danny ground his teeth and tried not to dwell on it too much. If they weren’t going to help him then he’d just have to manage it himself.

“I take it they figured out your suit?”

Danny nodded, looking back down once he no longer felt like he was about to burst into tears. “Yeah. It took a bit of testing, since clothing usually disappears when I change, but they’ve figured it out now.”

“Oh yeah?” Coelus stood up and Danny mirrored him, walking together towards the showers. “How’d they figure that one out?”

“Well, I don’t really need protection from a vacuum, I don’t think,” Danny said, tilting his hand in a so-so gesture. “It’s more for a precaution, but they got me to help them irradiate some material with ectoplasm and it seems to have done the trick. It had to be mine though, so that it matched my core and stayed during the change.”

He whistled. “That’s pretty impressive. Are both your general flight suit and your EMU suit like that?”

“Yeah, they really want to be sure.”

“Of course! You’re a first, and they want this to be a success.”

Danny sighed, twisting his towel between his hands as he stopped to wait for Coelus to enter the change rooms first. “It’s a lot,” he finally admitted, stepping inside as well and allowing the heavy door to swing shut. When he raised an eyebrow Danny shrugged and tried to elaborate without triggering more tears. Even so, his words were raspy. “What if there’s no one for me to save?”

Coelus gave him a sharp look. “Do you really think that’s your only reason for going up there?”

Danny blinked, any follow-up comments evaporating at the question, and once he’d opened and closed his mouth a few times Coelus grabbed his shoulders and gave him a single firm shake.

“Your mission isn’t to save them, Danny, it’s to show everyone that you’re at least going to try! ” He shook him again but Danny’s mind was reeling so much that he didn’t move to stop it. Coelus let go and ran both hands through his hair. “Look, you’ve done great work as Phantom, but you’re not here to play superhero. Didn’t Scott explain it to you?”

Danny shook his head, his thoughts frenzied and shapeless like the static of pins and needles. “He said I could try to save them,” he managed.

“And what happens if you get out there and they’re already dead?” Coelus snapped, ignoring Danny’s involuntary whine. He jabbed a finger into his chest. “You meet me and the rest of the crew at the new base on Mars, we collect our samples and meet our goals, and you come back home after. It’s that simple.”

Danny didn’t know when he’d started crying, but tears dripped off his chin and he wiped at them with the heels of his hands. “This wouldn’t have happened if I’d just been there!” The shout broke out of him unexpectedly, but now that he’d started, he wasn’t about to stop. “I should’ve been on that ship!”

Every faucet turned on full force in a sudden rush of white noise and the mirrors were immediately clouded over with frost.

Coelus pointedly folded his arms and raised a single eyebrow. “So what’ll you do if you get to the Persephone and they’re all dead? They knew the risks, same as any of us. So do you.”

Danny dug his fingers into his scalp, tugging on fistfuls of hair with a moan. “I know, but if I’d just been there then… then…”

“But you weren’t, through no fault of your own.” The hand he laid on Danny’s arm was surprisingly gentle. “I thought you were in the business of saving people. Haven’t you ever lost anyone before?”

He sucked in a breath so sharp that it ached. “Yeah,” he spat through clenched teeth, “and I promised it wouldn’t happen again!”

Coelus’ other hand was now resting on Danny’s opposite wrist. “I’m not your commander until we get to Mars,” he said, his tone soft and coaxing, “but please consider this an order, Danny. You need to just try your best, okay? Whatever happens happens, but so long as you can stand before me and say you tried, that’s all I want.” He tugged, and Danny mutely allowed himself to be led to sit on one of the benches in front of a row of lockers. “That’s the whole point of the space program. Even though we all say that failure isn’t an option, sometimes things don’t go to plan. Failure doesn’t come from not meeting our goals, it comes when we give up and don’t do our best. We go and try, with the hope that we’ll find new ways to help everyone in the future. Just you going up there and trying to help your team is more than enough, and you never know, it might soften public perception of halfas a bit too.”

Danny twisted his wrists slightly and was rewarded with their release. “Okay,” he whispered, and wiped again at his tears. They left the palms of his hands with a slightly glowing sheen. They both stayed silent for a long moment, and he realised that Coelus was waiting for more than just an okay. “I’ll just do my best, then.”

Coelus ducked his head a bit in an attempt to catch his eye. “Hey, that’s all anyone can ask of you. Don’t forget that, alright? Let’s just get clean for now, then I’ll go get some dinner with you before you finish any last preparations.”

Danny tried smiling but his face felt stiff and puffy. “Thanks, Eri.”

The taller man stood and clapped him on the shoulder before turning off the still-running faucets. He then grabbed some soap and a towel from one of the lockers and headed towards a cubicle. “By the way,” he said once he’d locked the door and turned on the water, “you all packed up yet?”

Danny was still sitting on the bench, staring at the grout between the tiles on the floor. “Yeah,” he answered, finally standing up and heading for his own locker. “Just gotta put away the last few things in the morning.”

“Good, good. You’re far more prepared than I was for my first spaceflight. When they sent me to the station for the first time I was so unprepared that I barely had time to say goodbye to my folks, and my room was still such a mess that I was up nearly all night fixing it!”

Danny froze, staring at the pictures taped to the inside of his locker door as dread pooled in his gut. His family and friends smiled back at him, their frozen snapshots as blissfully unaware as their real-life counterparts of his impending departure from Earth, and his heart sank as he realised what he still needed to do before he could leave.

Chapter Text

The only light in the room was from the laptop’s dim screen, so Danny flicked on the desk lamp. He didn’t need it himself, but it would make the video call easier for the other end if they could see him properly.

The stream of the Persephone’s latest positioning and communications data was still running, but two months after their loss of contact and route there hadn’t been any change. Most viewers had left by now, but there were still some, occasionally using the chat to discuss different hypothetical ways to reach the team in time.

For the first time in sixty-three days, Danny closed the window. It felt like something slicing his heart, but he had to shut down his computer soon anyway, and he didn’t want what he was about to do to be made more difficult by the livestream fighting for use of patchy internet. He sat back in his chair for a few moments, staring blankly at the wallpaper of a smiling Danielle, before dragging his hands down his face and leaning forward again to open the messaging app.

His mum was already waiting, the green dot beside her name piercing his composure like shards of glass.

He hovered the cursor over the call button and took a deep breath before pulling back again. His throat ached when he swallowed, so Danny took a swig from the bottle on the desk before stretching his arms above his head with a groan. “You can do this,” he told himself, trying to be firm. “You… you’ve done worse. You told NASA’s execs, so you can do this.”

Before he could convince himself otherwise, he reached out and clicked the call button.

For a moment all he saw was his own camera feed. He looked gaunt in the dim yellow light from his lamp, even though he’d been keeping to a pre-flight sleep and wellbeing regime. Still, the shadows beneath his eyes were deep, and he wasn’t sure if it was the poor lighting and bad webcam or if his cheeks really had begun to hollow out.

His face minimised into the corner as his parents accepted the call, and the screen was filled with their faces.

“Hey, Danny-boy!” his dad shouted. “How’s it all going?”

“You can talk normally, Jack,” his mom reminded before turning to the camera with a more subdued smile. “How are you, Sweetie? Keeping busy?”

Danny swallowed and nodded mutely before clearing his tacky throat. “Yeah, I’m… I’m okay.” He wiped his clammy palms down his pants. “I actually need to—”

“Good thing you weren’t on that ship after all, hey, kiddo?” his dad interrupted. “Didn’t want you stuck up there!”

“Jack!” she elbowed him in the ribs, jostling him halfway out of the frame. “Danny, Sweetie, he didn’t mean it like that… oh, Honey, don’t cry, please.”

Danny sniffed and swept the heels of his palms across traitorous tears. His core stuttered with the unexpected wave of emotion, but he pushed it down with the help of a few trembling inhales. “I’m okay,” he gasped, and took another shaky breath. “I’m… I’m okay. I just need to talk to you guys.”

“Oh, Honey—”

He held up a hand. “I need you to listen to me,” he begged. “If you could please just… be quiet and listen until I’ve finished, then I might be able to get through this.”

His dad’s typically carefree face furrowed with serious intent, and both of them settled back into the frame. “Go ahead, Danny-boy. What’s going on?”

His mother’s eyes went wide. “They’re sending you after them, aren’t they?”

“What?” Danny said, her comment breaking him out of his carefully-constructed train of thought. “Well, yeah, but that’s not—”

“How will you get to them?” she continued, an edge of panic to her words that made him grip his armrests in an effort to not just abandon the entire purpose of the call to reassure her instead. “The news says it can’t be done. Besides, how do they know the same thing won’t happen to you?”

“Just listen!” he snapped, ignoring the pang of guilt at her hurt surprise as she visibly drew back at his outburst. He glanced at the feed from his own camera and wondered what they were thinking. He was so tired. His skin was wan with stress and the dark blue of his uniform only served to make him appear even frailer, like he’d break at the slightest touch.

He sighed and started again. “Look, I know this is a lot. It’s… It’s a lot for me, too, but I wanted you to hear things from me. NASA won’t be able to keep this confidential for long, and I don’t really understand what is and isn’t protected by their information laws, but they can’t keep something like this quiet.”

“So they are sending you up there?” his mum asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I volunteered.”

“You don’t need to do that.” His dad’s voice was uncharacteristically soft. “You have no clue what’s waiting for you.”

Danny shook his head. “I have to go,” he insisted. “We don’t know what’s caused the issue, but if I’d just been there in the first place this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Oh, Sweetie,” his mum sighed. “Doesn’t NASA have a psychologist to talk to? What happened to your team isn’t your fault. Just because you weren’t there—”

Danny shook his head. “You don’t get it.” He twisted his hands together and tried not to snap. “I… I don’t know how to tell you this…”

“How could this have been your fault?” his dad asked.

Danny sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. Nobody spoke for several long moments, and he tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling instead of looking at his parents. His thoughts swam in the same circles that they had been for the past few days, weeks, months, years… and the question finally slipped out before he could stop it. “Why’d you leave him there?”

Nobody said anything, and Danny squinted back at the screen. “Please,” he asked again, “tell me why you did it.”

“Why do you need to know that?” his mum asked, her lips almost disappearing as she pressed them tightly together. The hollows in her throat grew deep with the tension. “He was evil, Danny.”

He ignored her in favour of watching his dad’s face. The man wasn’t looking at the camera anymore, his gaze instead dropping down to below the screen. “You know why I did it,” he finally said, and his tone was difficult to gauge beyond a yawning emptiness that sent a chill through Danny’s core.

“I need to hear it,” he pressed. “Please, Dad. I need to know why you’d leave him there like that.”

He sighed, running a meaty hand over his face before looking back up. “I don’t know what to tell you, Danny-boy. He’s a ghost.”

“A halfa,” Danny shot back. Both parents stiffened at the term but he ignored them as the sharp wedge that had permanently lived in his heart for the past several years dug itself a little bit deeper. “You left him alone in space to die because he’s a halfa.”

His dad sighed. “Yes, son. He was a halfa, and a threat to everyone. You know this.”

Danny closed his eyes, pausing for a moment to breathe as the words sunk into his soul. “And what about Danielle?” he rasped, struggling not to choke on his words. He knew that he was just digging the knife in deeper, but he had to know. “The… the little halfa girl in Brazil.”

“We weren’t involved in that,” his mum said.

“I know. I just… What would you have done?”

They didn’t say anything, and when he opened his eyes they were looking at each other, communicating through gestures and shrugs.

Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back down. “Look, I… I should have said something,” he said, and when his mother opened her mouth he shook his head. “No, let me do this. If you guys interrupt me then I might never tell you.”

“What is it, Sweetie?” she asked, and Danny felt like his soul was going to crack.

“I’m going to go and save my team because I’m the only one who can,” he said, and while his voice started as something just above a whisper, it gained strength as he continued. “Vlad and Danielle were… they were…” Tears slipped free again and he dashed them away. “Maybe Vlad was evil, and maybe Dani was unstable, but they were all I had. I never told you guys because when Dad left Vlad in space, I knew it wasn’t because of what he did, but because of what he was, and I didn’t want you guys to hate me, too, but here we are I guess.” He sniffed and gave a shaky laugh, talking over his mother when she opened her mouth again. “I have to go. I’ve worked and lived with these people for years now. They’re as much my family as Sam and Tucker, or even you guys.” He looked down at his hands, unable to trust himself to say what he needed to if he kept watching their faces. “There are no other halfas anymore. I… I’m the only one left, and if I don’t do what I can to save my team, then I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live with myself.”

He fell silent, and the only noise was the humming of his laptop’s fan.

“What are you saying?” his dad whispered, and Danny flinched.

“I was inside the portal when it turned on,” he rasped, watching the way his fingers moved as they clenched and unclenched in his lap. His vision blurred and he blinked, luminescent green tears dripping onto his dark blue pants. They were bright against the fabric, taking several seconds to fade as they soaked in.

He finally glanced up, and the sheer horror on his parents’ faces made him wish he hadn’t.

“You were inside,” his mum finally murmured, turning to look offscreen in what he knew was the direction of the portal. “But that should have killed you.”

“It did,” he said, and the fresh panic in her wide eyes and slack jaw as she swung back to face him was somehow worse. “That’s what a halfa is. I’m both alive and dead. I… I know Vlad didn’t really explain, but I have a beating heart and a functioning core. I’m completely stable, and I’ve been trying to be a good person, same as anyone else.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He’d tried not to imagine this moment too much over the years, but when their expressions stayed horrified instead of smoothing into acceptance, it was like a punch to the sternum. Danny fought to take a steady, trembling breath and pushed on, dashing away more tears before they could accumulate on his cheeks and shine brightly enough to be luminescent on the crappy webcam feed. “I know this is a surprise, and you don’t have to like it. You… you don’t have to like me.” His words caught but he cleared his throat and kept going. “I just wanted to tell you before the news did.”

He stared straight at the screen without really seeing it, and it was Maddie who finally broke the silence. “Well, this is… a lot,” she admitted slowly, like she was carefully considering every word, “but you know we still love you, right?”

Danny nodded, his lungs feeling like they were being crushed as she elbowed his father in the ribs.

“Yeah, of course we love you,” Jack said, a sudden forced smile unable to completely hide the tension. “Promise to come back safely, and make the Fenton name proud!”

“Yeah,” Danny choked. “Thanks, guys.”

They all sat there awkwardly for a moment longer. Their smiles began to slip, and Danny watched, torturing himself as he searched their faces for any hint of the affection that had dissolved with his revelation.

He moved the mouse to the button that would end the call, closing his eyes as he clicked.

The room went darker beyond his eyelids, silent and still, and Danny sat there for a moment before blindly shutting the laptop’s lid and leaning back in his seat.

If the tears came now, well, there was nobody to see how brightly they glowed, and so he gave a quiet sob and finally let them stream freely down his cheeks.

Chapter Text

Walking onto the tarmac was surreal.

The day was perfect. A cloudless blue sky stretched high above, and the afternoon sun beamed down like a blessing. It made his white spacesuit shine in similitude to his own ghostly glow, and Danny paused for a moment to close his eyes and imagine that he was flanked by his team, walking together towards the Persephone.

When he opened his eyes again he was faced not with the ship he’d spent three years training exclusively for, but the tiny rescue rocket that would punch him through the atmosphere with what should be enough energy to propel him faster than any living creature had travelled before.

He strode forward, making doggedly for the group of people waiting at the spacecraft. The follow-up team lined the way and he shook each of their hands numbly, the thick gloves making it difficult. He didn’t say anything, simply nodding to each of them and trying to ignore the large black cameras of attending media back behind the security line. Each time he looked away his gaze was drawn steadily back to them, and he felt like a specimen pinned beneath a microscope.

They’d find everything. All of his old google searches, his video gaming habits, the brands that he liked to buy and the places he went to eat. He’d seen them do this with Vlad — first the media, and then the more prolonged search by youtubers and true crime web sleuths, picking apart every facet they could uncover to try to paint a picture of this strange new creature who threatened their world.

He was glad to be leaving it behind for now.

Danny reached the staircase and held out his arms as the waiting attendants performed the final in a long string of pre-flight suit checks. Everything had been tested again and again and again, checking for the slightest hint of an issue, and now it was time for him to trust in the work of the myriad of engineers who had spent the last couple of months tirelessly preparing his equipment for this mission. For something as untried as his trip would be, any mistake might mean the lives of anybody left on that waylaid ship, and nobody was going to take any chances.

“Failure is not an option,” he whispered to himself when he was sure that the attendants weren’t looking at his face. It was something he’d heard hundreds of times before, but NASA’s mantra still brought him a tiny mote of comfort amid the roiling stress.

The crew nudged him to turn around so they could check the back of his suit, and he was faced with Scott, waiting at the foot of the staircase instead of mission control like Danny had expected. “Thank you for doing this,” he said, and even though his mouth smiled, his shoulders drooped and his eyes remained soft and sad.

Danny nodded back. “It’s an honour,” he responded, trying to convey with such a routine comment that he really did mean it. One of the attendants nudged him to move his arms and he complied, chewing on his next comment for only a moment of hesitation. “I know you have to tell the media everything soon enough. I’ve removed my laptop’s password. There’s a video on there that you can give to them. I’d… I’d prefer it to come from me, if it could.”

Scott’s jaw twitched. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s all I ask,” Danny responded, and then dropped his arms so the attendants could secure his helmet in place. There was a click and then a whoosh of air, and he was no longer breathing in the humid heat.

“Godspeed, Fenton,” Scott said, his tired eyes almost disappearing into deep crow’s feet as he straightened with a salute that Danny mimicked. His breath was loud in the helmet, and he turned and wrapped one gloved hand around the railing.

Despite the aching of his bruised heart, the grief and the worry and the horror of everything that was going on, Danny couldn’t help the undercurrent of euphoria as he took the first step off the landing pad. He was going into space alone, for people whom he loved, in the hope that at least one of them would still be alive. He didn’t know if any of them would make it back, and even if he did return, he’d be coming back to a world that knew what he was and hated him for it.

The thought had plagued him for the past couple of months, but now Danny did his best to push it aside. This moment, right here and now, was his, no matter what chaos was about to unfold.

He took a deep breath, calming his fluttering core, and as he climbed the staircase it was just as he’d dreamed it would be. For a single, perfect moment, he could just be.

The climb ended soon enough, and he stepped into the Demeter.

There wasn’t a lot of space inside the tiny rocket. They’d all worked together to make it something that Danny could be comfortable enough in while being as needle-thin as possible, in an effort to propel it into space at the greatest velocity. There wasn’t much more than his recliner chair at the computer controls, a couple of basic storage compartments with hygiene and life support supplies and a few changes of clothes, and the standard suction toilet cubicle. There was a doorway above him that led to a second floor, which held the rest of the basic equipment he’d need for life in space, such as exercise, food, and other basic materials. Despite him stressing that he probably wouldn't need all of that if he stayed in his ghost form the entire flight, NASA had still insisted that they’d provide him with the things to support his human body so that he could be as well-rested as possible when he finally reached the stricken ship.

He settled into the chair and positioned himself comfortably, numbly going through the motions for the next half an hour as the attending close-out crew did a final check that everything was in place before strapping him in and giving him a thumbs up.

Danny nodded back wordlessly, responding with a tight smile as sweat prickled across his forehead.

There were now just under two hours until launch, and as he began to run through the required pre-launch checks, the anxious fluttering in his core became more difficult to ignore. His voice cracked at the first voice check with Mission Control, but he pushed forward and was grateful that the flight director didn’t call him out on it.

Once all communications lines were checked and confirmed, the close-out technicians shut the hatch, and Danny was suddenly alone in the rocket. He could hear the crew testing the hatch for leaks, but pretty soon he received a radio confirmation that everything was ready to go, and all sound from beyond the ship faded until he was left watching the clear blue sky through the window.

Danny kept his sights on that sky. Now that he had some time to wait, the exhaustion of his sleepless night began to creep back into his joints and weigh behind his eyelids. The gravity of the situation bore into him, and he swallowed thickly, pushing away thoughts of the media gathered outside, of the public nature of his communications with Houston, of the way he’d quietly packed up his life into a few small boxes of belongings, just in case he never got the chance to go back to his room…

If he made it back home, what would it be like? He was giving up everything for this. After that disastrous call the night before, he doubted he’d ever have another family gathering to attend, or another birthday card from his parents, or even a phone call to see how he was doing. He wondered if they’d bother to sell his boxes of belongings in the shed, or if they’d just throw it all out.

Danny closed his eyes and pictured each of his stricken teammates, and his unsettled thoughts calmed. Whatever he lost, it would be worth it if he could save them. His core crooned at the thought, a tiny fraction of his anxiety dissolving now that he could actually do something about this.

He hoped that Clockwork would help him if things didn’t go according to plan. He always had in the past, so Danny held on to the sliver of hope that he’d continue doing so, after Danny had done all that he could do to fix it himself. The ancient ghost was probably watching him right now, making sure that nothing would happen that couldn’t be solved. Sure, he’d avoided him over the past couple of months, but Danny figured that he’d step in if things went wrong later. He always had before, after all.

The thought brought him comfort, and Danny continued to go through the necessary pre-flight checks before finally, finally, lying back in the recliner seat and waiting for the final countdown to commence.

It took a while, but when it began it was exactly as he’d expected. The numbers counted their way down, each one tugging at Danny’s gut with anxiety that clenched his stomach and throat with the threat of suffocation.

The sky above him was so blue, and he realised for the first time that he was actually going to miss it.

Everything… everything was going to be left here, and Danny had no idea if he’d ever be coming back.

He wondered if his parents were watching.

3…

2…

1

.

.

.

He didn’t hear anything beyond that. Liftoff punched him from behind with a wave of power, like the strongest rollercoaster, like a thousand missiles to the back, like having the breath knocked out of you with a million baseball bats.

Like being flung into the sun, with no way to possibly stand your ground or fight against it.

For a moment, the severity of the situation fell away and Danny was breathless and giddy, barely able to believe it as the rocket lifted off, just like he’d dreamed since he was four years old and watched his first space documentary on National Geographic. Blue bled into darkness, and the tears streaming from the corners of his eyes intensified as he was washed with the sheer breadth of what was happening.

His core sang as the Earth fell away, equal parts elated at this opportunity and overwhelmed at the ties he’d left behind.

It was almost too much, and it took Danny a moment to realise that Scott’s voice sounded in his ear. “Alright, Fenton, change forms and push!”

Danny sucked in a sharp breath and did as he was told, brushing aside his human self and pouring his core into momentum. His chair and harness were specially constructed to withstand the force as, in his reclined position, he flew forward, technically adding to the force and pulling the ship further as it detached from the launch boosters.

Even with this extra speed boost, it would take a long time to reach his team. His core clenched at the thought and his obsession beat through his veins, crushing any inhibitions that he might have held.

Numb to the strain, Danny pushed harder, ignoring the distant calls of Scott in his earpiece to stop, that he’d already done enough.

He poured every ounce of himself into the Demeter’s propulsion, gritting his teeth and gripping the armrests so hard that he felt them mould to the shape of his hands through his gloves.

He burned, but pain was only a message, it could be ignored, it had to be ignored, he had to save his team-

His core, stretched and strained with more exertion than he’d ever used in his entire existence, pulled taught like a rubber band. For a long moment he teetered, the edges of his vision blurring as he still pushed for all he was worth, and then Danny’s insides cracked and everything went black.

Chapter Text

It took several days for him to stay awake for more than a couple of hours. His throbbing core was in perfect sync with a constant headache, and Danny spent most of his waking time following basic on-flight routines through a haze of semi-effective painkillers and trying not to take Houston’s criticisms personally.

“You know why I did it,” he grumbled once again, pointedly taking a bite of a tortilla stuffed with freeze-dried scrambled egg and sausage.

Scott frowned, and Danny found himself wishing that he was already too far away for a video link to work. He cut off the thought immediately, reminding himself that sooner or later he wouldn’t have the option thanks to the time delay of distance, and then he’d probably wish that he did.

“The entire medical team’s going ballistic. You need to follow instructions, Fenton. Do you want to face disciplinary action? You know that you’ll never get to go to space again if you can’t follow orders.”

Danny shrugged and swallowed his mouthful. It was a little bland, but he wasn’t sure if that was due to the freeze-drying or his pressurised extraterrestrial environment. Maybe a bit of both? “Come on, Scott. We both know the only reason I’m even up here. I don’t count on ever getting the chance again.” It stung to say it, and his bruised core twinged at the thought, but he didn’t want to delude himself.

Scott sighed. “Nobody knows the future, Fenton. Just focus on your mission. How’s your core feeling now?”

Danny glanced at the bio-monitor strapped to his wrist and decided he wouldn’t bother trying to lie. “You know already,” he said. “I’m sore, but I’m already better than a few days ago.”

“How long until you think you’ll be back to normal?”

He took a much smaller bite of his breakfast burrito, mulling over the question for the moments that it took to chew and swallow. “I dunno, probably about a few weeks or so? The last time I pushed it this hard it took me over a month, but that was back when I was a teenager.” He snagged a floating chunk of scrambled egg before it could get too far away and popped it straight into his mouth. “I’ll try reintroducing exercise in the next couple of days and see where it goes from there.”

Scott drew back from where he’d clearly been leaning close to the monitor. “The med team should have an updated regime for your recovery ready by tonight,” he promised. “They’ll send it through.”

Danny sucked down a few gulps of juice. “Yeah, thanks.”

“Don’t overdo it again. Remember why you’re up there.”

He sniffed. “As if I could forget,” he retorted, hoping that the snark would hide the pang of hurt that lanced through his heart.

The hard lines in Scott’s brow softened. “I know, and aside from your core burnout, everything else is going according to plan. We’re all grateful that you’re doing this.”

“Yeah.” His throat was suddenly tight, and he disguised the hoarseness by taking another sip of juice. “Thanks for letting me try.”

They ended the call soon after that, and Danny drifted so that he was beside a window that looked back at Earth. He was already beyond the moon’s orbit, and so there wasn’t much to see beyond a tiny blue orb that was becoming difficult to distinguish from the surrounding stars. No matter how many times he saw it, it never ceased to inspire a wave of awe. Everything he’d fought so hard to protect came from that small blue dot, and he marvelled at the fragility of it all. He settled down to finish his breakfast, watching the spot and determined to get through the meal despite the fatigue steadily creeping through his bones.

Before eating any more he tapped into his core, its strength a smouldering ember in comparison to its typical flame, and the language of the dead rolled effortlessly off his tongue. “Why aren’t you here for me this time?” he asked, the chill of the grave turning his tongue thick and his lips numb. He knew from experience that they’d be blue in a minute. “I need your help. Why did you hide when I came to find you?”

Silence settled in his wake, and Danny stared blankly at the small blue dot that he cared so much about. He didn’t know how he felt about talking like this. The words were nothing more than a prayer, a plea to a higher power, and yet all he could do was hope that he was heard and keep going in case no help came after all.

The thought was bitterly sobering.

“Please don’t let them die,” he whispered, before releasing his core and finally taking a breath.

Ice had crusted the tips of his fingers and he gave them an experimental wriggle before pressing the lukewarm burrito against his frigid lips. It set them tingling and he decided to wait until he regained feeling before trying to finish his food.

In the meantime, Danny stowed his half-eaten breakfast away and grabbed his sleeping bag, clipping it into place so that he wouldn’t float around the cabin while asleep and bump into everything. He wriggled into it and tucked his hands into his armpits, not so much because the cold bothered him but that the uneven temperature across his body wasn’t exactly comfortable. There was nothing wrong with it, except for the receptors in his brain that were still learning that the cold was as much a part of him as his own cells. Frostbite had said it’d take several years yet for that to happen, so in the meantime Danny was left to sulk in his sleeping bag.

He pushed away thoughts of Frostbite. Instead his mind wandered until he was confronted with curiosity as to how his parents were coping with the media storm that had no doubt engulfed them by now. He huffed and tried to think of nothing instead, feeling a little bit guilty when he brushed aside thoughts of Jazz, Sam, and Tucker. They were probably dealing with a lot of crap right now, and he hadn’t even told them to expect it. Everything had just happened so fast though, so he doubted they’d hold it against him for long. Well, Jazz and Tucker wouldn’t, anyway.

He curled up and closed his eyes, figuring that he’d wake up when the med team inevitably contacted him to talk about the recovery program. For now, though, exhaustion draped around him and it didn’t take long for Danny’s intrusive thoughts to fall quiet as he slipped into sleep.

There was a point that Danny had failed to find the familiar blue dot. He’d moved between the two main chambers and their opposite-facing windows, trying to figure out if the computer was somehow out of alignment, if the moon was in the way… but no. Earth had dwindled to a pinprick as he’d slept off the worst of his core’s burnout, and now he could barely pick it out amongst the backdrop of stars.

He floated aimlessly, staring in the direction of the planet he’d left behind, and with a start he realised that he was most likely the loneliest person in the known universe.

The revelation set his heart fluttering and he took a deep, steadying breath.

He hadn’t expected it to feel like this.

Time didn’t take long to blend together as Danny fell into a routine. Logically, he’d known that it would happen, but when he first realised that the rush of excitement when his food began to float away from him had faded into the everyday, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of loss. He didn’t want to lose the wonder of his experience, but supposed that given enough time and exposure, people got used to anything.

He went through his routine slowly, paying attention to the weightlessness and the way things moved around him. It didn’t make it entirely fresh and wonderful again, but his core still hummed as he reminded himself of his environment and watched things drift around him.

He worked through the daily hours of exercise and maintenance before finally checking for any messages. Sure, it wasn’t exactly protocol to keep Houston waiting, but the daily contacts were typically all the same - checking that everything was okay, confirming the results of maintenance and basic experiments, the health team inevitably seeing his bio readouts and adjusting his diet and ectocapsule dosage accordingly…

The latest message was from Scott. Apparently your personal inbox is full. Why are we using valuable resources to give you access if you’re not reading them?

Danny huffed. I never said I wanted it, he typed reflexively, before gently squeezing his tongue between his teeth as he tried to think of a more appropriate answer. His messages with Houston were technically all in the public domain, and he didn’t think it was fair to poke at anyone while he wasn’t there to share the brunt of the resulting media attention.

Besides, some things just didn’t need to be shared with the entire world.

It’s probably just full of advertising junk, he finally settled with. I’ll sort through it today.

Still, as Danny set about making himself some lunch, he conceded that anyone would probably think it weird if an astronaut didn’t read the personal messages from the people they’d left back on Earth. At just over a month into his high-speed trip, he was roughly halfway to his destination, and guilt leached into his gut as he remembered that he hadn’t even told everyone that he’d be doing this. He might not talk to his old friends as much any more, but Sam would still be furious.

The inbox capacity was restricted by NASA so that it could be accessed throughout his trip, so there really wasn’t much to parse through, and there was definitely not going to be any advertising junk. It was all pre-screened back on Earth before being sent to him, after all. Danny knew this, but he still stared at his locked tablet screen for at least fifteen minutes before finally opening his emails.

The correspondence sat there, waiting patiently, and Danny skimmed through the list of senders. He swallowed dryly when he noticed about fifty from Sam and Tucker, with subject lines that suggested their anger and surprise at having to find out about his rescue mission by seeing the launch plastered all over the news. Jazz’s subject labels were less accusatory, more supportive, and far fewer in number, but then again, she’d actually received a quick call from him a few hours before he’d left for the landing pad. All of them seemed to have been dealing with the media fallout of his revelation, and he swallowed back sour guilt at leaving them to face something like that without him. He’d have to send some lengthy apologies.

There were a few more from other people in Danny’s life, mostly well-wishes and training updates from the team of the Persephone II. He was inwardly glad that the ground crew hadn’t seemed to have redacted any of his messages, although he supposed he wouldn’t really know until he got back home.

Danny read the list three times, his heart sinking more with each pass through, until he couldn’t deny it any longer. He checked the junk folder just to be sure, but it was completely empty. You didn’t get junk emails in space, after all.

He pushed away from the chair, floating over to one of the windows and settling there, staring unseeingly out into the void. The defeat of grief clawed at his core and he fished a pouch of ectocapsules out of his pocket, intending to suck on one to take the edge off the emotional sting. Instead he just stayed motionless for a while with the open pouch wrapped in his fist, watching blankly as stars glittered in the expanse.

Turning away from the window, Danny decided that he didn’t care if it would make a mess, or if the lack of gravity would reduce the satisfaction of the action — he lifted the packet, and threw. Glowing green capsules sprayed everywhere, each one breaking off from the initial flightpath and floating on its own trajectory, and within a few moments the entire interior of the main cabin was full of tiny spinning pieces that seemed like they’d never settle down again.

He scowled at them for a while. The message tone heralding a new email rang out but he ignored it, glaring more fiercely at the floating tablets. After a few minutes of ice building behind his eyes he blinked and rubbed it away, reminding himself that frustration wasn’t a good enough reason to glare at the mess until it burst into green ectoplasmic flames. Ectocapsule numbers were technically limited, after all, and it also really wasn’t worth the hassle to clean up and explain the sensor readouts of a fire to Scott.

Danny slowly collected the floating pieces and forced himself to eat a few before settling back at the computer. He may as well spend a bit of his free time now to answer some of these, even if it wasn’t the highest thing on his list of preferred activities in space. Even leaving Earth, it seemed that it really was impossible to escape emails.

And, well, if there was nothing there from his parents, then he wasn’t going to let that get to him. Danny used a tissue to blot at the tiny glowing tears that gathered on his eyelashes and tried to convince himself that he didn’t care anymore. It wasn’t his problem if they cut him off, it was theirs.

He’d just have to learn to live with it.

He’d lost track of the time, as he so often did once the exercise and experiments of the day were complete. Danny was tethered to one of the anchor points beside a window, but at some point had stopped reading an ebook on his tablet in favour of watching the stars. He knew the night sky as well as he knew himself, but as he’d travelled deeper into the solar system, the constellations had become more difficult to parse. He’d have to search for something he recognised and then use that as a point of reference to find other things. Sure, he could always just check it on the computer or his tablet, but it only ever took a few moments anyway, and the sudden satisfying snap of clarity when he figured it out was more than worth the extra moments of effort.

He wondered what it would have been like, to have been left out here without the knowledge that he had. With no way to navigate, doomed to float aimlessly in darkness until death finally consumed you.

The thought sent a pang of sorrow through his chest and he shook it off, turning back to his book and trying to ignore the lingering ache.

What was done was done and it hadn’t been his fault, no matter how much it felt like it was.

He knew he was getting close.

Danny simply allowed himself to float in the middle of the main cabin, tapping into his core to keep his position in check. None of the fatigue from his burnout remained, but instead of high-intensity bursts, the med team had asked him to work on building up his long-term endurance again.

It felt good, and his core hummed contentedly every time he used it to exercise. The past few months had been the first time in his life that he’d ever deliberately exercised his core on a daily schedule, and he was sure that he was better off for it. Danny kept himself limp, focusing only on the tiny adjustments to flight that would hold him in place, and took a steadying breath. It had been fun to explore how different ghostly abilities were and weren’t affected by his environment, and he’d been left with even more questions. Once he got back to Earth he might run the same experiments again, but underwater, and maybe after he’d rescued his team then he’d be cleared to give them a try outside the ship.

Sure, he’d fought Vlad in space before, but it had been fleeting and he was a teenager at the time who wasn’t really paying much attention beyond beating his opponent. Dealing with the asteroid had also given the scientific world a bit more information regarding ectoplasm and space, but that was more of an outlier than anything.

Now, he wondered how regular ectoplasm would work in the vacuum. Would it coalesce, sticking together in large globules, or would it diffuse into small particles? Would normal-sized blasts keep their momentum? What about ghostly ice, or teleportation?

Danny caught his train of thought and guilt curdled the excitement. He released his core, drifting out of place as the laws of physics once again claimed him and slowly carried his body closer to the floor.

He rubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he mumbled to the photo taped to the door of a storage compartment. He touched a finger to the corner of the picture. The crew of the Persephone were all lined up, ready for their flight, and he took a moment to gaze at each of their faces. “I’m coming for you,” he whispered, smoothing the tape where it had begun to lift. The hum of the life support systems in the guts of the ship filled his ears with white noise, and Danny stayed there, jaw working as he continued to smooth the picture. He eventually pulled himself closer and rested his forehead on the spot just above the photo, once again murmuring a quiet plea. “Just… please be okay.”

He said it in English this time, but his core still buzzed with emotion, and Danny squeezed his eyes shut and imagined that he could see Clockwork floating in front of the viewing screens in Long Now, watching over him and his crew.

It made him feel safe in a way he couldn’t quite place, and Danny reminded himself that all he had to do was try his best. If that wasn’t enough, Clockwork would help.

He had to.

He wondered if Vlad had been scared when he’d died, all alone in the suffocating darkness. He wondered if it had been fast, or if his core had clung on for far too long until it finally sputtered into merciful oblivion.

Danny never could have left someone out here alone. Not even his worst enemy.

He wondered if his father would have done it, if it had been Danny instead of Vlad.

He told himself that no, Jack wouldn’t have done that. Not to his own son.

It was almost easier to believe.

Still, Danny couldn’t help but wonder.

Chapter Text

Danny woke with a start. He shifted a bit in his sleeping bag so he could crane his neck, squinting blearily towards the beeping computer.

There was a notification on the screen for a message, so he phased out of his bag and rolled it up, stashing it away before floating over to his chair and half heartedly securing himself with one of the straps over his chest.

“What’s up, Houston?” he mumbled, rubbing the crust of sleep away from the corners of his eyes.

The message was from Scott, and sent a bolt of excitement through him as he registered its meaning. ETD Persephone 10,000mi. Attempt contact.

Danny slipped an ectocapsule into his mouth, and its outer casing dissolved within a few seconds of sucking, releasing a gush of something akin to lime mixed with iron. The ectoplasm almost immediately sent energy buzzing through his veins, and he tried not to fidget. He’d known he was close and had forced himself to sleep so he’d be as ready as possible, so it was a nice surprise to wake up to the message that he was close enough to finally do something. Roger, he typed back. Attempting contact now.

He keyed in a command, and the ship began to scan the surrounding space. The laser technology wasn’t only useful for quickly communicating with Earth, with a message delay of only three minutes from his current location; but it would also inform him of anything that it hit within a few light seconds away, giving a fairly good range to sweep for the missing ship. The past few scans had identified the wayward vessel, and he could only trust now that the ground crew had done their jobs well enough to get him within the estimated range.

The combination of ectocapsule and anticipation swept away any lingering sleepiness, and Danny left the chair, forcing himself to go through the basic wakeup routine of self-care before returning to the seat with a juice packet in hand. He’d eat something more substantial in a minute, once he received the results of the scan.

There were no answering communications from the other ship’s broadcasting systems, but excitement fluttered in his chest as Danny surveyed the initial scan results. There were a few things in his general vicinity, most of them irregular shapes and sizes that were likely just bits of space junk, but roughly seven thousand miles away was a clear reading of something that matched the Persephone’s dimensions.

It was too far away to see anything, but Danny kept the sweep going and fed the data into the program that would instruct his ship to finetune its trajectory. In a matter of seconds, the rocket fired propulsion fuel at the correct angle, and he was heading straight towards the blip.

At the speed of approach, the computer estimated that it would take him about an hour to arrive, so Danny sent Houston confirmation of his new flight path. That done, he unclipped the peg on his straw and sucked down the pouch of juice, barely holding himself back from just pushing the rocket faster using his core. He would already have to slow down to match the speed of the Persephone, so there was no reason to use up unnecessary energy when he was so close to them.

He sent a few more messages back and forth with Scott, establishing that they received the reading and confirming that he was ready to initiate contact before donning his chunky white EMU suit. The entire process took about half an hour even with help from his intangibility, and once he was properly dressed, the ship had drawn close enough that Danny was able to see the distant white shape of the Persephone, hurtling through space completely off-course from its original route to Mars.

“I’m coming for you,” he whispered, flexing his fingers inside the thick gloves. “Just hold on.”

The EMU was merely a precaution if the docking process went wrong, but he knew he technically needed to wait and breathe the oxygen mixture in its tank to minimise the risk of complications if he did end up in trouble. Tests back on Earth had indicated that instead of the full hour, he’d only need about fifteen minutes to adjust his biological processes to the gas mixture, but the prospect of waiting even that long made him want to fidget.

Instead, he shook himself and focused on the Demeter’s trajectory. There was nothing that he was actually permitted to do right now, provided that everything went smoothly. The team back on Earth had already programmed the Demeter to slow at a pace that would pull it up alongside the Persephone with a small margin of only a few miles. Danny was then supposed to use the laser to gain accurate calculations to aid in those final few moments of approach and line everything up for a perfect connection.

His palms were sweaty in the thick gloves, and Danny gritted his teeth and forced himself to follow procedure instead of just flying over there on his own. Still, he didn’t manage to keep hold of his human form. Light swept over him as his anxiety peaked, changing him into Phantom and dragging the ectoplasm-infused EMU suit along for the ride. Part of him wondered if it was a good idea to reach out to any survivors in ghost form, but the nervous energy was too much for him to try changing back right now.

The dock was agonisingly slow, even though it only took a few minutes once everything was in position. He strapped himself into the single control seat as per protocol and could now do nothing but wait as the ship’s computer did its thing. Metal ground together and the ship jolted, and Danny gripped the dented armrests and took several deep breaths through his nose. His blood beat loudly through his ears and he could practically feel it pulsing in his throat, so he forced himself to relax, taking slower breaths and closing his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them after counting slowly to ten, the screen had lit up with confirmation of a successful dock.

Danny shot out of the chair, phasing through his restraints. He floated to the doors and took a long moment to survey them with satisfaction. Lights indicated that the two ships were soundly docked together, and provided that the dock held firm, Houston would now be able to adjust the flight trajectory of his small ship remotely, using it to tow the Persephone back on course.

The tension in his chest eased just a tiny bit, and as he took a calming breath he realised that it was his first in what had likely been several minutes. He looked down at his hands to notice with detached surprise that they were trembling, the tense movement clearly visible even through the thick gloves.

Danny picked up the tiny portable speaker that linked directly to the comms system in his suit and shook himself, turning to face the airlocks. His bulky suit would usually be removed now that the dock was successfully completed, but he’d have to leave it on until he was certain that the Persephone was safe. The temptation to simply phase through the airlocks without bothering to traverse them properly flitted across his thoughts, and he followed the urge, passing through the still-closed doors without so much as a whisper.

Someone cried out, and the first thing Danny registered was a flurry of movement as several people all backpedalled at his sudden appearance.

His core leaped within him and Danny flew closer, grinning as he identified a group of figures jostling for space. The momentum of their recoil pushed them back against the walls and each other in a blur of blue shirts and waving limbs. The fluttering in his chest sank into contentment for the first time in months when they all stopped flailing long enough for him to count six astronauts, all alive and seemingly well. They’d likely all been drawn by the noise of the dock, and he was immediately grateful that he could immediately see if they were okay without needing to bother with lengthy explanations.

He released the speaker to float in between them, backpedalling a bit when they shrank away from him. “Uh,” he said, giving an awkward wave as they all grabbed onto anchor points and each other, “hey, team.” His voice hitched on the final word and he sniffed, hard.

Lowes was the closest to him, and her eyes went comically wide. “You?!” she gasped, her knuckles going white as she grasped an anchoring bar. The speaker not only conveyed his words to her but hers to him, and the sound of another voice talking to him after so many months of isolation warmed his heart. Her mouth seemed to stop working after that, opening and closing wordlessly as she stared at him.

Danny simply floated there, his smile slipping as he dropped his hand back down. “Well who else would they send?”

“NASA sent a ghost?” Thomas replied when Lowes still seemed to struggle for words.

“Oh,” Danny said, looking down at himself. “I guess she didn’t tell you all then?”

“You,” she growled again, and Danny held up his hands.

“Whoa. I get it, okay? I’m sorry for lying to you. I shouldn’t have hidden this. But when you all went dark on comms and off course, Scott asked if I’d come to help. I’m just…” his voice caught again and he cleared his throat, hoping that the microphone would muffle the sound but knowing that it probably wouldn’t. “I’m so glad you’re all okay.”

The crew looked between him and their captain, and Danny frowned when he tried to parse through their emotions and realised that his core’s ability to sense them felt weaker than he was used to, almost as if it was affected by static. The sensation was definitely uncomfortable, but it wasn’t unexpected after the stress he’d been under. It was probably just his emotional fatigue combined with the high ectoplasmic content of his suit, so he really should get it off soon, but first…

“Should I tell them or are you going to do it?” Lowes asked, and while it was phrased as a question, Danny knew that the steel in her tone didn’t leave him with an option.

“Yes, Commander,” he said, and tugged at the warmth nestled within his soul.

Most of them shielded their faces from the light of his rings, so once the change was over Danny just stayed floating there, waiting for their eyes to adjust, for them to blink away the spots and to finally see who had come to save them.

Nobody spoke for a long moment, and then Archie Russell swore. “Seriously, Danny? How could you never have told me?!”

Danny flinched as the dam broke. All of his old team members seemed to speak at once, and he drew back and held up his hands again, waiting for them to stop.

“Scott sent me to help,” he reiterated once they’d all fallen quiet. “Commander, I’m under your orders now that I’m here. I can use my abilities however you need me to, but first, we have to go back to the Demeter to let Houston know that they can change the trajectory to tow the Persephone to Mars. The Persephone II will meet us in about a year if we’re told to land on Mars instead of slingshotting back. They’ll be equipped with everything we need for everyone to finish our missions and get home safely. You can use my comms system to talk to capcom yourself.”

Lowes sighed, the deep shadows beneath her eyes seeming to grow more pronounced as she deflated. “Show me,” she said.

He nodded. “We’ll take five minutes,” he promised the rest of the team. “There’s not a lot of space in there, since it was only meant to get me here.”

Lowes nodded as well. “Go and take a break, everyone, and we’ll meet for lunch in half an hour.”

The crew murmured amongst themselves but dispersed as instructed, each person sending Danny curious looks before retreating back into the ship.

Danny grabbed the speaker and gestured. “After you?”

She raised a single titian eyebrow in response, gesturing for him to go first, and Danny didn’t wait to be told twice. He couldn’t seem to parse her thoughts — his core was feeling increasingly fuzzy, and he wondered if excess radiation had somehow managed to penetrate his suit and was causing enough damage to drag down his senses. He’d just have to suck on some more ectocapsules and hope that this was nothing more than the crash of relief after a prolonged load of stress.

They used the airlocks properly this time, and Lowes didn’t say anything until they were inside the Demeter and the doors had sealed behind them with a pneumatic hiss. “Okay, out with it.”

“Out with what?” He spread his hands. “This is your rescue mission. I don’t understand what the issue is.”

She narrowed her eyes and he thought he sensed a barb of impatience.

“I already said I’m sorry. What more do you need?”

Her brow furrowed. “You don’t mean it though, do you, Fenton?”

“What —”

“You,” she snapped, and paused to grab a railing before she could bump into one of the walls. “You are not sorry.”

Danny sighed. There was an ache deep beneath his ribs, and he rubbed against his sternum despite the thick suit preventing him from really feeling it. “I know, and I actually am sorry about that,” he admitted. “For what it’s worth, I told everyone the truth so I could come out here. Carpenter, Eri Coelus and the entire B team, my parents… the whole world knows now. You… you deserve honesty, and I let you down, and I’m sorry about that too. If I’d just told you from the start, then…” his throat and eyes burned. “Ahem… If I’d told you, I’d have been on board when things went wrong, and things wouldn’t have happened like this. I’m sorry for what I’ve put you, and everyone, through.”

His vision blurred so he phased right out of the suit, blotting at the tears that had built up and continued to cling to his eyes in big globs of moisture.

When he looked again Lowes was staring off to the side. He followed her gaze and realised that she was observing the picture that had been taken of the crew on the day of the Persephone’s launch.

Neither of them moved for several moments, but the stillness was broken when Danny’s head bumped against the ceiling. “Ouch,” he muttered, grabbing a railing and wondering when he’d stopped holding himself in place with his powers. He mentally prodded at his core, and the fresh sensitivity felt like pressing against a bruise. He must have been more out of it than he’d thought.

Lowes had turned to look at him when he’d hit the ceiling. “I need to know I can trust you, Danny.”

He stared into her clear green eyes. “You can, Commander. Always.”

She held him with her gaze before sighing and turning to the main screen. “I’ll contact Houston then, and tell them to correct our course. I take it we’re far enough away now that it’s text-only?”

Danny nodded, fishing an ectocapsule out of his pocket. “Yeah. You can technically send a sound or video file, but they both take a really long time, so it was only set up for sending extra evidence of whatever I found if a picture wasn’t enough.” He unlocked his tablet and held it out to her. “You can send a photo, if you want.”

She gave him an unreadable look out of the corner of her eye. “A group picture at lunch will probably be best.”

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded and pressed the device into her hands anyway. “I’ll just stow the EMU.”

She nodded, tucking the tablet under her arm and beginning to type on the main keyboard furiously. He left her to it, snagging the free floating suit and taking his time to put it away correctly. He also grabbed an extra packet of ectocapsules and zipped it into a pocket. Then, he waited as the minutes trickled by in awkward silence.

Capcom’s response came through quickly enough, and he read over her shoulder as Lowes responded with thanks to their confirmation of course change and their congratulations at all surviving the disaster.

“So… what went wrong?” he finally asked, once she had typed and sent a response.

Lowes’ shoulders slumped as she sighed. “We don’t know. Everything was fine for weeks, until systems just went dark and we couldn’t figure out why. Chris and Leah managed to get the life support systems back up and running quickly enough, but since then there’s been no communication or any way to steer, and we’ve just been spending our time trying to fix things. Our last effort was actually going to be to try to port through short-range comms to one of Mars’ satellites if we got close enough, but it still would’ve been a long shot.” She ran a hand over her tightly braided hair. “It’s certainly a surprise to see you, and I’m still pretty upset that you lied to us about something so important for years, but I think I’m speaking for everyone when I say that having you here is the greatest relief of my life.”

“I felt like a part of me was going to die when I heard,” Danny confessed. “The thing about halfas is that we feel everything stronger, since ectoplasm and cores are incredibly sensitive to emotions.” He pressed a hand to his sternum. “It’s usually not an issue, and you know I emotionally regulate well enough to have passed three years of mission prep with you all, but still… when I heard about what happened…” He swallowed thickly. “I just need you to know, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you all alive and well. Seeing everyone okay has to be one of the greatest reliefs of my life too.”

She adjusted the tablet beneath her arm and unclipped from where she’d been attached to the anchor point on the only chair in the tiny craft. “Well then, no more lies, Danny.” She nodded to the Persephone and Demeter mission logos embroidered on his sleeve. “Welcome back to the crew.”

He smiled at that, albeit tentatively. “Good to be back.”

“So, this tablet’s hooked up to comms?”

He nodded. “We can connect everyone’s. You can all send your reports and catch up on emails and the like.”

She pushed off toward the airlock. “Alright then, let’s go eat and then your first task is to set that up for us.”

His smile felt far more confident this time, gesturing to the airlock. “After you.”

She smiled back. It was tight and tired, but it was a start. “Always the gentleman, huh, Fenton?”

He inclined his head in imitation of a chivalrous nod. “Always, Commander.”

She smirked and they headed back into the Persephone. Danny waited while Lowes shut and reset the airlock, as was protocol, but the static in his core continued to build. He opened his mouth and took a breath, filling his lungs with the air needed to ask a question… and the air filled him with liquid fire.

He curled in on himself with a shriek, and then his hearing went dull and his vision blurred. “Help,” he tried to gasp, but each breath caused more pain to bloom. It seared through his chest and sank deep, and Danny squeezed his eyes shut and screamed as his core thawed like an ice cube in an inferno.

He felt as though he were being stretched beyond his limits, torn apart and beaten until he didn’t know anything but anguish, and then there was an internal snap like nothing he’d ever felt before and the pain was overwhelmed by oblivion.

Chapter Text

He woke slowly, like rising from a fever. Danny wasn’t sure how many times he’d been awake already, or how long he’d been out of it, but his brain felt like it was overrun with fog.

He must have moved or made some kind of noise, because a moment later someone lightly patted his shoulder. “You with me this time, Danny?”

His chest felt hollow and tight, as though he couldn’t draw enough breath. “Mmmmm,” he moaned, cracking open an eyelid and flinching when the light made his head throb. Something wet and thick caught in his throat and he jerked with the force of a sudden cough. His mouth filled with a hacked-up glob and he flailed blindly, squinting through the blur of tears that had sprung forth with the coughing. “Tissue,” he burbled, clapping a hand over his mouth to stop the iron-tasting phlegm from floating free. The movement sent more pain through him, centred at his core and radiating outward in rays of fire.

“Easy,” the familiar voice that he finally realised was Thomas murmured, and Danny allowed him to guide his hand away from his mouth and press softness there instead. “Spit.”

He obeyed, clapping his hands over Thomas’ and coughing up some more. The exertion made his head throb and his joints ache with weakness, and when he’d finally finished he dabbed away the tears before getting a proper look at his friend. “How’s it going?” he rasped.

Thomas sent him a glance filled with concern before turning the handful tissues to face him. “See for yourself.”

They were filled with green and red.

“Ah,” Danny whispered, rubbing his sternum, “that’s not good.”

“Has this happened before?”

He shook his head. “My core’s completely out. I have both blood and ectoplasm in my bloodstream, so that’s not contamination or anything. I’m just… hurt.”

Thomas folded the tissues so that the fluids were better contained. “Any idea why?”

“No. It’s like I breathed, and everything turned to fire.” Danny slowly began to peel back the sleeping bag that he was currently nestled in. He noted that his jumpsuit had been removed, and someone had dressed him in fresh khaki pants and a blue mission shirt. Talking was easier now that he’d started, but it still hurt. Everything hurt. “I could have changed myself, you know,” he teased once he managed to draw another breath.

Thomas rolled his eyes and gave Danny a light, playful nudge. “You know I had to check you over after you started screaming and blacked out. How long have things felt off?”

Danny made a show of pretending to recoil and almost bumped into the wall as a result. “Since I first came through that airlock without the EMU, so maybe it’s contamination on the Persephone. It’s probably something that attacks or nullifies ectoplasm, but they would’ve told me if they’d built something like that into the ship before they sent me out here.” He cleared his throat again, this time swallowing the bloody phlegm. “I take it I’m the only one affected?”

Thomas nodded. His brows were drawn together in a frown, and there were hollows in his cheeks and beneath his grey eyes that Danny had never seen on the man before. “Commander Lowes has been talking to the med crew, but nobody knows what’s going on. I think they’re trying to ask professionals, maybe even your parents, but I’ve been with you the entire time.”

“How long was I out?” Danny asked, trying to ignore the way that mention of his parents jabbed his already-aching chest. He shivered as he finally got the sleeping bag off.

“About a day,” Thomas answered, taking it from him and rolling it up to stow away. “I did my best, but I’m trained to treat, um… well, humans.” Danny’s heart sank the more he said. “They wanted me to ask when you woke up if you know anyone who might be able to give medical advice for, uh… you’re a halfa, right? Is that the correct term?”

“I’m still human,” he said, in the gentlest tone he could while his voice was this raspy. “I breathe less, and my heart rate and core temperature are lower, but you can treat me like you would anyone else. The only thing that’s physically different is my core.”

“And you apparently have ectoplasm with your blood,” Thomas countered. “Besides, your core’s the thing that’s hurt, so the question still stands.”

Danny shrugged and tried to keep the pain of the movement off his face. Judging by the way Thomas’ mouth pinched, he didn’t think he was successful. “Nobody human,” he admitted.

“Not even your parents?”

He winced before he could stop himself, and Thomas sighed as he passed Danny a shrink-wrapped blue knit jumper. “Right, then. Not even your parents.”

Danny tentatively stretched, wincing again at the resulting pain, and slowly unpacked the jumper and pulled it on. He checked his pockets in the process, relieved to find that whoever had changed him had also transferred his ectocapsules into his new pants.

“I have some old friends who might be up for going to see my ghost doctor. I don’t know how much it’ll help me though.” He immediately felt guilty for even suggesting that Sam and Tucker could take a dangerous trip into the Ghost Zone when they were settled in their lives and had never asked for this, but he pushed the reservation away. He knew they'd do it in a heartbeat if he asked them to. Frostbite, on the other hand… “Not sure how much he’ll even want to help me, since the last time we spoke I screamed at him because he wouldn’t help me make a portal to reach you guys.”

Thomas sighed again and shut the compartment with the sleeping bag inside. “Okay, keep that in mind as a backup then. The important thing now is that you’re better than earlier. Do you feel up to eating something?”

“Not sure, but I should probably try, huh?”

Thomas beckoned and Danny followed, carefully pushing off the wall and guiding himself with the minimal movement possible. He ached down to his bones, and the deep pain in his chest had him gritting his teeth in an effort to stave off encroaching panic.

The rest of the crew were gathered around the small, low-set food preparation table. “Danny!” Russell cried as soon as he saw him. “How are you?”

He tilted his hand back and forth in a so-so gesture. “Terrible,” he confessed, allowing Thomas to help steer him into place as the rest of them jostled to make room. “How are you all?”

Leah Hook, a geologist with brown hair swept into a bun and greying at the roots, was the only other person who wasn’t currently chewing on a mouthful of food. “Fine. It seems that you’re the only one who was affected. Any clue why?”

Danny smirked. “My dazzling wit and charm?”

Russell elbowed him playfully, and he yelped, pulling away with a wounded expression. “Careful, man!”

His friend’s dark eyes went wide. “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he blurted, hands hovering uncertainly around the vicinity of Danny’s shoulders. “Is it bad?”

“Pretty bad,” Danny confessed. To punctuate the comment he pulled a tissue out of one of his pockets and coughed into it, folding and rubbing to soak in the contents before opening it for the group to see.

“We’re eating,” Hook reminded him, wincing and turning away from the sight of blood and ectoplasm.

He folded up the tissue again and tucked it away to dispose of later. “Sorry,” he said, and accepted a juice pouch that Thomas passed over.

“See how you feel after that, then we’ll try solid foods. Any nausea?”

He shook his head. “Just sore.”

As he unclipped the straw and took his first heavenly swig of orange juice, Danny caught Lowes’ eye. She was watching him unreservedly, her wrap seemingly forgotten in her hand. “What do you think caused it?” she asked.

He swallowed, noting the pinch in his raw throat but neglecting to mention it for now. “No clue. I haven’t encountered much like that before. There is a flower that attacks cores, but it feels more like electrocution when you’re close to it. This was more like… burning. Or stabbing. Or maybe both.”

“Well, yeah, you were kinda pinned by those crystals for a while,” Russell mumbled through a mouthful of sausage.

Danny froze. “What?”

His expression must have conveyed enough confused horror for the rest of the team to pick up on his cluelessness. They all glanced at each other, as though gauging who would have to speak first, but Danny carefully clipped his straw and released the juice pouch to float freely. He gingerly ran his hands down his chest and gut, testing tender spots with soft pressure that smarted with the discomfort of bruising that had so far been overruled by the continual intense core pain.

“We treated you the best we could,” Russell offered, “but there wasn’t a lot we could do, since you weren’t bleeding or anything. The spots seemed more like contact points or burns than wounds.”

Isolating a tender spot on his forearm, Danny rolled up his sleeve.

The point was small and a sickly dark green, with faint veins spiderwebbing out from its origin in a radius of about an inch, like a mockery of the silvery lichtenberg scar that tendrilled across his body.

He swore, running a fingertip over the focal point. It was warmer than the surrounding skin, tender as though inflamed despite the lack of any redness or swelling.

“It’s all over you. We think it’s where the crystals touched you, even through your clothes,” Russell offered.

Danny’s head snapped up and his heart fluttered with anxiety. “What are you talking about?”

He frowned, snagging Danny’s errant juice before it could float entirely away from the group. “The giant green crystals that grew out of the walls when you started screaming?” he prompted.

Danny pushed away from the table, turning towards the doorway, when his momentum was suddenly arrested by a sharp tug on the back of his jumper. He yelped as much in surprise as pain, disoriented by the unexpected assault that he’d usually have no problem sensing and avoiding.

“Get something into you first,” Lowes snapped, turning him back to the table with a twist of her wrist. “You’re paler than I’ve ever seen you, even as a ghost. Those crystals aren’t going anywhere, and I don’t need you running back to them without a plan and causing yourself more damage.”

Danny coughed in response, swallowing against the accompanying blend of iron and sour ectoplasm on his tongue. “Easy,” he rasped, massaging his throat and sending his commander an accusatory look. “No need to get rough.”

She scowled. “I don’t know where this recklessness has come from, but it ends now, Danny. We’re a team, we work together, and we don’t face problems alone. Failure is not an option, and I won’t have you dying because you suddenly decided to develop an impatient streak.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he managed before coughing again, wrapping his arms around himself and unsuccessfully suppressing the moan that followed the fit.

The rest of the team stayed uncharacteristically quiet, and when Danny recovered enough to look around he realised that they were all giving each other varied measured looks and small gestures towards him and each other.

Lowes cleared her throat when nobody spoke. “Drink and talk,” she said, and Danny took the juice back and started to obediently sip as she continued. “Will painkillers do anything for you?”

“Not really, unless you have something super strong or specifically for ghosts. I have some in the Demeter, but used most of them up in recovery when I burnt myself out pushing the launch faster.”

Her eyes narrowed. “It keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Tell me, what are the actual risks here?”

“What do you mean?”

She drummed her fingertips against a clear rectangle between the velcro lines that crisscrossed the smooth metal table, but the tone of the next question was far gentler than he’d expected. “Is your life in danger, Danny, or are you already dead?”

He blinked, opened his mouth… and said nothing.

Fine lines creased Lowes’ brow as horror briefly flitted across her features. She quickly schooled her expression, but Danny doubted that anybody else had even noticed, since they were all staring straight at him.

“You’re already dead?” Amanda Weaver whispered. The short, curly hair haloing her face lent an air of overexaggeration to the question, and the uneasy glances of the rest of the crew did nothing to dispel the awkwardness of such a personal topic.

Danny pressed his lips together for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I’m not sure,” he finally confessed. Their expectant staring needled at him, and he shifted, taking another drink to try to quell the discomfort. “I have a heartbeat, and I need to sleep and all that, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “There are things that have happened over the years that should have killed me but didn’t. I’m not fully dead, but I don’t think I’m easy to kill, either.”

“What kind of things?” Lowes asked when he didn’t elaborate.

He sighed and the strong exhalation brought on another bout of coughing. Once it had passed, he cleared his mouth with another sip and tried to think of a decent answer that didn’t feel like bragging. “A lot,” he finally settled with. “You’ve all seen some of my bigger fights on the news. For every hit there, I’ve had a hundred others.” He tried a tentative smile. “I know this looks bad, but honestly, I should bounce back. I did the superhero gig for a long time. Believe me, I’ve had a lot of bad days. I’m just gonna be a little out of it until my core starts working again.”

Lowes’ jaw worked for a moment, and she put up her hand when Weaver tried to speak. “So what does it mean if your core’s not working?”

Danny rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “My powers are out,” he confessed. “I’m pretty sore as well.”

“Any idea of what will bring them back?”

He shook his head. “Time, probably. I have heaps of ectocapsules in the Demeter that the ground crew sent for me as well, and a few packets in my pocket. They’re sorta like tablets, but of concentrated ectoplasm instead. They should help me recover faster.”

“That’s the first good news you’ve given me so far. The med team’s going ballistic,” she said. “They’re trying to find a professional, but—”

“The only professionals are ghost hunters,” he finished for her in a resigned tone, ignoring the irritation clear on her face at the interruption. “Look, give me a few days, and if I’m not any better then I can see if someone can get in contact with my doctor in the Ghost Zone.”

“Why don’t you just send them now?” Russell asked. “You wouldn’t want this to get worse.”

Danny shook his head. “The only people who know how to get there aren’t involved with ghosts anymore, and these days they live pretty far away from Amity Park. It’d be unfair to ask them to take time off and risk their lives for this if I’m going to recover on my own anyway. Besides, there’s not much I can’t tell you about my own biology at this point.”

Lowes sighed. “Alright, Fenton. You have twenty-four hours to show improvement, or we’re sending for their help.”

He nodded. “That’s fair.”

“I don’t get it,” Hook muttered. “You came all this way to save us, but now you’re the one who needs saving.”

Danny winced. “I came out here to try,” he said, echoing Coelus’ words and feeling hollow for it. “I know that failure’s not an option, but I didn’t know what I was going to find, so all I could do was hope you were all okay.”

“At least we’re safely en route to Mars again now. Danny did save us from missing the mark completely,” the typically taciturn Christopher Samuels remarked. He met Danny’s eyes briefly before darting his gaze away again, examining his packet of dried fruit and nuts like it was the most interesting thing in the universe.

Various people in the group glanced between the two of them, and Danny barely suppressed a groan at the realisation. “Chris, seriously, there are no hard feelings. I was kicked from the team because I lied, okay? Even if you were the only person on this mission I would’ve come to help you. Do you really think I’d be pissed that you got the chance to join when I screwed up?”

Samuels swallowed despite not having anything in his mouth. “Sorry,” he mumbled, glancing back up tentatively. “I just know I would've been disappointed.”

“It was my fault,” Danny reiterated.

The group fell into an uneasy silence for a beat before Hook sighed. “Thanks for coming to help us. Things were looking pretty bad for a while there.”

Danny finished off his juice. “It wasn’t even in question,” he said. “You guys are like family to me. I’d do anything to help.”

Russell cleared his throat when the resulting silence stretched to the edge of awkwardness. “Yes, well, do we have comms set up now?”

Danny nodded. “We can connect your tablets wirelessly through the Demeter’s comms system. You should get wifi and everything back easily.”

“The Demeter and the Persephone,” Russell snorted. “Now all we need is the Hades, huh?”

Weaver elbowed him in the side and he squawked, accidentally jostling against Danny and sending hot shards of pain streaking through his chest. Danny gasped and jerked back, wrapping his arms around himself tightly and breathing sharply through his nose until the pain dulled back down and the ringing subsided enough from his ears to hear his friend’s frantic apologies.

“S’okay,” he rasped, uncurling a bit and dabbing at the reflexive tears. Even in the absence of a functioning core, they glowed with ectoplasmic content. “You didn’t mean it.”

Lowes placed a hand on his arm. “You need to rest.”

He wanted to say no, that he’d set up their tablets with them, but exhaustion was already weighing on his bones, and he found himself yawning before he could stop himself. “I want to help,” he protested.

“That’s an order, Danny,” she insisted. “You’ve done more than enough for now. Take some capsules and go back to sleep, and we’ll set up the tablets.”

“But you said there were crystals?” he asked.

Her gentle hand grew firm. “They’re not going anywhere, and they’re not hurting us.”

“It’s probably still best if he sees them first though, right?” Russell interrupted.

“Yes,” Thomas chimed in, “in case he knows what they are.”

Lowes scowled. “Fine,” she conceded. “One quick look, and then back to bed.”

Danny’s nod was maybe a smidge too eager, but he didn’t want to look any more sickly than he already did. “Sure, Commander. Five minutes, tops.”

She narrowed her eyes for a second before sighing and releasing his arm. “Alright then. Let’s all finish lunch, and then Danny and Elliot, you’ll examine the crystals with me. Everyone else, you can collect your tablets and meet at the airlock to the Demeter.”

“Oh, one more thing!”

“Oh no,” Weaver murmured.

“I don’t like that smile,” Hook agreed as Russell groaned.

Danny only grinned wider. “We have to let everyone see you’re all okay, so it’s time to take a selfie!”

Their collective moan warmed him from within, distracting Danny from the pain far better than any kind of medicine ever could.

Chapter Text

The small movements Danny made to direct himself around the spaceship felt wrong. Logically, he knew that this was how it was meant to be. Astronauts didn’t simply float in their environment, they had to guide themselves off the walls and keep upright through their own movements.

It was just disconcerting, needing to use his own body to course-correct instead after having subconsciously used his core almost the entire time he’d been in space. It hurt, too, thanks to whatever had happened earlier.

Danny kept any complaints to himself though, trying not to indicate the true level of his discomfort to Lowes lest she send him straight back to bed. Tension wound him tight, and he ground his teeth as he followed Lowes and Thomas back towards the airlock that connected to the Demeter. He’d trained so long for this ship that he knew every nook and cranny as well as his own bedroom, and despite the circumstances, he felt completely at home here.

It was a relatively short trip, since the Persephone wasn’t very big, but as they went his core ached more and more, and Danny stretched his jaw open to pop the pressure building in his ears.

“You’ve never seen green crystals before?” Lowes pressed as they neared their destination.

Danny shrugged, using the smallest movements possible to propel himself in the hope that it wouldn’t aggravate whatever was wrong with him. “I’ve seen a lot of things,” he confessed. “Ghosts like crystals, and glowing things, and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I’ve seen green crystals, but I don’t know if I’ve seen these specific crystals.” They paused at the door that led into the passageway to the airlock and he coughed again, swallowing so he didn’t have to bother with a tissue. “I don’t know why I’m coughing up blood though,” he confessed once he was sure the fit had passed. “That’s never happened before. At least, not because of crystals. Blunt force trauma, sure, or maybe being stabbed, but nothing like this.”

The concerned looks on their faces said it all. “We can do this later,” Thomas offered.

Danny shook his head. “We’re here. Let’s just get it over with. I might know nothing anyway, and you can send me straight to bed then.”

Lowes opened the door with a pneumatic hiss, and green glinted through the gap.

Danny froze, staring at the thick crystals that seemed to fill the passage. They were lime green, opaque at their bases and fading to almost transparency at the tips. His core, weak and barely there, sputtered.

He ignored the discomfort, allowing himself to be manoeuvred through the door with Lowes in front and Thomas behind. The latter’s hand rested on his elbow, and Danny glanced back quizzically.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Thomas murmured.

Danny smiled, but the stretch felt weak and hollow, and he could only wonder what he looked like. “You know me,” he said, “mister dependable.”

His brow furrowed slightly, like a soft ripple that smoothed so quickly you’d wonder if you’d even seen it, and Danny bit back the urge to say anything else. He didn’t know if he was interpreting the expression correctly, but was Thomas wondering if he actually knew him after all? Danny thought that if their positions were reversed, he might have had such misgivings.

He was surprised by a sudden pang of loneliness at the realisation, so he pushed it down and turned back to focus on Lowes and the crystals instead.

She tilted her head in the direction of the green clusters. They seemed to have sprung directly from within the framework of the ship, breaking through at least a couple of layers of walls and insulation. The ruptures didn’t seem to breach the pressurised integrity of the ship since none of the alarms were going off, and the crystals pressed so snugly against their points of entry that the seals were likely practically airtight, but the integrity of the spacecraft was clearly threatened by their sudden unexpected growth.

“I don’t understand,” Danny murmured, moving a bit closer. The ache in his core turned sharp and he hissed, pressing a hand against his chest and recoiling as fresh horror swept over him.

“What’s wrong?” Lowes asked, throwing out an arm to arrest his movement before he could inadvertently travel closer to the crystals.

Danny gritted his teeth and allowed himself to be manhandled. It took every ounce of his self-control to not curl up into a ball and whimper, so if a little bit of a whine slipped out then he didn’t think it was that much of an issue. Everything went fuzzy, and his thoughts and vision distorted like heat waves shimmering on the road in the middle of summer.

He didn’t take another breath until the airlock clicked closed, and when Danny blinked through the blurriness he realised that the other two had moved him back away from the crystals and sealed the door once again.

Thomas pressed a straw against his lips, and Danny obediently drank what turned out to be water. It helped to clear away the sour tang that clung to his tongue and the back of his throat, and when the pain of his damaged core finally settled enough for him to uncurl he took the pouch and finished drinking it in one go.

“You with us again?” Thomas asked.

“Core hurts, but yeah.” He turned his head to face Lowes and everything spun. “Whoa.” He threw out a hand and someone caught it and held it firm, arresting whatever movement he was making. The ship continued to spin around him anyway so Danny closed his eyes and focused on not throwing up as the sheer intensity of the pain made his stomach roil.

He swore through clenched teeth and pressed a hand flat over his gut, swallowing back a sudden influx of sour saliva and trying to regain his composure.

“You okay?” Lowes asked from somewhere off to his left and he nodded blindly.

“Yeah,” he croaked. “Just… just give me a minute.”

They waited without saying anything else, and Danny listened to whatever machinery was still working whir and hum away in the guts of the ship.

“I don’t know how it got onboard,” he finally murmured, risking opening his eyes to squint at the others.

“You know what it is?” Lowes asked.

The light made his head throb so he squeezed his eyes shut again and swallowed thickly, gripping the hand that held his and riding out a fresh wave of nausea. “Ectoranium,” he managed, before needing to swallow again.

“Oh, no,” Thomas breathed from somewhere vaguely in front of him.

“What is it?”

“It’s bad, Commander. Ectoranium’s that ghost-repellent stuff that the giant asteroid was made of. Right, Danny?”

Danny allowed his head to drift in what he hoped was an affirmative gesture and kept most of his attention on keeping down his orange juice. His body chose that exact moment to cough, and he hacked up more bloody phlegm while somehow managing not to hurl. A tissue was pressed to his mouth and he spat obediently, allowing them to manhandle his aching body any way they wanted to.

They murmured for a moment more and then he was being tugged, and the next sensation he recognised through the haze was cool cloths pressing to his forehead and neck.

“Careful that you don’t make them too wet,” Thomas instructed, and Lowes made a sound of agreement. The one on his neck was adjusted and he moaned appreciatively. He hadn’t realised how uncomfortably warm he’d become, but now the cloths felt heavenly against his skin.

“Ask the med team how ectoranium affects cores,” Lowes said, and then a hand tapped lightly against his cheek. “Hey, Danny, I need you to tell me what these do to you. How can we help?”

He tried to mumble something, he wasn’t sure what, and then a straw was pressed against his lips and he pursed them towards the contact.

The sweet-salty mixture of an electrolyte replenishing drink hit his tongue and he sipped it slowly, taking his time to keep the ebb and flow of nausea in check. “I’m okay,” he breathed after a few mouthfuls.

“Danny,” Lowes snapped, and he blinked his eyes open automatically at the sharpness in her tone. “What did we agree about lying?”

He winced. “Sorry, Commander. Just… just give me a minute.” He closed his eyes again, the lights doing nothing to help stop the vertigo. “‘M just dizzy. Nauseous, too.”

Her hand slipped into his. “Don’t talk then. Squeeze once for yes, twice for no. Got it?”

He squeezed once.

“Is this like radiation sickness?”

He tilted his free hand back and forth in uncertainty and she sighed. “Alright. Are you getting worse now?”

He squeezed twice, breathing slowly through his nose and trying not to think about the dizzying darkness that had unfurled in his deepest parts.

“Will your capsules heal this?”

He squeezed once, but then paused and tilted his free hand again.

Her sigh was a little more strained this time, and it sounded like it was coming through her nose. He envisioned her lips tightly pressed together, like she’d done countless times when they’d worked on difficult training exercises and scenarios. “Do you have any powers right now?” she finally asked, and her voice held an edge of fear that nudged his bruised core with a jab of discomfort.

He squeezed twice, and the admission felt like a vice tightening around his ribcage. He allowed himself to go limp as she slipped her hand out from his with a shaky breath.

“Commander—”

“You make him drink more of that now, Thomas, and you can clean up the puke,” she interrupted. “Let’s just get him comfortable. He can have more when he doesn’t look so nauseous.”

The straw was removed from his mouth and Danny could only cough weakly and allow himself to be moved as gently as they were able to.

In the midst of the pain and disorientation, he bit back a delirious smile at the unexpected thought that so long as he kept his eyes closed and didn’t focus on his lack of core output too much, weightlessness actually did sort of feel like flying.

Chapter Text

He couldn’t sleep. Not that he wasn’t tired — weariness seeped into his very bones, but as the crew spent the rest of the day cycle moving around the Persephone doing various tasks he simply floated in his sleeping bag, listening to the murmur of conversations too quiet to be heard over the louder hum of the ship’s internal machinery, no matter how much he wanted to pay attention. Every part of him ached, and he occasionally sipped water when the taste of iron and sour citrus became too strong, but other than that he just spent his time in a daze of pain.

Thomas checked on him occasionally, but once they’d established that Danny’s condition had once again stabilised, there wasn’t really much that could be done except attempt to make him comfortable. It was a moot point, what with his insides feeling like they’d been turned to mush, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless.

He tried to relax, but the continual pain coupled with the stress of the entire situation kept him very much on edge. His mind was mostly fuzzy and disjointed, thoughts swept into fragments by a throbbing headache, but moments of lucidity had Danny puzzling over the giant green crystals. It just didn’t make sense… but then again, nothing about this entire disaster seemed to make sense.

He was eventually roused from his ruminations by a gentle touch to the shoulder. “Hey, Danny,” Weaver said, “I’ve brought you some dinner if you can keep it down.”

He squinted at her, blinking a few times until his eyes adjusted to the light. She was holding two clear plastic packages, both containing what he thought looked like mac and cheese.

“It’s something simple,” she defended when she caught his expression. “Elliot said you should try light foods first.”

“Anything’s better than my own blood,” he rasped. His throat stung and he winced, slowly repositioning so that he could take the offered food and fork. He hadn’t thought he had an appetite, but as Weaver rolled her eyes at his dramatic comment and opened her own packet the smell of hot, rehydrated mac and cheese sent a pang through his stomach. He wondered whose rations he was eating, or if they’d actually managed to fetch his chosen foods from the Demeter. He didn’t bother asking though — it was difficult enough to take the food packet and a fork without showing how much it pained him.

The first bite warmed him in the way that attending to human needs after long periods of ghostliness always seemed to do. If he were to attempt to describe it, the feeling was akin to taking a sip of hot tea during a cold morning. It soothed a deep emptiness that he hadn’t even noticed growing, making him feel far more alive and grounded than he had in what felt like months.

He ignored the way that Weaver watched him eat, as though he would keel over at any moment.

“I got to message my family thanks to you,” she finally murmured, turning back to her food when he looked her way. “It means a lot, Danny. My daughter turned thirteen a week ago and I’d… I’d started to think…” Her voice grew thick and she cleared her throat, her eyes bright when she glanced at him. “I was able to send her an email with our crew photo from lunch. She said it was the best birthday gift I could've ever given her.”

Danny swallowed past a suddenly tight throat. “It’s nothing,” he whispered.

“But it’s not,” she insisted, jabbing her fork in his direction. “Don’t you dare say that what you’ve done is anything less than heroic.”

He shook his head, scowling when frustration seeped unbidden into his tone. “You guys are my team though. You’re like family, and I’d do anything for you, and if I’d just been honest in the first place then this would never have happened!”

“You can’t know that,” she retorted. “You’ve given up everything for us. What, is this just a little excursion for you? Was saving your hometown from invasion so much that you became their local superhero also just nothing? Or what about when you convinced hundreds of ghosts to help you save the entire planet when you rerouted that asteroid?!” She shook her head and stabbed at her food so forcefully that it was a miracle she didn’t poke holes in the bag. “Don’t you dare invalidate your sacrifices, because if what Danny Phantom does is nothing, then what does that say about the rest of our efforts?”

Danny watched as she rubbed a hand over her reddening face before taking another bite of her food. She glared as though daring him to argue and he took the opportunity to consider what she’d said as he finished his own mouthful.

“You’re right,” he finally admitted, looking out the round window at the endless expanse instead of facing her. “I’m sorry.”

She sniffed. “Good to hear it.”

“Good to hear what?” Russell asked, poking his head into the room. “Y’know doors are supposed to be kept closed, right?”

Weaver rolled her eyes. “We were just talking about Danny saving the world.”

“Oh.” He floated fully into the room, shutting the door behind him and settling so that the three of them formed the points of a triangle. “So who’d you confess your love to when we all thought the asteroid was gonna wipe out life as we know it?”

She huffed. “I was already engaged.”

He wiggled his eyebrows. “Oh, suuuure. I keep forgetting the rest of you are all too old to have been young and foolish middle schoolers who confessed their undying love to their crush, only to be mortified when the ghosts rerouted the lump of impending doom.”

Danny snorted. “I take it yours didn’t go so well,” he teased.

“Alas, we were both too young,” he moaned, dramatically throwing his head back with his hand against his forehead in a poor imitation of a swoon. “When we graduated I was swept away by the dramas of life, and she married my best friend instead.”

“That’s rough, buddy,” Danny said in the most deadpan voice possible, smirking at the responding wounded glare of utter betrayal.

“You just don’t understand my pain.”

“No, because he was too busy organising for hundreds of ghosts to blast the asteroid off course and save all of our lives,” Weaver retorted, rolling up her now-empty food pouch.

“I actually did confess to my crush after saving the planet,” Danny admitted, ignoring the slight flush of cold to his cheeks that indicated a blush. He tilted his head back as though examining the ceiling. “We dated until we graduated, but then went in different directions.”

“Wow, not even superheroes can keep their first love alive.”

“Shut up, Archie,” Weaver said, but her tone was light. “At least he got a relationship out of it.”

He slammed a hand over his heart. “You wound me, Amanda!”

Danny laughed, but that quickly turned into a bout of hacking as he choked up a glob of phlegm that turned yet another tissue a sickly mixture of green and red. He waved the other two off when they started forward in clear concern. “I’m alright,” he managed. “Far better than Archie’s heart, anyway.”

“You, too, Danny?” he implored. “My brother in everything but blood, and you just twist the knife deeper!”

Amanda flicked her rubbish at him. “Go lick your wounds somewhere where you’re not making him hack up a lung then, and tell Elliot that Danny’s ready to be checked over again while you’re at it.”

He made another wounded noise, dramatically slouching so that he draped against her shoulder. In zero gravity it was certainly a feat, but one that he managed with his usual over-the-top flair. “I cannot believe, after all this time, that you could treat me so poorly,” he drawled. “We’ve faced down the inevitable slow starving death of aimless space travel, after all!”

She snorted and rolled her shoulder in an attempt to dislodge him. “I would’ve eaten you first,” she joked.

He pulled back with a cry. “Oh, the sheer betrayal! The cold callousness! Do you see what I’ve been putting up with in your absence, Danny?!”

“I would’ve eaten you first too.”

Russell shook his head and floated back to the door. “Oh, woe is me, for trusting such terrible cannibalistic souls. I bid you adieu, in the hope that once you run out of chocolate pudding you decide to eat each other instead of coming after me.”

Danny laughed again as his friend left with a final jaunty wave before the door shut behind him.

Weaver sighed, but her mouth curved in a fond smile. “I sometimes forget how much younger the two of you are,” she said.

“Yeah.” He smiled back. “It’s good for everyone.”

She smirked and pushed off from the wall, the smooth motion aborting as she jerked her arms around her gut with a sharp gasp.

Danny frowned. “What’s wrong? Is the food not agreeing with you?”

Her next breaths were heavy, and she barely managed to throw out a hand and cushion her trajectory before she could slam into the other wall. “Cramping,” she gasped, and Danny detached from his anchor and carefully moved closer.

“Hey,” he tried, putting one hand on her shoulder and using the other to hold them in place. The movements stirred his own deep aches but he ignored the pain and clipped her onto one of the anchors. “Where does it hurt, Amanda?”

Her forehead scrunched as she prodded her stomach and chest. “It’s deep.” Her face had taken on an ashen tone, sweat glinting across her forehead. “I can’t… ah… find the source.”

“It’s not a stomach thing?”

She shook her head mutely, whining and curling tighter with a weak cough.

“I’ll get Elliott.”

Her hand shot out and snagged his sleeve, and Danny turned back at the wounded sound she made. Despite the lack of core ability his heart still stuttered with the intense need to heal and help and protect, and the fear in her eyes tore at the primal part of his obsession that screamed for him to fix this now!

He sucked in a breath and laid a hand over hers. “I’ll just call through the doorway, alright?”

Her gaze focused just long enough for her to nod, but then her eyes unfocused and slid away from his face, and fear pierced through his gut. Her mouth moved soundlessly, and she wheezed as though unable to draw in enough breath.

“Okay,” he murmured, gently removing her hand from his sleeve and pushing off toward the door. He opened it and stuck his head through the gap. “Something’s wrong with Amanda!” he screamed, but volume quickly trailed off at the painful tug to his ribs and throat. “Elliott, Commander, get in here!”

“Danny?” she whispered. The sound was faint, even to his heightened hearing, and he looked back over his shoulder.

Her breathing had grown quicker, coming in shallow bursts as she clenched her fists in her blue mission polo shirt. The fabric beneath her fingers has gone dark. Before his brain could catch up and realise what was happening, Danny’s body reacted in accordance to years of seeing the same thing on his friends’ clothes after particularly brutal fights.

“Okay, Amanda, just breathe,” he heard himself tell her, and he moved back to her side and gently lifted her hands away. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

When he released her hands they left his smeared with blood.

“Okay,” he said again, because it was all his brain seemed capable of doing right now. Every fibre of his consciousness was screaming for him to fix it fix it fix it now, and his hands trembled as he reached for the hem of her shirt. “Can I look?”

She screwed her eyes shut and nodded, whimpering as he carefully peeled the increasingly-soaked fabric from her skin.

He stared, brain scrambling to comprehend what he was seeing, and Weaver made a sound somewhere between a choke and a sob as sharp shards of glowing green crystals continued to steadily push their way out through her skin. Danny froze, then tentatively extended a single fingertip and brushed it against one of the pencil-thin points. It burned to the touch, and when he pulled back and looked at the pad of his finger it bore a fresh dark green mark, similar to the ones that already littered his body. As he watched, small veins spiderwebbed out from it like cracks growing in ice, stopping in a small halo before their tips could reach around the sides of his finger.

Blood was building at the dozens of wounds in his teammate’s flesh, mostly sticking to Weaver’s body for now in large globules, and as Danny stared she looked down for a long moment before pressing her lips together in a thin line. She tilted her head back and the tears that pooled around her lashes snapped him out of his reverie.

“You’re okay,” he breathed, reaching for her hand and giving it a squeeze.

She laughed, hollow and weak, and immediately broke into a cough. Her fingers tightened around his and she cried out, tensing as the crystals pressed even further outwards. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”

“No!” he insisted, taking her other hand as well. “You’re okay, Amanda, you’re… damn it, someone help!”

Something cracked and Danny looked down in horror, unable to do anything but watch as a particularly large crystal pressed its way out from between two of her ribs with a fresh burst of blood. She shrieked, but the scream was weaker than it probably should have been, and Danny realised with a sickening lurch that globes of blood had begun to float around them in a grotesque cloud.

“No,” he croaked, unable to face the building resignation in her expression. “No, we’ll… We’ll figure this out… You’re gonna be okay…”

She opened her mouth and blood slipped through her lips, the lifting free and floating between them like sickening sanguine bubbles. “It’s okay, Danny,” she rasped. More blood sprayed forth with a jerking cough, and she gripped his hand so tightly that even though the pain was negligible in his heightened state, he could feel every taut tendon and sinew in her fingers. “You… you’ve gone beyond the grave already, right?”

He squeezed back, careful not to crush her hand as his vision blurred with tears. “You should rest.”

She laughed, and it came out wet and red. “I’ll rest soon enough. Tell me… what’s it like?”

Her tone was so pleading, her expression open and beseeching, and Danny closed his eyes to try to avoid the hunger in her gaze. “I don’t know,” he murmured. At the thought of his death a phantom surge of white-hot ectoplasmic energy swept over him, pricking his skin as it raised the fine hairs along his arms and the back of his neck, and the faint echo of burning flesh drifted through the air. “Everyone’s different. I think… it all blends into peace in the end, though. Or at least a kind of relief.”

He opened his eyes again in time to see a still calmness melt away the creases that had been furrowed into her brow. “Oh,” she breathed.

Her grip had loosened, and he squeezed her hand again. “I won’t leave you,” he promised.

She smiled, and the blood clinging to her lips contrasted against her increasingly ashen skin. Her breaths were slower now, and she tilted her head back so she could see out the window.

Neither of them spoke again, and Danny carefully wrapped his free arm around her shoulders, holding her so that she could keep watching the stars as her body went limp.

It didn’t take long for her breathing to go quiet, and the gaps between her heartbeats stretched further with each passing moment, until she breathed out one last time and fell completely still.

Her soul whispered past him and slid out of reality, and Danny let go of her hand and brushed his hand gently over her hair.

He kept his arm around her despite the way that the crystals lining her back burned even through his sleeve.

Distantly, he heard someone call his name, and he turned his head to rub the tears away on his shoulders so he could clear his vision.

“What did you do?!” Lowes shrieked.

He moved, taking a breath for the first time since Weaver had let out her last. “I… I didn’t,” he tried, but his dead teammate’s glassy eyes caught the light in his peripheral vision and he choked, using his free hand to scrub away fresh tears. “They just started, and… and I couldn’t do anything, and…”

Thomas stuck his head through the door over Lowes’ shoulder and immediately jostled her to the side, pushing his way into the room and floating over to them. “What happened?” he asked, quieter than Lowes had but no less firm.

Danny shook his head. “Nothing,” he croaked. “We… we had some food, and then Archie left to get you, and she… she…” His voice wavered and broke, and Danny clapped his hand over his mouth as though stifling his sob would somehow improve the situation.

“Okay.” Thomas touched the arm that was still wrapped around Weaver. “Danny, you have to let her go. Are you hurt?”

He peeled his arm back, and the palm of his hand and inside of his wrist were dotted with dark green spots connected by a lattice of spiderwebbing tendrils. They disappeared beneath the cuff of his jumper, and Thomas gestured for him to roll up his sleeve while checking Weaver’s throat for a pulse.

The rest of Danny’s arm was the same, and he winced as the simple brush of fabric made his skin sting. The side that had been pressed against Weaver hurt as well, and he lifted his clothing with mounting horror to see the same thing there too.

He looked up in time to see Thomas shake his head at Lowes, and Danny flinched when she glared at him. “Tell me what happened,” she snapped, moving closer and glaring straight into his eyes.

“It just started, I swear,” he rasped, holding up his hands. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Then why did this only happen once you came on board?”

He shook his head, but his thoughts turned thick and slow. He… he couldn’t have done this. He’d come here to save them, hadn’t he? There was no way that him being here could have caused this…

Right?

“I’m no expert, but I don’t think ghosts and ectoranium mix well,” Russell chimed in from the doorway.

“We need to message Capcom,” Lowes said in response. “I want the best ghost experts in my inbox in under half an hour, and you, Daniel Fenton, are not leaving my sight.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Russell offered.

She shook her head. “No, you help Elliott clean up in here.” She met Danny’s gaze and jerked her head towards the door. “Come with me.”

He could barely see through the continual tears, so Danny wiped his sleeve over his eyes again and slowly moved to the door. Lowes ushered him through first, closing it behind them and wordlessly directing him through the ship until they reached the empty control space. The six chairs in their circle were like a silent audience, the glaring reminder of what had just been so abruptly lost squeezing around his chest and threatening to shut his brain down entirely.

He tethered himself into one at her gesture and stared blankly for a moment, the image of the crystals slicing through flesh replaying in his head, and as the memory of Weaver’s cries and their conversation about her daughter rose to the forefront of his mind he buried his face in his hands and wept.

Lowes didn’t interrupt him, but the intensity of his tears slowed quickly as his strength waned and the pain built, leaving him limp and gasping. Still, he’d cried for long enough to leave his face feeling puffy and congested.

Something white flashed through the blurriness and a tissue pressed into his hand. He took it, wiping at the snot and tears until he could see again, and Lowes clicked the side button to lock her tablet before he could catch sight of the screen. “Capcom answered already. They said you couldn’t have done it.”

He sniffed, but it did little to clear his plugged nose. “Do you really think I’d come all this way to kill you guys?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she sighed, absently running a finger around the edge of the tablet. “I want to trust you, and the ectoscience team said there’s no way you could have done something like that, but I need to get us all safely home.”

Danny winced. “I don’t know why this only started when I got here, but maybe the ectoranium was what messed everything up in the first place?”

“We don’t know how it got here though, or why it’s growing. Capcom said there's no conclusive research yet that shows anything like this happening.”

He groaned, repositioning so that he could carefully reach for a water pouch from a nearby compartment without overextending. “I can try telling you what I know, but I doubt it’s more than the Guys in White or even my parents, since they all studied this stuff non stop for a couple of years after the near miss.” Water successfully obtained, he sucked it down without pause. It helped clear some of the combined stickiness of blood and crying from his throat, but did nothing to ease the washed-out exhaustion weighing against him.

“I’d still like you to explain it.” Lowes took the empty pouch from his hand, moving to throw it out herself. “I want you to stay with me until we figure out what’s causing it, though.”

“You mean you still don’t trust me,” he challenged as sharp betrayal pierced his heart.

She sighed, thumping her forehead against the wall before turning back to face him. “Look, Danny, either you did it and the only way I can keep the others safe is for you to kill me first so they know you’re behind this, or you didn’t do it and my continued safety helps to prove that. If you stay with me and one of the others develops symptoms, then your innocence will be proven.”

“But—”

“Besides, your core’s still down, right? The best thing you can do right now is rest.” She fixed him with a stern look. “Pushing yourself will only make things worse.”

“I don’t feel like I’m getting any better though.”

“See if those ectotablets help,” she suggested, turning back to her tablet and unlocking the screen.

He obediently fished them out of his pocket and knocked two back, swallowing them dry without bothering to wait for them to dissolve on his tongue. “What if this is like radiation sickness, and I’m already doomed?” he ventured.

She glanced at him sharply before tapping furiously at her screen. “I’ll ask. Do you think anybody would know?”

He shrugged, and even that small movement ached. “I don’t think anybody ever managed to get samples, aside from trying to synthesise something similar out of blood blossoms. Maybe someone smarter than me will know though.”

She nodded, and they both lapsed into silence as she kept typing. The lull freed Danny’s thoughts to wander and when he blinked he saw Amanda Weaver, ashen with the pall of death, baubles of blood clinging to her lips and floating softly around her in a grisly halo.

Tears threatened to rise again and he swallowed back, hard.

Where had the crystals come from, and why were they growing out of people?

He must have made some sort of noise, because Lowes looked up at him sharply. “Are you in pain?”

He blinked. “No more than before.”

“Is it localised at all?”

“I don’t think so.” He experimentally tensed his body with a grimace. “My core’s the worst, but all the rest of me hurts too. The spots from the crystals are stinging though.” He looked down at his hands and was surprised to notice that they were shaking. It was a numb, detached feeling though, and he wondered if he was experiencing some kind of shock.

She clicked her tongue and nodded. “Okay. How’s your energy level beyond that? Are you still nauseous, and do you have a headache?”

He sniffed away the residual snot that had been plugging his nose. “Stomach’s okay for now, but I’m exhausted and my head’s starting to hurt again,” he confessed. “I know I have no right to complain though, so—”

“Rest, then,” she advised. “I’ll wake you up later if you fall asleep.”

“What about the others? We have to tell them.”

“We will.” She turned her tablet so he could see the screen. “Look at your biomonitor readouts. Apparently you have a low fever, and your heart and breathing are quicker than normal. There’s nothing you can do right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re suffering from shock as well, so I’m ordering you to rest until we know whether you’re stable or not.” She eyed his trembling hands pointedly. “I don’t need you getting worse.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but the readings caught his eye and he wilted. They were worse than when he’d burned out his core during the launch, and the memory of how long it had taken to recover from that alone pricked him with anxiety. “Okay,” he conceded. “I’ll rest and see if they improve, but I don’t think I can sleep.”

“Rest is still helpful.” Lowes turned the tablet back to herself. “I’ll grab you a blanket. Then I’m going to stay right here with you and keep messaging Capcom for now. They need to know everything that happened, and then we’ll have a team meeting, probably in about an hour.”

Danny nodded to show that he’d heard, waiting for her to fetch an emergency space blanket and strapping himself into it before closing his eyes and trying to relax.

His thoughts spun, and he replayed what had happened over and over again, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. He didn’t know enough about ectoranium since he’d never so much as touched it before, and now he cursed himself for keeping distant from his parents. The asteroid had just been so complicated, and with success had come the feeling that things were actually kind of okay for once, at least on the surface, but the problem with saving the world was the expectations. Danny had always struggled with the weight of disappointment, and having a core only amplified the feeling.

He huffed and made a show of pretending that he was just uncomfortable, keeping his eyes closed as he slowly stretched and settled again. He felt warmer already, which was unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and his shaking seemed to be slowing down. Still, he turned events over and over in his head, and kept revisiting the horror of the past thirty minutes. To die like that, so far away from loved ones, and know you’d never go home again…

It was horrific.

He thought, unbidden, about what it might have been like if it had happened to him, either now, or back when he’d faced the threat of that asteroid.

It all kept coming back to that, didn’t it?

…If he was honest with himself, it wasn't really about the asteroid, was it?

The memory of the broadcast from his father’s and Vlad’s spacecraft brushed against his thoughts and he pushed it away, taking a deep breath and blurring into slow fuzziness as exhaustion finally sank into his conscious cognition. His thoughts occasionally stirred towards the utter silence in the moments after Weaver had breathed her last, but with his eyes closed and the constant breaths of his commander beside him, his own body dragged him down with the sheer weight of everything it was dealing with.

He didn’t really sleep, but drifted in the quiet space between wakefulness and oblivion, punctuated mostly by spikes of grief or guilt that managed to pierce the numbness, however briefly. People moved in and out of his vicinity but their voices were nothing more than soft murmurs, and his overstressed brain couldn’t find the energy to focus enough to think beyond the general sensations of floating and the continuous hum of machinery within the walls.

Chapter Text

He was stirred from his daze by a hand squeezing his shoulder, and Danny blinked the bleariness away as the meaningless murmur of his team’s voices separated into distinct words.

“I’m up,” he slurred.

“You didn’t actually sleep, did you?” Lowes challenged, and he sent her a guilty wince. She jerked one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “At least you rested. Any better?”

It was his turn to shrug as he tried to take stock of himself beyond the residual heaviness of rest. He peeled back the shiny space blanket and immediately felt a chill in its absence, but managed to suppress his shudder as he folded it up and thought about how he was really feeling. It was as though there was too much going on at the same time as not enough, and he felt as though he was continually swinging between detached and overstimulated. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m not coughing as much any more, am I?”

“No,” Thomas chimed in. “You did a few times while you rested, but only every fifteen minutes or so.”

“That’s good,” he said, looking around at the rest of the gathered crew. They were all sombre, eyes at various levels of red puffiness. Samuels’ nose and cheeks were still flushed from recent tears, and as Danny curled himself up a bit to help create more space he felt a pang of guilt for clocking out like he had while they’d all had to face this tragedy. He didn’t know why he wasn’t a complete mess himself, but everything felt distant, like he was observing himself from afar.

Clockwork would fix this anyway. After all, he’d never let him mess up this badly. There was nothing to learn from something so senseless, so all Danny needed to do was sit tight, try his best, and wait…

Right?

“Alright,” Lowes said, breaking the silence. “Danny, take some more ectocapsules. The med team insists you have two every hour. Your vitals settled a bit while you rested but it’s still not looking great.”

“Any word on how the crystals got here yet?” Russell asked as Danny wordlessly did as she asked. The supply in his pocket wouldn’t last forever, especially if he was taking them so frequently, but hopefully they’d be able to get more from the Demeter soon.

Lowes shook her head. “They’re trying to figure out what we should do. I’m going to be brutally honest here — if the Persepone’s contamination is found to be a continued risk to all of us, we may have to take our chances in the Demeter, no matter how cramped it’ll be.”

“Whoa, who’s to say we don’t already have them inside of us?” Hook asked, her tone bordering on snappish. “Maybe that’s why Danny’s still so sick. Do you already have crystals in you, and you’re passing it on just by being near us?!”

“If I had ectoranium inside me I’d be dead by now.”

“You’re already dead though,” she retorted.

Danny tried to not clench his hands into fists, twisting the folded space blanket in his lap instead. “I’m not dead,” he growled, “and if ectoranium got to my core I’d probably destabilise.”

“What does that mean?” Samuels asked.

“I mean melted into a puddle of goo.”

“Oh,” Russell said, “like that little halfa girl who got shot by ghost hunters?”

Danny closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath through his nose. “Yes,” he said once he was sure his voice wouldn’t waver, “exactly like Elle.”

Something shifted in the air around them, and he looked again in time to see them all sharing glances of varying levels of confusion and dawning pity.

“So, you knew her, then?” Thomas ventured.

Danny nodded, sucking in another breath and scrubbing his knuckles against his burning eyes. The grief was an unexpected blade to the heart, when she’d been gone for so long now and there was far more happening than his old losses, but he supposed that what was going on must be dredging up old feelings. That was probably what Jazz would say, anyway. Something about grief intersecting or some such psychobabble. “She was like a sister to me,” he finally managed.

“I’m sorry,” Samuels offered.

The others murmured similar condolences, and Danny dropped his hands away from his face. “It’s fine,” he said, even though he knew that staving off the tears now only meant that he was going to cry about it later. His core might have been out of action, but through the continued numb detachedness his brain still howled for him to feel in the way that only the dead could — completely and utterly consuming him. He could only hope that if he kept talking then he’d hold off the inevitable breakdown, and he could give himself over to everything later.

Amanda’s face, contorted with pain, swam to the forefront of his thoughts, and he paused for a moment to breathe through a fresh wave of grief. He had to keep going right now, so he swallowed back the rising tightness in his throat and refocused on the discussion at hand. For now, there were people to save, and that was enough to keep him in check.

“If they say to use the Demeter how will we get past the crystals?” Hook asked before the silence could stretch too long, looking to Lowes.

“That’s a good question, but there’s another point to consider as well. Even if we relocate, there’s no guarantee it’ll support all of us for the next few weeks.”

“You’re right,” Danny said, grateful that he could feel helpful in this conversation. He was also fully aware of the weight of eyes on him, and tried not to wonder what each of them were thinking. “There’s only really space for two or three people to fit comfortably, and while we could all probably squeeze in there with food and clothes and just shuffle around each other, the life support systems might not keep us all alive. We’d be using everything at more than six times the rate that I would alone, and these things don’t last forever. I don’t know all of the specifications myself since it was built in such a hurry with the purpose of just getting me here, and if necessary, to Mars alone. They had me doing a lot of extra tests and training before launch, but it was all solo in the event that I couldn’t make contact with you all. We don’t know what the strain would do of everyone in there at once, so you’d have to ask Capcom.”

Samuels nodded. “Besides, the Demeter doesn’t have landing capabilities, does it? We need the Persephone to get us down to Mars.”

“Danny can fly us down,” Russell offered.

“Only if his core comes back though,” Samuels countered.

They all looked at Danny, and he shrank back. “I don’t know if it will. I burnt out during launch because I tried to push the Demeter to go as fast as possible, and that took almost a month to get me back to normal capacity. Scott banned me from pushing the ship again without permission. This feels even worse, and I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to get us down safely.”

Hook sighed. “So we can’t just jettison the Persephone, even if it ends up being what’s causing the problem.”

“That still leaves the issue of the crystals,” Russell chimed in. “Do they hurt you every time you go near them, Danny?”

He passed Russell the blanket and looked down at his hands, giving them an experimental clench. The hand that had been around Weaver’s back smarted far more than the one that hadn’t, and when he opened his fingers the resultant stretch made the dark green spots sting. “Yeah,” he said, continuing to move his fingers despite the discomfort. “Touching the crystals doesn’t seem to be doing me any favours, and being close to the big ones actually made me sick. I don’t think my core’ll come back quickly while I’m still this close to them.”

Lowes shifted at a notification and everyone turned to watch as she unlocked her tablet and read whatever was on the screen. Her lips pursed and she typed something before redirecting her attention to the team. “The most distant point from the crystals is where we sleep, so Capcom wants us to all retreat there for the time being and wait to see if either Danny recovers or if the crystals spread to any of us.”

“So, what, we’re just going to wait to die?” Hook snapped.

“It’s not like we can do anything else,” Thomas retorted. “Either this thing’ll kill us all, or Amanda was somehow infected and we’re all fine so long as we stay away from them. Either way, there’s nothing we can do except wait and see what happens.”

“Exactly.” Lowes tapped her nails against her tablet, looking at each of them in turn. “Danny, you stay with me. Everyone else split into pairs and gather what we’ll need to stay there. Don’t go near those crystals if you can help it, since disturbing the growth might have been what spread it to Amanda. Elliott and Archie, collect food and water. We can’t take it all in there with us, but bring at least enough for everyone for a week. Preferably things that don’t need heating, since we need to limit leaving the room as much as possible.

“Leah and Chris, I want you two to grab our tablets, some exercise gear, and first aid supplies. If you have time after that feel free to get anything else you think we might want, but only from this deck. I don’t want you risking exposure to grab anything nonessential. Gather everything right outside the door to the sleeping space but don’t enter. Danny and I will make sure we have clean clothes for everyone to change into before going inside as a way to reduce risk of contamination.”

The group chorused varying affirmatives and went to follow their orders. Danny made to move as well but Lowes waved him back. “Rest as much as possible. Our survival might hinge on your recovery.”

“I can still help,” he protested.

She shook her head and floated over to a storage compartment. “I’m not risking it.” She pulled out some slim packets and pushed so that they drifted over to him while she kept counting out more of each type.

Danny snagged them when they were within range. It was more of the standard mission-blue jumpers and polo shirts and a set of plain khakis and some socks. “How’ll you get Archie to wear one of these instead of his own stuff?” he joked, waving the polo shirt packet.

“I don’t mind if he does, so long as it’s not contaminated.”

“And that he hasn’t worn the same meme shirt for three weeks already.”

She shuddered. “Of all the things about space travel that you think you’re ready for but really aren’t, the smells have to be near the top.”

He chuckled, breaking off with a wince when it tugged at his aching insides. “Yeah, but it’s worth it, though.” He rubbed his sternum absently. Even with everything going so wrong, coming out here really had been worth it. It was far better than just waiting back on Earth for his teammates to die without doing anything to help them.

“What made you want to be an astronaut?” she asked, closing the storage compartment and turning back to face him with an armful of clothing packets. She’d stuck a few to the velcro strips on her pants as well in order to carry more.

He frowned. “What do you mean? I told you, I’ve always wanted to be one.”

She couldn’t move her arms without releasing the packets so instead gestured vaguely with her shoulder and chin. “Sure, you told me when we first met, when you were just a normal human as far as we knew. But you’re actually invested in the whole saving the world thing. Isn’t coming out here leaving everything you’ve worked so hard for behind?”

Danny blew out a breath through pursed lips. He wasn’t used to talking about his purpose like this, but the lack of a working core did quell the discomfort he’d typically feel when prodding conversations nudged too closely to obsession territory. For once, he could speak freely without having to hold his powers in check. It was honestly relieving. “Well they’re kinda linked in a broad sense, aren’t they? We’re trying to ensure the continuation of the human race. And besides, I care about you guys as much as I care about my own family. My goal isn’t to save the world, it’s to help the important people in my life. I also really love space, and so when I graduated it was a no-brainer.”

“Why didn’t you help your parents with their research then?” she asked, floating closer and slapping a few packs onto Danny’s velcro. “You’re a halfa who’s an engineer, after all. Wouldn’t it be right up your alley?”

He winced. “Uh, not really. They’re a bit sensitive about halfas after…” he trailed off, swallowing around a lump in his throat as he grappled with how to phrase it.

Lowes simply nodded. “Must have been hard.”

“Yeah,” he managed, sniffing and untethering himself from his anchor point.

She didn’t push further and he didn’t offer, so they moved back to the bedroom in silence. Lowes then took back the packets stuck to Danny’s velcro strips and turned away from him. “Go on, get changed and then go in.”

“No way,” he said. “I’ll wait out here with you.”

Her shoulders tightened and the tone of her voice was more than enough to convey her frown. “That’s an order. I want to get everyone changed and in as quickly as possible, and they should all be back in a few minutes anyway.”

“I guess so.” He opened the fresh clothing, identical to what he already had on, and went about swapping his outfit with as little cross contamination as possible. “What if it really is inside me, and I’m spreading it to you guys?” he ventured meekly, moving slowly to pull on the new pants and grimacing at the pain that the motions caused.

“Your parents agree that if you had ectoranium in you, you’d have melted by now.”

“Oh.” Trying not to imagine that possibility, he put on the polo shirt, equally as slowly. His ribs and shoulders ached with the effort. “They messaged you?”

“They messaged the ectoscience team, and it got forwarded to me.”

“Makes sense.” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice even though it curdled in his gut. Lowes made a questioning noise but Danny grunted and made a show out of struggling with his jumper. He popped his head through the hole to find that she’d turned back to facing him. Her face was soft with concern and he ignored the unspoken question, instead occupying himself with working off his shoes and grappling with the socks.

“I’m sorry we had to tell them before you could, but it’s a medical issue that needs to go through the proper channels.”

He shook his head. “Yeah, I know. It’s just…” He shrugged, keeping his gaze on his feet instead of meeting her eyes. “I’m just stressed.”

“You can message them once we get everyone safely inside,” she promised. “I’m sure they can’t wait to hear from you.”

He shrugged again, replacing his shoes and stowing his old clothing in the laundry sack that Lowes presented for the purpose. “They don’t really do emails.”

“Still, I’m sure they’re worried about you.”

Even with his core too weak to sense her emotions Danny knew she was studying him, so he schooled his expression into something that he hoped resembled contrition. “Yeah, I know. I just want us all to be safe before I think about messaging anyone back home.”

She frowned and looked like she was considering her next words when a sound reached them, barely audible over the constant loud humming of the ship’s life support systems. It was short and sharp, and when it came again Danny’s heart began to flutter at the realisation that someone was screaming.

He made to move and Lowes threw out an arm before he could push off. “Stay here. I’ll go see what’s happening.”

“But—”

“Stop questioning my orders and do as you’re told,” she snapped, heading down the passageway and leaving him to fret.

Danny watched her go, itching to move but kept in place by the unspoken threat apparent in her terse tone. The minutes dragged and he heard nothing else, and then Samuels and Hook turned into his line of sight. They were each carrying a few tablets, and had some first aid kits slung over their shoulders, and as they drew closer Danny’s breathing hitched when he recognised the spots of blood on their hands and clothing.

“Elliott’s gone,” Hook supplied when they were close enough to talk at a normal volume. “Crystals split him open in seconds. He didn’t stand a chance. Lowes said you were with her the entire time, but don’t think that puts you in the clear.”

Danny closed his eyes and took a moment to breathe. The vertigo of his wounded core sparking with grief rolled over him in a wave that threatened to make him vomit.

“Did you hear me?!” she snapped, and he blindly nodded.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” he rasped, his mouth filling with sickly sweet saliva.

He must have really looked like it because a moment later someone was pressing a vomit bag into his hand, and Danny immediately shoved it over his mouth and threw up.

“Easy,” Samuels murmured in between his heaving retches, and a firm hand rubbed between his shoulder blades. Danny’s senses were a mess but he was grateful for the contact despite the resulting sting, and then his insides cramped and he retched again, spitting up what felt like nothing but bile and maybe a bit of blood if the awful taste was anything to go by. He squinted through the blur caused by tears of exertion and felt a prick of gratitude that nothing seemed to have escaped the bag, but he kept it against his mouth for another moment to make sure he was done.

His blood throbbed in his head, pounding with the drive to go and save his friend right now, but the pain and disorientation of such a sudden strong urge combined with Lowes’ orders and kept him where he was. In his current state he didn’t think he’d even be able to move around the ship unassisted.

It was maddening.

Samuels passed him a tissue when he pulled the bag away and Danny wiped his mouth. Hook exchanged the bag for a water pouch, her ashen face pinched with what Danny thought might be concern, and Samuels kept rubbing his back as he took a long drink in an attempt to wash away the lingering taste.

“It was fast,” Samuels offered once Danny had finished.

He nodded to show that he’d heard and rubbed away his tears. Fast didn’t mean painless, and his breathing hitched for a moment before he wrestled himself back under control in an effort to not throw up again. It took a few more long breaths before he tried speaking. “What about the others?”

“The commander and Archie are just… erm…”

“They’re cleaning up,” Hook supplied when he trailed off. “We were told to come get changed and stay with you, and they’ll bring the food and water once they’re done.” She passed him his tablet. “You’re supposed to contact Capcom right away to talk about your recovery plan so you can get us out of here. And, um… sorry. I shouldn’t have accused you so quickly.”

Danny nodded, numbly unlocking the device and trying to make sense of the plethora of notifications. He stared at the screen, not realising that time was passing until it went dim in preparation to lock itself again.

Samuels squeezed his shoulder. “It’s alright, Danny. Just take a moment to breathe, okay?”

Tears welled to blur his vision again and Danny dabbed them with a sniffle. This all felt so wrong — he was supposed to be the one to come and save them, and yet here he was, falling apart while his teammates took turns taking care of him as they were dying!

Hook deposited her armful of tablets and first aid supplies into Samuels’ already loaded arms and grabbed some fresh clothing packets. She nodded towards the airlock. “Get inside before you have to change again, Danny.”

“But I thought I wasn’t supposed to be unsupervised?” he asked forlornly.

She rolled her eyes. “You hardly look capable of anything except throwing up or passing out right now. Go inside and check your messages.”

Too worn out to argue, Danny did as instructed, moving stiffly. Part of him railed against leaving them alone, but it was a small part of him, barely noticeable under the washed-out exhaustion of his combined grief and core damage.

The sleeping quarters had no remaining trace of what had happened only a few short hours beforehand. Logically, Danny knew that it would have been cleaned well by the team, with Amanda put into a bag and kept in the coldest section of the ship until they could bring her home. If systems were running as normal they’d likely have followed the protocol to expose her to space and thus freeze her body and break it up for easier handling and storage, but part of him was grateful that she would remain untouched for now. She was already damaged enough.

And now Thomas would join her. He replayed the last few times they’d been together over in his mind, unable to believe that he’d never see him again. He felt detached as he considered it, not ready to accept the fact that this was their reality.

Nothing had gone this spectacularly wrong before that he hadn’t been able to fix.

Still, it was dragging on far longer than he’d expected, and he was starting to wonder if he’d been forgotten.

Conscious that his teammates might enter at any moment, Danny looked out the porthole and tried to nudge at his unresponsive core. “Clockwork?” he whispered, unable to speak in the tongue of the dead but deciding that language and core involvement wouldn’t really matter when the person he was trying to reach saw everything anyway. “I… I don’t understand. Why did you let this happen?” His voice cracked but he pressed on. “What did they do to deserve this? Why didn’t you let me save them?”

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and bit back any further pleas as the airlock opened with a pneumatic hiss, and both Hook and Samuels made their way inside, dressed in clean clothing and toting their small collection of equipment.

“Please let me go back and fix this,” he whispered into his palms before they could draw close enough to hear.

The thought alone was enough to calm him, and Danny resolved that once he’d regained his core, he’d get the staff of the map and one of Clockwork’s medallions, and make it so this never happened. Even if he had to dismantle Long Now brick by stupid brick, he’d get it.

He’d spare everyone the pain, and figure out whatever he was supposed to in this branch of the timeline. He didn’t think he had any moral failings to overcome, and this seemed too drastic a measure to deal with the loose threads of his familial relationships, so he couldn’t figure out why Clockwork would be allowing this to happen. Nevertheless, the reminder that events weren’t fixed helped a tiny ray of hope to shine through his despair, and Danny resolved to hold himself together and figure out how to reverse this as quickly as possible.

Clockwork could probably see a future of its resolution happening already, and maybe that’s what he wanted Danny to do. Maybe breaking into Clockwork’s lair was simply the next step in Danny’s power progression, or perhaps he was supposed to figure out time travel on his own or something?

It felt stupid even considering options like that, but they were at least better than the alternative.

Danny glanced out of a nearby porthole. The starry expanse was dark and stretched beyond what he could conceive, and for a moment he was tamped down by the sheer insignificance of their tiny ship and their tiny worries and their tiny lives in the grand scheme of it all.

He shook himself. No, he was going to fix this. They mattered, and he wasn’t going to let them just die like this. He’d make sure of it.

He pulled out his tablet from where he’d tucked it under his arm and began to parse through his messages. They were mostly overlapping correspondences from the health team and the ectoscience team, conveying varying levels of helplessness and advice. He skimmed them, generally unsatisfied with the lack of helpful suggestions beyond food, water, ectocapsules, and lots of rest.

He responded affirmatively anyway, agreeing to follow the recovery plan and asking what to do about the dwindling supply of capsules in his pocket since the crystals blocked the way to the rest.

He then opened his personal inbox, sucking in his lower lip and trapping it between his teeth as he scrolled down the list of emails from the people back at home.

He tried not to get his hopes up but when he got to the end of the list of new emails and there was still nothing from his parents, something delicate bruised inside him just a little bit more, and he wondered how much further silence he could endure before any hope of reconciliation shattered beyond repair.

Chapter Text

Food had never seemed so unappetising.

Danny took a tentative bite of his peanut-butter smeared wrap when he realised that Samuels was watching him out of the corner of his eye, but it felt like a lump of lard as he forced himself to chew and swallow.

Hoping to distract himself enough to be able to get through the meal, Danny opened his tablet and began to flick aimlessly through the apps. His emails had all been read, his health plan filled out down to the most recent activity, and in the confines of the small bedroom space there wasn’t much else he could work on. He took another bite of his food, mechanically chewing as he opened an ebook and tried to pick up where he’d left off.

It was a useless endeavour, and after rereading the same passage twice he gave up on that too, staring forlornly at the remaining half of his wrap.

“You won’t recover if you don’t eat,” Samuels reminded him, and Danny grimaced and took another bite.

The older astronaut sighed and moved closer, tilting his own tablet so that Danny could see the screen. “What do you think?” he asked.

Danny took the tablet to get a better angle, and was presented with a beautiful digital rendering of the expanse beyond their window. Far off in the distance was a red star that shone slightly larger than the rest.

“My wife told me I should do some paintings of our trip,” he explained when Danny didn’t react. “She said we could get them printed and give them to our children for Christmas, so I figured I’d get things planned out while we’re waiting in here.”

“You’re very talented,” Danny responded, passing the tablet back and shoving the final quarter of his wrap into his mouth. It was far more than polite, but he just wanted to get rid of the damned thing as quickly as possible at this point.

“Thank you. Do you want to see the others?”

Still chewing, Danny raised an eyebrow and gestured affirmatively. Samuels flicked to another picture and put the tablet in Danny’s hands again. “Swipe to see the rest,” he instructed, leaning back a bit and watching as Danny began to look through the collection of images. They were mostly of the different things Samuels would have been observing — the moon, large and round with closeness, perfectly captured through the circular frame of a porthole; the curves and lines of an empty passageway on board the ship; food packets stuck to the velcro strips on the table; the six launch chairs in their reclining circle.

The final image gave him pause, and his breath caught in his throat at the sketchy representation of the group selfie that they’d taken.

“I was originally going to remove your sickness, but I figured I’d ask you first.”

Danny mentally traced each face, some more rendered than others but everyone still recognisable. Their base tones were warm and lively, smiles taking shape and floating hair and clothing adding an ethereal air. “No,” he murmured, glancing at the green undertone of his portrait’s skin before looking back at the unfinished faces of his dead teammates. “This is perfect.”

It took his vision blurring to realise that he’d started to cry, and Danny let go of the tablet to rub his eyes.

“Would you like a copy once it’s finished?” The question was slow and tentative, and when Danny glanced over he had reclaimed his floating tablet and was watching him with a pinched expression.

Danny nodded. “Yeah,” he rasped. “I’d really like that.”

Samuels mirrored the nod. “Alright then, I’ll keep working on it. It’s not like we have much else to do in here but wait, anyway.”

Danny attempted a small smile. His face felt stiff, but at least the stretch in his cheeks meant that he managed something beyond the blankness that had been his constant for the past few days. “If I never have to be locked in here again it’ll be too soon.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s only been three days. We still have a long way to go!”

“I know, but at least nothing else has happened.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Samuels advised. He untethered himself and pushed away from the wall, stretching as he floated. “Anyway, I’m going back to bed now that you’ve eaten.”

“You don’t have to take turns supervising me, you know.” Danny did his best to look disgruntled but Samuels only raised an eyebrow.

“You wouldn’t take care of yourself properly if we didn’t,” he pointed out. “You should get some sleep too, since Commander’ll be up to make sure you eat again in two hours.”

Danny sighed but unclipped himself as well, pushing off in the direction of the small sleeping pod that he’d been using. Each crew member had one, which was a small enclosed booth with its own lighting and other basic systems, just big enough inside to stretch out in a sleeping bag that was tethered in place. “Eating so often is really annoying,” he complained, wrapping himself into his sleeping bag.

Samuels chuckled. “Well if you’d thought to bring more of those fancy green tablets when you first came on board then you’d just be taking those instead.”

Danny groaned and was rewarded with another chuckle. “Thanks, Chris,” he said softly after a moment, and closed the small double doors. He thought he heard his friend sigh, but then everything faded into the ship’s soft humming, and he turned off the pod’s internal light so that when Lowes came to get him she’d at least assume he’d been asleep.

He stuck the tablet to its velcro strip in front of his face and plugged it in to charge, then turned down the screen brightness and reopened his emails. He scrolled down the list until he found the one he was looking for, and opened the attachment.

The group photo filled his screen and he stared again at his dead teammates’ faces. “Clockwork,” he whispered. His voice stayed in the normal spectrum of sound, no ethereal echo or chill of ice seeping out of his damaged core. “Please, answer me.”

He stared blankly at his own face in the picture, sickly and pale with a dark green spot and tiny matching veins lapping at his jawline. Nothing happened, and after a long moment Danny sighed and locked the screen.

He closed his eyes, figuring that he might as well try to get some rest since the med team would be on his back about it if his bioreadings showed that he hadn’t slept again. His thoughts wandered and he allowed himself to drift, thinking about things back home. He cycled through thoughts of his family and friends, of the funerals that they would be having for his teammates in the next few days, of the way the sun had felt that last time he’d walked out onto the tarmac and bid his world goodbye.

He’d been so hopeful back then. Anxious, but hopeful.

He wondered when he’d begun to lose that hope, and Danny shifted restlessly, even though there was no way for him to be uncomfortable when weightless in a controlled temperature. He debated taking a couple of sleeping tablets despite advice to the contrary, but figured it wasn’t worth the trouble if the bioreadings ended up ratting him out.

It would be interesting to see how much of his data ended up online. He wondered if they’d merge his wikipedia pages now that his secret was out, or if they’d just permalink Astronaut Daniel Fenton and Ghostly Superhero Danny Phantom. Vlad’s had been merged into one, but even though his actions were monumental, the worldwide impact had been short-lived enough to simply add a few paragraphs to Billionaire Vlad Masters’ page and call it a day. Part of Danny quailed at the thought of everything being so easily accessible, but he reminded himself that the public had known his secret for months now. There was no hiding this anymore.

Frustrated, he wriggled again before reopening his tablet and tapping on the emails logo. He opened his drafts, scowling at the one message he had saved, and pulled it up onto the screen.

He read, pausing to change words here and there, or to chop or add a sentence or two. The email was long enough that he’d split it into paragraphs, and he toyed with its content for the better part of fifteen minutes before giving up again with a loud groan.

“What are you stewing about now?” Lowes’ muffled voice asked from the adjacent pod.

“Nothing,” he grumbled, closing the app and locking the tablet again in disgust.

He heard the click of her accordion doors unlatching, and then his own opened too.

“Don’t I have like another hour before you make me eat again?”

She wrapped her arms around herself, looking cold and forlorn despite the warm grey jumpsuit pyjamas. “I have a question.”

“Yeah?” He made to unzip his sleeping bag but she motioned for him to stay where he was.

“It’s… I don’t know how to put this delicately,” she confessed, hugging herself again so tightly that he worried that she’d bruise herself.

Danny waited.

“Will they come back?” She looked away, closing her eyes for a moment before turning back to him again.

“You mean…?”

She scowled, and he felt a flicker of guilt for making her spell it out, but he didn’t want to jump to the wrong conclusion.

“Ghosts were people once, right?”

He sighed and shifted to better face her. “Ghosts still are people,” he said, as gently as he could. “Some are people who have died, but there are others who have never been alive at all, and then there are spirits that embody constructs or non-living entities too. It’s complicated.” He waited for her to nod in tentative understanding.

“So what are you then?”

“I’m me,” he said with a shrug. “Some ghosts call me a halfa. Older ghosts use the word liminal. In the end though it’s not always as important as you’d think, because in a lot of circumstances the most significant thing is sentience. Having a core’s also important in the Ghost Zone, but sentient thought in all of its different forms is what seems to define personhood, not whether you’ve ever been alive or not. Does that answer your question?”

She frowned, chewing on her lower lip. “I guess that makes sense, but it’s not something I expected.”

“The Infinite Realms are a lot more varied than most of us will ever realise,” he said, trying to be sensitive to her clear pain and need for some form of understanding but beginning to feel a prick of frustration at the topic. “But to answer what you really came to ask — no, they won’t come back. There’s just not enough ambient ectoplasm here for them to become ghosts.”

She breathed a sigh. “That’s…”

“Good,” he insisted when she trailed off. “There’s no easy way for them to stabilise, since it’s not like we can find a portal out here, and I’m not confident I could support both of their needs at once. New ghosts need a lot of energy. There’s also the issue of the way they died, and how that might manifest physically and emotionally. It… it’s better that they stay at rest.”

She shivered. “What’s it like?”

“Are you seriously asking me what it feels like to die?” he snapped, tamping down on the anger that threatened to take over. Sure, Weaver had asked the same question, but the circumstances had sort of called for it.

She recoiled, shaking her head. Flyaway strands that had escaped from her braid shifted with the motion. “No, sorry, I didn’t say what I meant. I… I was wondering what it’s like to have a core? I read a bit about halfas when everything happened with Vlad, and the general consensus seemed to be that his core had corrupted him.”

Danny blew out a long breath through his nose and tried not to grit his teeth so hard. “That was mostly speculation by so-called experts who had never even seen a ghost in person, let alone a halfa.”

“Oh.”

He mulled over what he should say while she waited. “I guess it’s indescribable,” he finally settled with. “It’s like a distillation of your essence, but stored in a highly emotional powerhouse. Sort of like a second brain, but one that lets you do things like fly and turn invisible.”

“And it can get hurt.”

“And it can get hurt,” he confirmed. “It’s just another organ, but one that people on Earth don’t understand. Vlad’s actions were his own though. Cores only amplify what’s already there. Vlad was controlling and obsessive even when he was younger. He might not have been that way his whole life, but he had the potential for it and so when bitterness started to grow and he didn’t stop it, his core magnified that hurt and entitlement and turned it into an obsession. When I first met him I don’t think he ever would have dreamed of using his powers to rule the world — his goals were a lot smaller.”

“He was a billionaire though,” she pointed out. “That doesn’t happen ethically.”

“No,” he agreed, “and that might have contributed to the whole world domination thing, but in the end it’s not something that controlled him from the get-go, but something that he allowed to consume him.”

She shifted, looking at him askance. “And what drives you, Danny Phantom? Why do you save people?”

He shuddered, tiny sparks of discomfort pricking at his insides. “You’re lucky my core’s so unresponsive, because usually a question like that gets a visceral response,” he said. “The two things you don’t ask a ghost about are their death and their obsessions.”

“Sorry. You… you don’t have to answer.”

He massaged his sternum. “I think I’m okay, as much as I hate to say it.” He took a moment to stare blankly at the hinge on one of his doors, gathering himself. “I guess… I guess I’ve inadvertently talked about it a lot with all of you over the past few days, so there’s not much else to say. But my core sparked a bit when you asked me just then. Not enough for any powers or anything, but still, it was something.”

She grabbed the edge of his pod, using it to draw a little closer. “Do you think it’ll come back quickly since you finally felt something?”

“It’s hard to say.” He paused, mulling over the small sensations deep within his body. “It’s just so flat. Most of what I feel is pain when I move too much. It’s kinda funny, you know?”

“What is?”

He chuckled dryly and she raised both eyebrows.

“Ever since I was fourteen, I’ve wanted nothing more than to be normal. I tried to hide my core, and sometimes a part of me even wanted it gone. My powers lost me so much, but now that I actually want them, they’re not here.” He laughed again, soft and bitter. “So much for failure not being an option.”

She scowled. “You’re here, aren’t you? You brought us the Demeter, and with it, a way to get back on route and maybe survive after all. That’s more than we ever could have hoped for only a week ago.”

“But Amanda and Elliott—”

“Would have been dead anyway,” she reiterated. “I know it’s harsh to say it like that, but if we didn’t fix this by the time we ran out of options, we had a plan to at least try to buy one of us some more time.”

He shuddered. “Why do I get the idea that I won’t like this?”

She sighed. “It’s horrific, but survival situations typically are.”

“Who would it have been?” He didn’t want to ask, but part of him had to know.

“We went by body size and engineering expertise, to figure out who might have the best chance of being able to fix things while using the least amount of resources.”

“So clinical,” Danny observed. “What did Archie say about it?”

“What do you think?” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know what would have been worse — being one or us or being in his position — but either way, it wasn’t looking good for the team. You know, it’s funny. He kept telling us to not lose hope, that he was sure we’d find a way, or that NASA might even be able to help us somehow.”

“He’s always been the most optimistic out of all of us,” he conceded.

She shook her head. “No, Danny. The most optimistic person in our crew has always been you.”

He opened his mouth to refute her but paused and closed it again. Huh.

Lowes smirked and gently squeezed his shoulder. “It’ll be alright. We just have to get to Mars, okay? If the past few days are any indication, the rest of the trip is going to be pretty boring.”

As if activated by her comment, a distant alarm began to beep.

“What’s that?” he asked, already unzipping his sleeping bag as she pushed off back towards her own pod.

“Knowing our luck? Something bad.” He heard her moving as he shuffled out of his pod. She had her tablet in her hands and her face had drained of colour.

“What’s wrong?” Danny drifted closer so he could peer over her shoulder and swore under his breath at the notification on the screen.

“Are all the airlocks closed?” she whispered. She was grasping the tablet so tightly that every sinew stood out in her thin wrists.

Danny swallowed, his tongue thick in his suddenly-dry mouth. “I don’t know. They’re meant to be, right?”

“The sensors are only showing a drop in pressure. I can’t see if all of the doors are secure though or if the leak just isn’t large enough to affect other areas yet.”

“What do you think is causing it?” he asked, moving to knock on the others’ pods.

Her green eyes were wide and afraid. “It’s where the crystals are. It looks like they’re potentially breaching the hull.”

His blood turned to ice, and not the comfortable chill of ghost powers. “So much for a quiet, boring trip, huh?”

She grimaced. “Wake everyone up, and see if we can get to the suits before we lose everything outside this room.”

He swore again. “Are you sure that’ll work?”

She shook her head. “No, but there’s not enough water in here for three more weeks. It’s either we do what we can now before the rest of the ship depressurises, or we die safely in here before we reach our destination.”

He nodded in agreement and turned back to waking up his crewmates. When it came down to it, there was really nothing else they could do but try. Danny could only hope that they wouldn’t lose anyone else in the process.

Chapter Text

“I’ll go,” he offered.

Hook shook her head, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “Are you kidding? We’re losing pressure, Danny. Do you want to die?!”

He twisted his hands together. “That’s why I should go, right? Even when I’m hurt like this you can see that I only need to breathe a few times a minute, or when I want to talk. It’d take me longer to suffocate than any of you if the depressurisation’s bad enough.”

Archie scowled. “You’d have to go near the crystals though. Can’t you only just feel your core a little bit now?”

Lowes’ head snapped up. “Were you eavesdropping, Russell?”

He gave a sheepish smile. “I wasn’t actually asleep. Sorry.”

Danny automatically pressed his knuckles against the end of his breastbone. “I can barely feel anything. It’s still mostly just painful, but there might be a tiny bit coming back. If I’m only closing the door between decks I shouldn’t have to get too close to the crystals though.”

“I’ll go with you.” Samuels crossed his arms over his chest as though the decision was final.

Danny shook his head. “No way. Without a suit you could die!”

“So could you!” Samuels retorted.

Lowes clapped her hands and they all stopped, turning guiltily to look at her. “Enough.” She brushed a stray strand of hair away from her face. “Now that we know we can tough it out in here, we need at least three more weeks’ worth of food and water. Water’s the priority though. It seems like a door’s been left open because the pressure drop extends to sensors beyond the crystals. It’s not a full vacuum yet, but there’s still the risk of that. Danny, I want you to go and close the door. No heroics, please.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said when she paused.

She nodded. “Once Danny closes the door we’ll be in a better position to plan how to deal with this. The pressure should be stable on this entire deck with it shut, so we can gather the supplies we need to hunker down in here for the rest of our journey.”

They made sounds of general assent and Danny pushed off the wall to float towards the door alongside Lowes.

“It’s likely only a tiny leak, right?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Without seeing it I have no idea. If I had to guess I’d say that the crystals are plugging any major breaches, but the tiniest shift would destroy all integrity. It hasn’t triggered all of the sensors yet so there’s still hope that the leak is slow and gradual, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way.”

“We’re so lucky it didn’t happen when they grew.”

She nodded, placing her hand on the door’s release and giving him a stern look. “No heroics, Fenton. You close that door and come right back here.”

He nodded. “Yes, Commander. I’ll see you in a minute.”

“If you’re not back in three I’m coming after you.”

He took a deep breath and held it as she swung the door open just wide enough for him to squeeze through. It shut behind him again with a click, and then he was completely alone.

He almost wanted to breathe again despite not needing to yet, just to test the environment, but knew logically that there wouldn’t be enough of a change to sense yet if the sensors were anything to go by.

Beyond their room, the main lights were off. Danny debated turning them on but then decided not to bother, since the general lights of different electronics along the walls still shone green and blue, giving him more than enough illumination to see by. There was no other light coming from the direction of the control room so they mustn’t be currently angled for the sun to come through that particular window.

He floated down the passageway, passing through the kitchen space until he reached the ladder-lined path leading to the second deck. The door was indeed wide open, and Danny took a tentative sniff out of sheer curiosity. He thought he might be able to detect the legendary space scent of walnuts and burnt steak, but it could just have easily been his imagination.

He closed the door, latching it firmly and heading back the way he’d come.

As Danny passed the control room again a glimmer caught his eye. He turned to look, horror squeezing the breath out of him at the sight.

Needle-like green crystals burst through the upholstery of several seats. The thickest cluster was concentrated in the chair closest to the control panel, spreading out over half of the seats in an increasingly smaller layer. They glowed with their own internal light, and would have held an ethereal beauty with their backdrop of space through control’s large window if it weren’t for the terror that clawed its way down Danny’s throat.

He pushed himself back towards the kitchen, swallowing hard and fighting the panic down. His hands were clammy but he paused to shut the door between the kitchen and the rest of the ship as well. It should never have been left open — none of the doors should have, and were probably only left like that with the stress of a second death and their rapid sequester in the sleeping zone — but hopefully by closing it now he’d prevent any further movement of the crystals.

He knew that they were likely in the guts of the ship, spreading slowly through the different systems and likely contributing to the shutdown that had seemed to start this entire mess. Still, he could only hope that they wouldn’t move beyond their current spots. Closing the door still made him feel better though, and he breathed out slowly through his nose in a deep controlled gust before opening the door leading back to their living space.

The crew drew back from where they’d been clustered around the door, giving him room to move inside before shutting it again.

“Crystals,” he gasped, pressing his hand over his painfully-beating heart and taking a deep breath. “Crystals are on the launch chairs.”

Lowes put a hand on his shoulder as the rest of the group murmured amongst themselves. “Did you get the door shut?”

He nodded. “Yeah, between decks, and on the other end of the kitchen.”

“Why didn’t you shut the one leading to the control bay too?” Hook snapped. “You could have locked the crystals in there then, since we don’t know how fast they’re spreading!”

He opened his mouth with a flicker of irritation but Lowes spoke first. “Danny followed my orders, Leah. If he’d gone closer to the new growth it might have affected him like the others did and we’d be back at square one.”

Hook crossed her arms over her chest and worked her jaw but didn’t say anything else. The altercation was unusual for their group since they’d all trained together on rigorous survival missions to avoid this kind of thing, so as Lowes stared each of them down they all paused to collect themselves.

“I’m going to contact Capcom,” she said once they’d settled. “All of you get dressed.”

Russell yawned and raked a hand through his unkempt hair. “Yes, Commander.”

They dispersed to their separate storage compartments, swapping pyjamas for their regular clothing. Lowes typed out a quick message on her tablet and then did the same. The lack of conversation grated against his nerves but Danny didn't try to start anything — although the silence was stressful, facing further criticism would be worse.

They gathered back in the middle of the room and Lowes tapped away at her tablet screen. “They want us to take refuge in the Demeter.”

“It’ll support all of us?” Samuels asked.

She shrugged. “Between the odds of  another breach that we might not get to in time, and squeezing into a smaller ship, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to choose the latter.”

“Will the systems support us all?” Hook echoed.

Lowes sighed. “They should. It still won’t be comfortable, but it’s a far greater chance at survival. We’d just have to hope that Danny’s core recovers enough for him to shuttle us down to Mars in an emergency.”

Archie rubbed his upper arms in a motion that only contributed to Danny’s building stress. “So we’d just jettison the Persephone then?”

Lowes shook her head. “If Danny doesn’t recover in time then it’s our only lifeline. We can only hope that the airlock is enough to keep the crystals at bay for a few weeks.”

“That’s a pretty big gamble,” Samuels said.

“I know.” She pressed the tablet’s case to a Velcro strip on her thigh. “That’s why I’m discussing this with you all first instead of just giving the order.”

Danny frowned. “But wait, if you were ordered to get us to move there, then won’t you be court-martialled when you get home if you don’t do it?”

Her gaze was steady and certain as she looked straight back at him. “At this point, Danny, I think the fate of the crew should rest on a group vote. Capcom didn’t order me to move us yet, only advised us that if we can get safely to the Demeter then it might be a better option. We would have to cross the depressurising zone after all, and even with suits, going that close to the crystals is an unknown risk.”

Danny looked down at the dark green spots on his hands. “I guess you’re right,” he said when nobody filled the silence, curling his fingers into fists so that the tiny wounds stung.

“I don’t want to go anywhere near those crystals,” Hook insisted. “The Demeter definitely sounds like a safer choice, but I just keep thinking about…” Her voice cracked and she audibly swallowed. Her eyes were bright and she rubbed them before looking down at the floor.

Samuels went next. “I agree with Leah. We shouldn’t take unnecessary risks when there are so many unknown factors.”

Archie looked between them, incredulity clear on his face. “Are you two kidding me? You wanna stay here, when we could depressurise in our sleep?”

“You saw what happened to Elliott and Amanda!” Hook retorted. “Do you really want to die like that?!”

Lowes cleared her throat. “Alright, that’s enough. Everyone has a right to their own vote here, Archie. I take it that yours is to try to get to the Demeter?” He nodded and so she turned to Danny. “And what about you?”

Danny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he confessed, rubbing his sternum. “I… I want to stay as far away from the crystals as possible, but the Demeter’s safer for all of us…”

Lowes frowned and cupped her chin in her hand, rubbing her jawline. “How does your core feel after going out there? Any change?”

He frowned, pressing his hand harder against his chest. “I don’t know. I just feel all fuzzy.”

“Is it as painful as a few days ago?”

He shook his head. “It still hurts, but not as badly.”

Her smartwatch beeped. “Eat,” she instructed, gesturing towards the compartment with their current food stash. “Then you’re going to try to use your powers.”

Danny stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”

“You might not be able to die as easily, Fenton, but one wrong step is life or death for the rest of us,” she explained, moving to the compartment and pulling out a sealed bag of nuts and a water pouch. “I’d feel better in the Demeter myself, so since you’re on the fence about it, there’s no winning side. With a tied vote, I’m not going to make a final call until we know what we have at our disposal.”

She threw the packets in his direction and he obediently grabbed them before they could float past. Danny grumbled under his breath but did as requested. The almonds felt like sawdust as he chewed but he ignored the discomfort and worked on eating them as quickly as he could. The rest of the group spent the few minutes it took to take care of different things themselves, and by the time he was ready, the only person still beside him was their commander. He still felt fuzzy, like he was filled with static, but he’d come out here to try his best, so that’s what he’d do.

“What power would you like me to try?” he reluctantly asked once he’d disposed of the remnants of his food packaging.

“The one that takes the least effort.”

He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t even know what that would be.”

“What was the first ever thing you did?” she pressed. “Wouldn’t that be the easiest?”

Danny closed his eyes and his thoughts slipped back to his first few months as a halfa. It was a time that felt so impossibly distant that he was surprised he remembered as much of it as he did, but he figured that trauma did strange things to the brain. 

He thought about sinking through the floor, about not being seen, about feeling weightless and breathless and freezing from the inside out… and then the burst of the activating portal flashed a searing green through his closed eyelids, and ice swept through his very soul with a familiarity so deep that he’d ached in its brief absence.

Lowes sucked in a loud breath and Danny opened his eyes to see that his khaki pants and polo shirt had changed to the plain blue jumpsuit that he’d been wearing beneath the EMU suit the last time he’d been in his ghost form.

He looked up and saw his glow reflected in her eyes, and then groaned as his core trembled and the white rings swept his human form back into place.

“Ouch,” he gasped, forcing himself to breathe as he flexed fingers that had gone numb. His core smarted and the brief transformation throbbed down to his bones, but despite everything, Danny couldn’t help but laugh in relief, giddy and breathless with the tiny spark of power that he’d managed to grasp. Maybe, just maybe, they were going to get out of this mess after all.

And then he was going to wring Clockwork’s sorry neck for making him go through all of this in the first place.

Chapter Text

Once again, Danny rested. He tried to tell himself that it was the best thing to do, but as the remainder of the team took stock of what they had left and ventured beyond their small living space to gather essential supplies, he was permitted to do nothing but watch.

He rubbed his chest. In the thirty minutes since the momentary shift into his ghost form the ice had started to return to his blood. He hadn’t realised how much he’d thawed in the absence of power until it had begun to trickle back, turning the tip of his nose numb as he fought against increasing shivers.

“You look miserable,” Russell said, sticking the last packet of chocolate pudding at the end of the line on a velcro strip.

Danny hugged himself. “Core’s coming back a bit.” He didn’t really want to explain himself right now, when he was feeling all kinds of discomfort, but the thought that keeping information back might nudge the distance wider between himself and the rest of the crew was unsettling. It pricked him with enough of a threat of loneliness to make it worth the effort.

“And your powers returning are a bad thing?”

He shook his head and made a show of taking a shuddering breath. “I’m just cold. It’ll settle soon enough.”

“You mean your body has to get used to your core again?” Russell had turned to face him more fully now, his expression a mix of curiosity and something else that Danny couldn’t quite place. “When will your powers be back?”

“Not sure.” Danny rubbed his icy nose even though his hands were just as cold. “I’m still really fuzzy, and I could only hold my ghost form for a few seconds. It’ll probably be days before any of my powers are reliable.”

“Do you think we have days?”

He shrugged.

Russell sighed in response and jerked his head towards Danny’s sleeping pod. “Go get in there to warm yourself up. I’m getting cold just looking at you!”

“It won’t help.” Danny tried to keep the whine out of his voice. “The cold comes from inside me, so I’ll just cool down faster if I’m wrapped up. Not even space blankets would warm me up right now.”

His friend rolled his eyes. “Then use some of the heated clothing.”

“But they’re only for emergencies,” Danny insisted. “What if one of you need them and I’ve depleted the charge, or my cold core breaks them? What if trying to warm me up slows down my recovery?”

“Stop making excuses.” Russell rummaged in the first aid compartment and flung a battery-operated vest and socks in his direction. “We have the heating in the EMU suits if there’s that much of a climate emergency, and you’ll be no good to us if you get hypothermia before you adjust.”

Danny caught the floating items once they moved within range. As uncomfortable as he felt, the solution made sense, and was exactly what he would have suggested for anyone else. The issue didn’t lay with the clothing, he mused as he reluctantly pulled on the vest and thumbed its activation button. He just itched, deep within the freezing, tingling mass that was his bruised core. The sensation wasn’t unfamiliar but he couldn’t quite place his finger on what it was trying to tell him, so he was left to simmer in a discomfort that offered no clear relief.

Russell closed the first aid compartment with a decisive click before returning to the rack of food packets attached to velcro strips. He moved his finger down the rows, mouthing numbers as he counted, and then sighed and slid the rack back into its own compartment. “I’ll go get some more snack foods then.”

Danny glanced up from his slow wrestle with the socks. “Aren’t Leah and Chris getting food and water?”

He rolled his eyes. “Do you really trust Leah to bring us anything aside from healthy meals? I swear, she’s just like my mum.”

Danny managed to fake a small chuckle. “Yeah, maybe you’d better go get more brownies and m&ms.”

Russell saluted as he drifted to the door. “Yessir!” he barked, and this time Danny chuckled for real as his friend drifted out of the room and shut the door behind him.

The vest was slowly beginning to warm, and he moved into his sleeping pod and secured himself inside the sleeping bag without closing the door. He told himself that it was more to keep out of the way when the crew returned with supplies that needed to be sorted and stored, but he rubbed his eyes before unlocking the tablet that still sat in its docking station.

He opened his drafts once more, hovering his finger over the single message in the folder before sighing and running his hands through his hair instead.

Maybe he should just start over.

He opened a fresh email, but had barely typed the recipients’ names before the door slid open. It startled him more than it should have, and Danny shivered as a sharp ache pierced his soul. Maybe trying to write this message now wasn’t the best idea after all.

“Back already?” he asked as casually as he could, looking over to see Samuels floating in the doorway.

There was no answer, and Danny tilted his head to get a better viewing angle. Green glinted in the hollow of his throat, and Danny sucked in a breath and held it as he unzipped his sleeping bag. “Hey, Samuels, you alright?”

The older astronaut floated in the open doorway, limbs loose and unmoving as food packets slowly drifted around him.

Danny moved closer. “This isn’t funny, man,” he said, wrapping cold fingers around Samuels’ shoulder with the expectation that he’d move to grab him in a poor attempt at a joke any second.

He didn’t though, and when Danny didn’t hurry to fill his own lungs again after speaking, the stillness in his teammate was glaringly clear.

“Hey,” he tried again, softer this time. Samuels moved with his gentle touch, slowly rotating until Danny could see the dark slash that gaped wide across his neck, lined with tiny glowing crystals. Globules of dark blood broke free with the movement, drifting in a grisly trail that followed Samuels’ motion.

“Help,” Danny croaked airlessly, laying his other hand on Samuels’ cheek. The plea sapped his strength and he breathed in before trying again, at a much louder volume this time. “Commander, help!”

His skin was still warm to the touch, but despite the weakness of Danny’s core in its current state there was still enough of a spark to instantly recognise the fellow dead.

“No,” he breathed, and he didn’t realise that he’d slipped into the tongue of the grave until his lips went numb. He shook his head to dispel the trickle of power, looking around frantically. “Is anybody there?!” The words were in English this time, but the brief dip into his more ghostly side while in human form had left a fine coating of frost over his extremities and fogged his next breath in front of him.

Lowes’ familiar voice called back from beyond the door that closed off the passageway from the food preparation area, and Danny reluctantly pulled back from his dead friend as the far door slid open.

His wrist stung where it had been close to the crystals that were still steadily growing out of Samuels’ slashed throat, and Danny swallowed and pushed back to increase the distance in an effort to prevent his core from any fresh damage.

Lowes gasped and Danny threw up his hands. “The door opened and he was just floating there, I swear!”

She moved closer, and he couldn’t see her expression through the body between them. “Did he say anything?”

He shook his head. “He was already gone. I might have even felt it, but I thought I was just stressed.” He rubbed his chest as she tilted Samuels so that he rotated to face her.

Hook swore from somewhere behind her, but Lowes shushed her without pausing the examination. Danny’s ears were ringing and he wrapped his arms around himself. The heated clothing felt stifling, encompassing his chest and feet with unsettling heat, but his fingers ached with the cold. He tucked his hands into his armpits and curled up until his chin was against his collarbone and the tip of his icy nose brushed the vest’s warm hem, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible.

The tears didn’t come until he took another breath, the warmer external air filling his lungs with such a pronounced ache that he couldn’t quite stop himself from whining.

His core pressed against his insides as it swelled with grief, leaking power into his veins, and Danny sobbed. The thought that he’d failed once again tore at his self-control, and he looked up frantically at the sudden realisation of how much danger the remainder of the crew was still in. It wasn’t new information, but his freshly-active core pushed him to do something, anything, in an effort to save them, and he pawed at his eyes until they were dry enough to see and moved closer to the gathering in the doorway.

He had just enough restraint to prevent himself from grabbing Lowes’ sleeve. As it was… “Please,” he rasped when she spared him a glance, “don’t risk exposing yourselves.”

She looked back at the corpse. “I need to put him with the others,” she said gently, passing a hand over Samuels’ glassy eyes so that they closed.

This time Danny did grasp her sleeve, just for a moment before pulling back and hugging himself again. The vest and socks now not only felt stifling, but sweltering, and he tamped down on frustration as she gave him a cool stare.

“Please,” he whispered again, untethering his ghostly side just enough that his eyes would be glowing. “You have to stay safe.”

She gestured to the body and her eyes were overbright. “I’m only going to move him, alright Danny? Keep yourself in control. We can’t afford to make any mistakes right now. You stay here with Leah, and I’ll find Archie and we’ll be back in a few minutes.”

It was a reasonable request, and her delivery was gentle enough, but it still took all of Danny’s strength to release her.

“Commander,” Hook murmured from beyond the doorway, “I didn’t leave your side. You know that, right?”

“I know,” Lowes responded. “Danny can’t touch the crystals, so it’s not from him.”

Danny fumbled with the vest’s zipper. The irritation of the temperature felt like ants crawling across his nerves, especially when coupled with the stress of the situation. He couldn’t shake the deep sense of betrayal, that they would even consider that he might have had a hand in something like this. Once he’d shucked the garment he went to work on the socks, flinging them off one at a time.

Lowes paused, using her tablet to take a photo before touching Samuels again. Danny watched, hating that he couldn’t help more, as she moved their dead friend through the doorway and down the passage.

Hook floated around her and entered the room.

“Wait,” he said when she moved to close the door.

She stilled, watching him with a dull expression. “What?”

Danny fetched the vacuum and began to clean up the blood. He ached, both physically and on an emotional level, but his stirring core screamed that free floating blood was a danger and had to be dealt with now before someone could inhale it and choke. “Can you grab the food?” he asked as he began to clean, nodding at the packets that had dispersed down the corridor and begun to drift into the living area.

She moved stiffly, and neither of them spoke until Danny turned off the vacuum.

“I don’t understand,” she finally said, closing the compartment where she’d haphazardly stuffed the packets.

He put the vacuum back in its place and took a deep breath, but no explanation came to mind.

She seemed to take that as acknowledgement of his attention. “Where’s the knife?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

She sniffed and wiped her face with a wadded-up tissue. “His throat… Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”

He stiffened at her reminder. “You don’t think…?”

“Well it certainly isn’t natural!” she snapped nasally before pausing to blow her nose.

“He could have noticed the crystals growing and done it himself.” Even as he said it he knew he was wrong, and Hook’s bloodshot glare was enough to silence that train of supposition.

“You know he’d never do that.”

Danny thought back to the paintings that Samuels had been so carefully making for his family, and his soul ached with a fresh wave of grief-fuelled guilt. “Then who did? I never saw Elliott, but Amanda had them grow right out of her.”

“Elliott was the same,” she confirmed. “Chris is the first to have something like that.”

“I don’t know enough about ectoranium to say for certain that the crystals didn’t do that,” he ventured.

She snorted and drew her arms around herself, grasping at the sides of her shirt as though attempting to hold herself in one piece. “I’m not an idiot, Danny. Chris’ throat was cut, and he either did it himself, or someone on this ship decided to do it for him, and with the camera system down we have no way of knowing who.” She drew her arms around herself. “Commander says you can’t touch the crystals, but what if you’re lying? Nobody died until you got here, Danny, so there’s no proof that you’re not getting some twisted revenge or something by killing us all off one by one.”

“I’m not here to kill you!” he snapped. “Leah, please…”

She shook her head. “No, Danny, you don’t get it! You’re already dead! The crystals didn’t grow until you got here, nobody died until then, and people keep dying when they spend time near you! How can you even think of defending yourself?!”

“Because I did die!” he shouted, his vision going blurry as icy rage washed through him. “I know how it feels to take your last breath, breathe it out, and know you’ll never get another one!” Sparks flared along his body and he sucked in a breath, hugging himself as his core flickered with the sheer intensity of the turmoil. “Waking up after something like that isn’t the blessing everyone seems to think it is! I lived through my death and now I have to carry it forever, and every time I remember what it’s like it’s horrific! I would never want someone to face that because of me, understand?!”

She’d backed away as he’d shouted, face pinched in clear horror, but as Danny breathed and the sparks of the memory of the portal blinked out he realised that he wasn’t sure if it was because of what he’d said or if she was afraid of him.

“Is that how we’re all going to end up?” she whispered. “Holding on to existence, haunted by our traumatic deaths?”

Danny closed his eyes and rubbed them with the heels of his palms. “I don’t know,” he choked, his throat tight and his heart aching. “I’m sorry, Leah, but I just don’t know.”

Chapter Text

“I still don’t understand why you don’t think it’s Danny,” Hook snapped. “Chris was helping us, Archie showed up, Chris left to bring back a load of supplies, and then we both saw Archie go to use the toilet. The only person who could possibly be the culprit is Danny!

Danny stayed quiet, tethered to an anchor point and staring at the stars beyond the porthole while they argued. At first he’d defended himself, but after going around in circles for hours he had long since given up trying to convince anyone of his innocence.

“Would you like to talk to the ectoscientists?” Lowes offered yet again, her voice far calmer than Danny thought he would be in her position. “He can’t touch the crystals without getting hurt, Leah, and there aren’t any new marks on his hands consistent with that. I think the experts know what they’re talking about.”

“Why are we even arguing about this?” Russell interjected. “Half the crew is dead, and all you can think about is blaming Danny just because he’s different from you! Ectoranium has barely been studied since it’s not like there are a lot of samples around, so for all we know it could possess a person’s mind or something.”

He made an interesting point, but Danny didn’t think that was possible. He wanted to say so, but instead kept his head down as they continued to bicker. As nice as it was to have the other two on his side, Danny still wondered if Hook didn’t have a point. What if the crystals were growing in an attempt to feed off his core, and his crewmates were simply getting caught in the crossfire? He debated joining the discussion again, but when he’d mentioned this line of self-incriminating thinking half an hour ago Lowes had ordered him to stay quiet and stop making things worse.

He flexed his hands, staring at the stinging green marks that were just as dark as ever.

“Why aren’t you helping?” he whispered, the language of the grave chilling his mouth so much that it made his teeth ache in his current human body. His breath fogged, but nothing else happened.

The continual arguing lulled, and Danny looked up with a frown at the quiet. “Did you say something to me?”

Lowes shook her head without looking up from her tablet, and he untethered himself so he could drift closer when he realised that his teammates’ expressions had turned from frustrated to apprehensive.

“What’s up?” he pressed.

“More pressure sensors,” Lowes explained, turning the tablet so that they could all see the screen. “It looks like the crystals are spreading again, faster this time.”

“What should we do?” Hook breathed, and Danny tried not to feel hurt when she shifted away from him.

“I’m waiting for Capcom to answer, but I think they’re going to tell us to try for the Demeter since it doesn’t seem to have any pressure issues.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Russell snapped. “If the crystals are still growing they’ll have blocked the passageway to the airlock by now, and that’s the area that’s lost the most pressure. There’s no way any of us are guaranteed to get through there safely, especially Danny!”

“Then those of us who can go through get there, so at least some of us survive!” Hook retorted. “We all knew the risks when we agreed to this mission, Archie.”

“Leah!” Russell gasped, and Danny clenched his teeth at the pitying way his friend looked at him.

“Enough,” Lowes interrupted. She kneaded her eyes with the thumb and fingers of one hand before looking at each of them in turn. “The suits are on the other side of the crystals. The pressure there is too low now for any of us to pass through without risking death. Yes, Danny, even you,” she said, holding up her hand when he opened his mouth. “If you pass out again, none of us will be able to save you from suffocation.”

“My core’s coming back,” he said when she paused for breath. “I can keep away from the crystals if I try to phase through the ship and get to the Demeter from outside. I can hold my breath for far longer than that’ll take, and besides, we’re still not sure if I can actually die or not.”

They all stared at him in horror. Hook was the first one to find her voice. “Are you insane?” she hissed. “Untethered and without a suit?!”

“You’re the one who thinks I’m killing everyone,” he snapped, the constant cold surging icier and building behind his eyes and deep within his chest. “I protect people, Leah! I’m here to protect all of you!”

“You’re doing a pretty bad job of it,” she huffed.

He recoiled, his hearing muffled by the singing of a sudden surge of power in his veins. Danny took a breath and the stretch made his diaphragm ache, but he forced himself to reign in his core as frost flowers spread across the window and his teammates’ breaths fogged the air.

The static in his head began to clear and the first sound he registered was Lowes, her tone as icy as his skin as she hissed a reprimand at Hook.

Archie’s hand waved in front of his face and Danny jolted.

“Back with us?” he asked. “You went all glowy for a second there and it was like you’d disassociated or something.”

Danny rubbed his chest. “Sorry.” His voice was raspy and he cleared his throat before trying again. “My core’s still fragile. It’s no excuse, but talking badly about ghosts’ purposes…”

“Yeah, I figured.” Russell sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “So… are all your powers back now?”

Danny shrugged, taking another deliberate deep breath and feeling how it warmed him ever so slightly. “I’m still pretty hurt, and I’m colder than normal, so it’s got me constantly feeling like something’s wrong.”

“Like you’re sensing the crystals kind of wrong, or like you’re still hurt kind of wrong, or like your purpose is threatened?”

Danny frowned. “I’m not sure,” he confessed. “How do you know so much about cores, anyway?”

“What do you mean?” Russell ran a hand over his chin with the rasp of a missed shave. “I’ve asked you plenty of questions since you got here.”

Danny shrugged. “I guess so.” He looked down at his hands again. His fingers were still icy, and the bloodless pale tint of his skin only made the damage from the crystals more pronounced.

He tentatively pressed both palms against his chest, closing his eyes and reaching for his core. Now that Russell mentioned it, the constant cold and unease really were unsettling, and he didn’t want to have to risk flying untethered through space if there was an issue he hadn’t noticed yet.

The cold anxiety wasn’t unfamiliar, but so far he’d just chalked it up to the return of his powers, especially his ice-based energy. Now that he prodded his core though, Danny realised that the icy energy of his cryokinesis didn’t quite feel like this. When it was out of control it would just build and build until he either let it out, Frozen-style, or until he froze over and iced everything around him.

This cold wasn’t building. Instead it stayed a consistent pressure, needling him with discomfort not dissimilar to the painful pins and needles from sitting on one’s own foot for too long. It was familiar to the point of normalcy, and it took him several moments to place the source. He didn’t think it possible in his current freezing state, but when Danny realised what power was flooding him with ice, his blood ran cold.

He swore under his breath and opened his eyes to find everyone looking at him. “What did you say?” Lowes asked.

Danny licked his lips and took a shaky breath. He looked to each of his teammates in turn, trying to discern if there was a glimmer hidden within any of their eyes. Nothing was immediately apparent, and he tried to reach out, to better pinpoint the source of his alarm. He grappled with sheer sensation, but his core was still too bruised to easily manage more than the continual general warning like a distant klaxon that had continued to sound from the moment the first whisper of power had seeped back into his veins.

Lowes moved closer, Hook trailing behind, so that the three of them were gathered around him. “Danny, what’s wrong?” she pressed. “Leah didn’t mean to hurt you. She didn’t know what talk like that does to cores.”

He shook his head, withdrawing when she reached out to touch his arm. “Everybody stay back,” he gasped, parsing through all other possible explanations for what he was feeling and coming up blank. “I… I think it somehow is my fault.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lowes snapped, but he held up a hand.

“Something’s wrong,” he insisted, pressing his hands to his chest and taking a deep breath in. He turned his awareness outwards, straining at his core as he tried to focus on what could be causing this constant internal warning.

When he breathed out the air spilled from his mouth in tendrils of fine blue mist.

“What was that?” Hook demanded.

He ignored her, positioning himself in the middle of the group as he turned to face the source of the ongoing cold. The feeling, he finally realised, of a continually-triggered ghost sense.

“Who are you?” he breathed.

Familiar dark brown eyes sparked, blooming red as Archie’s mouth stretched into a smile that was slightly too wide for his face. “Finally caught me, huh? I guess cutting that last one’s throat was a bit too obvious, even for you. I would never usually be so uncouth, but he saw me, and we couldn’t have that now.”

Danny raised his arms in preparation for a fight. “Who are you?” he hissed again, ignoring the feeling of the two behind startling, probably thanks to the sudden switch to a primal language that Sam had once described as striking the dread of the grave into one’s soul.

“My dear boy, I’m hurt,” Archie drawled, pressing a hand to his heart. When he smiled his teeth flashed white. “Who else would I be?”

Danny shoved an intangible hand right through his friend’s ribcage, curling incorporeal fingers around a vortex of undead power and ripping the ghost out into the open.

“You,” he growled, gripping tighter to the collar of the tattered suit.

Plasmius smiled, his fangs sliding out like a snake’s ready to strike. “Me,” he said simply, and punched Danny in the face.

Chapter Text

The momentum of the blow threw Danny backwards and he slammed into the others before he could correct his trajectory. His ears rang and he gritted his teeth, ignoring the urge to grab his stinging nose after the audible crack of a break from Vlad’s punch. He wiped his eyes instead, but before he could clear his vision the air charged with power around him and then he felt Vlad’s sharp fingers curl in his hair and slam his head against something hard.

Someone yelled. It might have been him but he couldn’t be sure.

His ears rang and his vision swam, and Danny yelped as sharp fingers dug into his scalp and slammed his head against the wall again. He sucked in a breath and blindly grappled for Vlad’s wrist, managing to get enough purchase that he felt his nails scratch soft skin.

Even through the staticky feedback of several blows to the head, he heard Vlad’s growl. It was deep and held an animalistic edge, and the primal sense of danger made his heart hammer in his ringing ears. Danny’s core quailed for a moment at its sheer feral dominance but he forced himself to push back, flaring as much power as he could down his arm and gasping in relief when his fingers that were still digging into Vlad’s wrist went cold with the rush of ectoenergy.

“Get off me!” he grunted, pouring strength out of his hand until Vlad pulled away with a cry.

Danny winced, wiping his eyes in a bid to see clearly. “What are you doing here?!” he snapped, his words slipping back into English as he focused all of his core’s strength on preparing to fight. It was shaky, but it was there, and he could only hope that he’d be able to end this before his core gave out again.

“Oh, whatever do you think I’m doing here?” Vlad snarled.

Danny squinted through the haze of tears even though his screaming head begged for him to shut his eyes for just a moment. His scalp burned where Vlad’s nails had dug into him, and the mere proximity made Danny’s core burn.

His vision cleared just enough for him to properly see the person floating in front of him.

The fine details were difficult to make out, but that didn’t matter when the person before him had been warped so completely by his time away from Earth, and Danny’s gut roiled with sudden nausea. Vlad’s aura haloed him in a sickly green glow, blurring like out-of-focus streetlights. He was wispy at the edges in a way that was reminiscent of a newly-formed ghost, and his typical colour palette was now complemented by bright green accents.

“Wha..” Speaking without breath felt like trying to blow bubbles in toffee, so Danny opted to shake his head instead as he tried to suck in enough air to keep going.

Vlad smirked, and his mouth split too wide. Beyond his teeth stretched more green, rending his cheeks in a nightmarish grin. It was like something out of a horror movie, with sharp green points poking through skin and flesh and lining the inside of Vlad’s mouth like some kind of eldritch monster.

“You always make it far too easy, Daniel.” Danny jerked back as he reached out, but Vlad was faster. His hand brushed his cheek and left behind a trail of fire, and Danny yelped and swatted him away. The tips of Vlad’s gloves had torn off to make space for long green claws that glittered as their movement caught the light.

Danny finally managed to breathe, albeit choppily, as though he had just run halfway across town. “Why are you here?” he demanded again, eyes and throat burning, and he realised with dawning horror that simply being close to Vlad was going to destroy his core just as effectively as the crystals beach in the passageway had done. “You really came all this way, did all this, just because of me?!”

Red eyes burned brighter, sparks shooting from their outer corners. When Vlad opened his mouth, green smoke rolled free. “You’re asking me why I’m here?” he hissed, his body blurring and shifting like water rippled by a breeze. “You’re the son of the man who not only murdered me back in college, but who left me out here to die!”

Danny winced as Vlad drifted closer, his core aching and the sparks in his blood dying down as he tried to scrabble for power that was quickly waning. “Why didn’t you just kill me then?” he gasped, pressing back against the wall and grabbing an anchor point for support. His palms were sweaty and he resisted the urge to wipe them on his shirt. “I didn’t even know you were here! Why not just finish me off?”

Those sharp fingers grazed his throat and Danny whined, sweat beading on his forehead as the oppressive heat wrapped around him and threatened to melt the deepest recesses of his power. He tried to push him away but Vlad easily deflected the blow. “My goal isn’t to kill you, Daniel,” he purred, his oily voice so low that even with Danny’s supernatural hearing he could barely make out the words. Steam rose from wherever Vlad touched, and Danny wilted as his strength waned. “No,” he continued, claws scraping down over Danny’s collarbone in a motion that would have felt scandalously intimate if not for the burning lines that they left in their wake, “my goal is to make you feel so much guilt, so much despair, that you finally become exactly like me.”

Say what you will about the man, but even as his head spun Danny could admit that Vlad had always been the most theatrical of his enemies.

It was familiar in a sharp kind of nostalgia, dredging up the pain not only of fighting and fearing for his family’s lives for years on end, but of something deeper, that Danny had barely dared to consider. The shadow of a future that never came to be passed over him, and he resisted the urge to shudder.

“I’ll never be like you,” he wheezed, if only because it was the thing to say.

Vlad laughed, and the sound was as cruel as it was familiar. “Oh, but my dear boy, aren’t you already on your way to doing exactly that?”

Danny shook his head, trying to kick Vlad off him, but his feet swung right through a spectral tail as insubstantial as smoke. “Not a chance,” he insisted, trying to suck in enough air for this song and dance. He needed to save enough of his core for a battle instead of wasting it on speaking ghost-to-ghost.

A small part of him fluttered with horrific anxiety at the situation, screaming that this was nothing like the fights back at home, but Danny pushed it away in favour of slipping back into the familiar rhythm. Vlad had been such a staple in his life back then, the fights flashy but short. Still, this time felt far more serious, and Danny swallowed against the rising nervousness at facing off against the person who was currently pressing him against the wall and raking sharp fingers down the middle of his chest.

“You’ll cross a line, Daniel,” he purred, stopping right over Danny’s heart. “You’ll do something to upset them, to scare them, and then it’ll be your turn to be disposed of. Isn’t that what already happened, when you were removed from the team?”

Danny coughed weakly, his throat thick with welling ectoplasm that sprayed into the space between them in tiny globules. His lungs felt like they were being crushed, and all of the symptoms that he’d fought so hard to overcome had started to come back in full force. “No,” he rasped, trying again to push Vlad away but only succeeding in pressing his hands against sharp points that felt like brands. They were all over Vlad, sticking out of his shoulders, his chest, his face…

“Think about it, Daniel. If you’d never come out here, if you’d never even met this team, then none of them would have had to face this horror. Can’t you taste how much they resent you? Oh wait, of course you can't. You'd need a working core for that.”

Danny tried to breathe, but blood and ectoplasm flooded his mouth and instead he heaved with nothing to show for it as his core thawed into anguish.

His head throbbed so badly that his vision had gone dim but he still had enough sense to feel Vlad lean so close that his hot breath clouded over Danny’s ear. “And the best part of all of this is that you already know . Deep down, you know they’re happier without you. Why else haven’t you sent that email, hm? Do you really think that great ghost-hating oaf wouldn’t have left you out here to oblivion?”

A sob bubbled through the slickness in his throat and Danny tried once more to push, but then the sharp points that had so teasingly dragged themselves along his front buried themselves in his chest.

Danny screamed, eyes flying open to stare down at the claws of ectoranium that had impaled themselves between his ribs. He choked, wrapping his hands around Vlad’s wrist and trying to shove himself away, but then Vlad’s other hand reached into the small of his back and jammed it full of shards of fire.

“Your father left me in agony! You left me to suffer alone!” Vlad howled, the dead tongue piercing through Danny’s ringing ears. “The broken pieces of that asteroid impaled me and there was nothing I could do! Do you have any idea what it’s like to want to die, and not be able to?!”

With every statement he drove his claws deeper, pressing their bodies together so that the clusters of crystals growing out of Vlad’s body pushed past the flimsy barriers of clothing and skin and sliced into Danny’s flesh.

“I can’t even go back to Earth now,” Vlad shrieked. “I tried, but without the solar radiation of space, my core destabilises until I melt and slip through the Earth and back out here again!”

The news was a fresh layer of horror, but he could barely focus beyond the pain of this fresh assault. Danny grunted, trying not to pass out as his entire body burned, and then…

“Get away from him!” Lowes cried, and Vlad jerked as she threw a sleeping bag over his head. She pulled it taut and yanked, and Danny screeched as the force tugged some of the crystals out of his flesh.

“Hold on, Danny,” Russell ordered, and Danny squeezed when a cool hand grabbed his. More hands closed over his arms, and then Vlad thrashed and Danny screamed again as the claws snapped inside him and Vlad was flung away, spinning into the middle of the room with the smouldering sleeping bag trailing behind him.

Danny gasped, clutching Russell and Hook as they flanked him.

“What do we do?!” Lowes shouted, and it took Danny a moment to realise that she was talking to him.

He coughed up a wad of fluid and sucked in a raspy, rattling breath. “Just keep hitting him!” he managed, trying to blink the encroaching darkness out of his vision. He let go of Hook and held up his hand to summon a blast, but when his screaming core did nothing but throb he looked around frantically. “Use anything!”

Vlad’s flailing stilled and then the cloth around his head dissolved in a burst of green fire. He was grinning like a jack-o-lantern, the interior of his mouth glowing as smoke continued to belch free.

“You,” Russell choked from somewhere off to the side. “You!”

“Come now, was sharing your body with me really that bad?” Vlad spread his hands wide. “It’s only thanks to sampling your memories that I was able to get this far, after all! And it automatically protected you from becoming one of my victims early in the game.”

Hook growled. “This is a game?” She flung an arm wide. “Our friends are dead because of you! Have some respect!”

“You know, I never liked you, Leah.” Vlad tapped his chin before holding up his hand, surrounding Lowes with a red light that suspended her in place just before she could slam her reinforced tablet into his head from behind. “I never really liked any of you. Everyone here is just so irritating.”

He met Danny’s gaze with those burning red eyes that sparked with clear mirth. “What do you say we take this outside?”

Danny barely had time to throw up his arms in protest, bubbles of blood and ectoplasm fanning out in their wake, before Vlad slammed into him and they slipped right through the hull like it didn’t exist.

Danny’s chest felt like a crushing soda can as the air was ripped from his lungs, his delicate insides breaking with a wave of agony so intense that his vision went white. He couldn’t breathe, and he’d felt his ribs crack and his organs tear as all air had been forced out instantaneously with the violence of the sudden pressure change. His brain scrambled to catch up but for a moment all he knew was that he hurt, and it felt like he was dying all over again.

Hands that had been looped around his arms suddenly dug into his sides and latched onto his clothing, and Danny’s gut lurched as he realised that Hook was still holding on to him.

He hooked his fingers into her shirt, the silence of the vacuum the most horrific thing he’d ever heard as she jerked and writhed with what he recognised were the first creeping moments of death.

He opened his eyes and saw nothing as his eyeballs burned like fire for just a moment before the soothing ectoplasm in his system replaced the evaporated fluid, leaving his vision tinged garishly green.

Vlad was floating in front of them, smiling that infuriating way he always had when he’d gained the upper hand in a fight. The crystals pushing through his skin glowed brighter in the absence of the artificial light inside, and as Danny scrambled to desperately reach for his core to save his teammate who was dying in his arms, glowing green veins began to spread and pulse beneath Vlad’s blue-grey skin.

The shards within Danny pulsed in response, and if he’d had breath he would have screamed in a ghostly wail as they swelled within him and sent their sharp points straight through his core.

The first thing he noticed when he finally rose out of the sea of anguish that had engulfed him was Vlad’s echoing laughter, audible even in a vacuum as he spoke not with his voice but with his core.

Danny opened and shut his mouth as he tried to muster up even a single spark of power, but the intrusion into his deepest point was all he could feel. The rest of him was so cold that he’d gone numb, and he looked down to check that Hook was still attached to his arm.

She’d gone limp, her body only still tethered because she’d managed to snag one of her Velcro strips against the edge of a tear in his shirt. Her eyes were closed, and she would have looked serene with the way unconsciousness smoothed out the creases in her face if blood hadn’t been clinging to her lips.

Even now, he could sense her life ebbing away, and though he knew it was futile he was washed with the urge to get her inside where she’d be safe.

Vlad was still laughing and Danny growled. The sound rolled from the deepest recesses of his core, spilling into the range of the spectral tongue and making itself clear despite the limitations of physics. If he had to describe it, he’d say that the ghostly sound was more of an impression than a noise, reaching beyond the sense of hearing and into firmly incorporeal territory. Energy seeped back into his core, but it was painful, and held a dangerous sickening power that pulsed through him with the warning of damage and change beyond repair.

He ignored the warning, reaching for the power even though it sent an unnameable darkness through his soul and shushed his obsession to help and protect, washing him instead with thoughts of revenge and the first flicker of true hatred for the person who had done this. “I’ll kill you,” he hissed, shifting as though he could shield Hook from Vlad’s view. As though that would help at all. His words, spoken in the tongue of the dead, used no sound or breath and yet echoed around them.

Vlad spread his arms wide, waving them as though conducting music, and the spikes within Danny continued to grow with each new flourish. Danny did scream this time, an unholy screech forcing its way out of him that would have rippled the air if there had been any.

He couldn’t cough, but he spasmed nonetheless, and tried to fight down the panic at the feeling that he was maybe too far gone to fix things this time. Vlad had paused his movements and now drifted several feet away, watching with hunger clear in his soulless red eyes.

“There,” he said, as though Danny were simply a child who had finally eaten his vegetables, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? Just a little bit more and you’ll have all the power you could want. You’ll never have to go back to that wretched planet where they all hate you anyway, and neither of us will be alone anymore.”

Danny shook his head and reached for his words, uncertain if he should feel relief or dread when they came easier than before despite the deep damage. “I hate you,” he managed to growl, and his skin turned colder still. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore, and he knew it wasn’t only due to the chill of the vacuum.

Something fluttered beside him, and as Danny glanced down in horror Hook’s soul slipped free and dissolved into a hereafter beyond his reach.

“Leah,” he whispered, but even before he brushed a hand against her throat for a pulse he knew she was gone. He hugged her tighter, drawing her in so that he could wrap both arms around her body and bury his face in her shoulder for a long moment.

“I didn’t think she liked you much anyway.”

Danny stiffened and glared at Vlad. “You! What’s the point of such senseless death? Why are you doing this?!”

He sighed. “I thought I’d made that clear, Daniel. Even if you never speak to me again, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be such a great part of what you’ve become that you’ll never escape me again, and by keeping you out here forever, I’ll finally have achieved something. Of course, you’ve always been far too altruistic to understand a core such as mine, so I needed to change that as well. It matters not if you hate me, my dear boy, because either way you’ll be consumed by me, and I’ll finally have my revenge on the lot of you.”

Pierced with a pain that wasn’t entirely physical, Danny realised that he was beginning to understand after all. He reached within, pushing for power and drawing on whatever he could find even though it felt as though he was clawing at his insides. He released Hook and green flames rose along his skin, licking at his fingertips and making the crystals sticking from his skin flash.

He grappled with flight and launched forward, swinging wide and managing to completely miss Vlad. “I’ll destroy you,”  he howled, and this time he meant it.

The action hurt almost too much to bear, but Danny gritted his teeth and reached deeper still. The crystals in his body continued to splinter and grow, needling through him as they spread, and as Danny turned and slammed a glowing fist into Vlad’s stupid smirk he felt a delicate thread of something unnameable begin to pull taut in the depths of his core.

Vlad growled and grabbed Danny’s wrist, pink fire lighting up his palm and skimming its burning touch up his arm.

Things devolved into brutality from there. They scratched at eyes, tore out hair, dislocated joints and broke bones. Through it all Danny’s anger towards the man continued to build, setting his blood alight and overwhelming any other thought or drive with the sheer burning need to destroy everything about the person who was making him hurt so much.

They each traded several more blows, neither gaining the upper hand but neither one willing to back down either. Danny’s lip split only to freeze and boil all at once. Vlad’s nose broke. Both gouged again at each other’s eyes and throats, howling like beasts as they fought in an abyss of nothing.

Danny eventually grabbed Vlad’s shoulder and pulled him close, grunting with the effort and driving his knee into his groin. Vlad turned intangible at the last moment, and as he tried to slip away Danny shot his own intangible hand out and wrapped it around the older man’s core.

Vlad stiffened and tried to wrench away, screaming when Danny squeezed tighter. “Daniel!” he screamed, and it was with a desperation that was the closest thing to true surrender that he had ever seen in him.

He almost faltered, but the continued spinning momentum of their fight rotated Hook’s limp body back into his field of vision and any empathy he might have felt evaporated, leaving behind nothing but hatred. He tightened his grip, his own core burning and stretching with the sheer emotion of it all as though it would snap. Slowly, deliberately, Danny channelled what dregs of power he could still summon to press ice into the very fabric of Vlad’s power. His hand burned with the furnace of a fire core, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. The pain would fade soon enough.

Vlad keened in a long, shrill peal, and Danny winced. He paused for just a moment, the thought of what he was going to do dragging against his deepest obsession to help and protect, but then he caught another glimpse of Hook floating lifeless over Vlad’s shoulder and something within his core finally cracked.

Danny looked blankly right into Vlad’s burning, terrified eyes, and decided then and there to follow this new primal rage and need for revenge. He narrowed his eyes, smirked, and tightened the fist around Vlad’s core to crush him once and for all.

Chapter Text

Even though his heart naturally worked slowly, he still recognised when it skipped a beat. The next thing he noticed was a chill that whispered behind him, raising the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

Danny blinked into Vlad’s unseeing eyes before looking down. His hand was no longer inside Vlad’s chest. Instead, there was now a gap between them of about a foot. The fires encasing his adversary had stilled, frozen in place, and Danny’s had gone out entirely.

Something was around his neck, and as he realised what had happened, he raised a trembling hand to brush the cool metal gear that he now wore like a medal. He whirled, flinching at the pain of using his core, and his chest seized as his body involuntarily tried to sob in response.

Clockwork brushed a hand over his singed hair. “Daniel.”

He jerked back, grasping the gear like a lifeline. His mouth worked for a long moment, a distracted part of him wondering if the entire universe had been stopped for this visit, and his thoughts raced as he tried to grapple with the relief that warred with a betrayal so great that he felt like he was going to break. “Why?” he finally choked.

Clockwork turned his head and Danny followed his gaze, looking at the husk of what felt like the source of all of Danny’s pain. The stillness of the timestop couldn’t quite mask the unnatural dullness of his aura, and horror crept into Danny’s heart as he realised that he was the one who had done this to Vlad. He had… he had hurt him, and even though he hadn’t fully crushed his core before time had stopped, he’d clearly caused significant damage. Damage that might never heal. The hatred in his soul flared for a moment, and he felt a spark of pride, but then his basic primal need to help the people around him brought self-loathing to the forefront again. He grappled with this dichotomy, trying to make sense of where the balance lay, and realised with a wave of fear that he was teetering on the edge of complete contradiction.

He looked down at his hands, the dark green veins so prolific now that they even drowned out his death scar. “What’s happening to me?” he whispered.

Clockwork took Danny’s hands in his. His gloves felt nice against the heat of the fire burning from within, and Danny watched as the simple touch seemed to reverse some of the damage. “You have reached a crossroads,” he finally said.

Danny frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Clockwork released him and waved his staff. The clock at its tip dragged through the void as though it were water, sending a smear of iridescent disturbance that logically shouldn’t have been visible, and Danny got the sense that he was witnessing the corporeality of the concept of time. In the past he would have been more fascinated, and perhaps even asked questions, but now he felt so hollow that any scientific interest had no chance of manifesting.

Images shimmered in the resulting slick, providing glimpses of green, of Danny screaming as ectoplasm dripped from his eyes and crystals forced themselves up his throat and out of his mouth, of his remaining teammates dying by his own hand.

He turned away, rubbing his arms and wincing when his hands nudged the crystals that had begun to grow through his skin. “Why are you showing me this? Why didn’t you stop things before they even happened? I called for you so many times! ”

“Daniel,” he said, and Danny’s name had never sounded more soft, more pitying, more like it would melt under the slightest breath of air, “tragedy is inevitable. The reason I didn’t intervene is because you need to learn that.”

Danny shook his head, thoughts momentarily shorting out as he tried to process what he’d just heard. His heart grew heavy as horror sank beneath his broken ribs. “What do you mean?”

Clockwork sighed with the sound of a single distant chime of a far away grandfather clock. “People can’t live forever, Daniel, no matter how much you want them to. You can’t stop the inevitability of mortality, and you can’t keep rearranging the timeline when things don’t go your way. Do you truly think you understand how small changes ripple through the grand scheme of things, especially for someone as influential as yourself?”

Danny tried to sniff, but the lack of air in the vacuum meant that it did nothing to fight against the ice plugging his nose. “So what, you just let me give up everything so I could come out here and… and learn another one of your lessons?! My friends are dead! Do you even know what that means anymore?!”

The old ghost’s cloak drifted as though they were underwater, haloing his form in soft purple. “You need to learn this, or the future will be one of dread for everyone. The Observants wanted me to destroy you, both when I helped you last time, and again now. This is my last chance to stop your destruction, for if you are destroyed, the results have a much higher chance of misery for many realms.”

Danny shook his head, fisting his hands in his hair with a sob. Tears were gathering across his eyes, slowly blocking his vision as they coalesced into larger blobs of fluid sticking to his face, and he brushed them away. They spun into the emptiness, the tiny glowing drops quickly blending into the backdrop of distant stars through the blackness. “Why couldn’t you have just told me?” he choked. “Why did you let them die? Is their pain worth nothing more than a lesson to me? Is mine?!”

Clockwork turned his head and Danny followed, staring at the time-frozen Vlad. His face was battered from their fight, made all the more grotesque by a particularly large patch of noxious green crystals that had begun to rupture through the skin on the left side. They had grown more pronounced throughout the battle, and Danny realised that their spread had been fuelled by their host’s sheer fury.

“Do you want this to be your future?”

His blood went cold. “I’m not like him,” he whispered, and his throat ached as he felt sharp points press against the skin from within.

“No, you’re not,” Clockwork agreed, turning his staff between his hands in a motion that seemed far too casual for the situation, “and now you’ll never be.”

Danny drifted closer. “But… you can fix it now, right? Take me back in time so this never happened?”

Those dark red eyes turned to him, and the finality of their gaze settled across Danny’s shoulders like a mantle.

“No,” he breathed when the ancient ghost remained silent, and something hollow clawed at his insides. “Clockwork, please, what have I done to deserve this? What have they done?! They were innocent!”

“Death is inevitable for all but a few.” Clockwork floated towards Vlad, prodding him gently with the butt of his staff so that his still form spun in place. “You have great power, Daniel. Far greater than most others you will encounter, and you’re only going to grow. You and I have reached a threshold, and I am not permitted to fix things for you anymore. I would not have been permitted to come here now, either, except to collect Vladimir and help you weed this corruption out of your core before you destroy us all. There were not many timelines that didn't result in your descent into hatred and your transformation into something that you’ve tried so hard to prevent. It was either I meet you here to arrest this fate, or in a timeline where Plasmius managed to return to Earth with this corruption and laid waste to everything you hold dear.

“Either way, your friends cannot be saved.”

Danny shook his head. “Then take me back,” he pleaded. “Send me back to before the asteroid. I’ll stop Dad from leaving Vlad in space, and this’ll never happen!”

Clockwork’s sigh chimed heavy and slow. “Oh, Daniel,” he murmured, “how can I make you see that if you try to save everyone, you’ll never find peace? Cores aren’t meant to be stressed like that. Sooner or later,” he gestured to Vlad again, “you’ll break.”

Danny’s core clenched and it took him a moment to realise that a sudden high-pitched whining was coming from himself. “Please,” he tried to beg, but when he opened his mouth the core-deep whine overrode everything else, and he curled in on himself and wailed.

His anguish spilled out with the spectral sound, the tension that had threatened to snap him in half loosening just a tiny bit as he finally allowed himself to open up to the grief and begin to mourn.

He didn’t know how long it took for him to regain composure, but there probably wasn’t any way to measure it in a timestop anyway. All Danny knew was that he returned to himself in drips and drabs, his core slowly drawing back from its suffocating hopeless grief. The pressure of emotion on his chest eased and he gasped despite the lack of air, spasming from the reflex before wiping fruitlessly at ectoplasm tears that when dislodged floated aimlessly around his head like a tiny asteroid field.

Clockwork was waiting for him, still using the butt of his staff correcting Vlad’s spin so that he didn’t drift too far.

Danny rubbed the remaining tears out of his eyes and turned away, looking out into the void. He drifted there, running his fingers across the hard edges of the gear medallion slung around his neck. A strange sense of calm stillness crept over him, and as he stared at the soft lights of suns beyond his reach he found himself wondering if it would really be that bad to just disappear. Surely the pain of depressurisation would eventually dull, and he could drift and explore, seeing things that nobody else ever had or likely ever would. He could leave it all behind…

Deep down, he knew that wasn’t possible. There was a brief flash of envy, that he had to keep feeling like this while everyone else eventually reached their rest, but even in his grief Danny was cognizant enough to remind himself that those kinds of thoughts didn’t help anyone, least of all himself.

Eventually the eddies of strong emotion subsided further, and Danny turned back to face the waiting ghost.

He wrapped his hand around the gear and lifted it over his head, holding it out. “You can start time again,” he whispered, his supernatural voice raspy after the wail. “I won’t…” He swallowed reflexively as his throat tightened, gesturing to Vlad. The ribbon attached to the gear fluttered weightlessly with the movement and the crystals poking through Danny’s skin glittered in the combined light from Clockwork’s glow and the distant sun. “Lesson learned. I won’t be like that. I’ll… I’ll fix my core and never trouble you again. So please…” His words cracked and he cleared his throat. “Please, just take him and go.”

Clockwork opened his mouth but Danny closed his eyes and dropped the gear, and when he looked again a heartbeat later both Clockwork and Vlad were gone, leaving no evidence that they had ever been floating there to begin with.

Chapter Text

He wanted nothing more than to drift numbly in emptiness, but Danny could barely sense the flickering lives of his remaining crew as it was, and he knew if he drifted further that he risked losing them altogether. So, he nudged his battered, aching, fading core, and urged himself to move.

Hook’s body still floated nearby, so he headed for her first. As angry as he was with Clockwork right now, he still felt a spark of gratitude that he’d stopped things before her body had slipped away into the void and been forever lost. He’d come here to bring them all home, and he wasn’t going to leave her behind, no matter how suspicious she had been of him.

Danny grit his teeth as his chest spasmed with a voiceless, airless sob. He folded his hand around her limp fingers and turned them both towards the ship. He was so tired and drained, and hurt down to every muscle and sinew, but as he searched for the flash of a metallic hull in the distance he felt detached, almost as if his movements were being directed by an unseen puppeteer.

Now that time had started once more, the ship was moving away from him at an incredible rate. He reached into the recesses of his exhausted core and forced himself to fly faster, pushing to close the distance.

It took more effort than he’d expected to catch up, and longer than he’d thought it would, but eventually Danny phased into the Demeter. He spared a moment to tether Hook to an anchor point before eyeing the compartment that held his sleeping bag. He felt numb, and when he tried to prod at that numbness a harsh anger pricked his blood and threatened to break him down entirely. Its intensity was frightening, and he didn’t know how he was going to overcome such a raw, powerful emotion. Instead of dwelling on it right now, Danny shook himself and drifted to the console.

He sent a short message to Lowes. In the Demeter. Leah and Vlad are both gone. I’m sorry.

He moved to send it but stopped short, his finger hovering for a moment before he added one more line. I understand if you don’t want to see me again. I’ll stay in here until you need me.

His flesh creaked as he moved, and his eyes watered for the first time since reentering the air-filled, pressurised craft. Danny he winced as the dull throbbing of his collapsed lungs and broken ribs began to morph into a sharper, more acute pain now that he was in an environment where his healing could start to take effect. The crystals still jutted from his skin but they weren’t growing anymore, and he somehow knew that what happened from now on was entirely up to him. He just… he just couldn’t face it at the moment. Too many things had happened far too quickly, and the thought of pulling the needle-sharp slivers from his core one tiny piece at a time was far too overwhelming to handle at the moment.

He hit send on the message and fetched his sleeping bag, moving like an old man as he wrapped himself inside and anchored it on the opposite wall from Hook. Her glassy eyes watched blankly so he turned away. The movement made him moan in discomfort, but the sound was weak and raspy, his throat unable to support anything greater yet. His eyes itched, perhaps with tears, and he barely resisted the urge to rub them. He wanted to scream but he beat it back down, trying not to let the hatred overwhelm him again. He bit his lip and closed his eyes as grief and anger both fought to break through the emptiness.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered airlessly in the tongue of the dead, his core still doing the work where his ruined body failed. “I’m… I’m so sorry.”

There was no answer, no sudden breath from the body an arm’s length away and no whisper from beyond the grave, so Danny curled up and stopped fighting.

He thought about each person that he’d lost or left behind. His last moments with each of them had been under the impression that a simple time shift would fix what had gone wrong. Before, it hadn’t been goodbye — just a painful recognition that Danny had somehow messed up, and he’d have to make it right.

Now, though? Now, everything had changed, and he was never going to see any of them again.

He’d thought that he’d understood his core, but despite everything that he’d felt and endured over time, the soft keen that built until it drowned out all other noise embodied a grief deeper than he’d ever felt. It went on and on, regardless of a lack of breath or even functioning lungs, and the universe faded away until Danny felt nothing but the anguish of his failed obsession that threatened to drag him to depths that he’d heretofore been unaware were even possible.

It was the cry of his very soul, and once he’d started, there was no way to stop. Slowly but surely, Danny sank into the abyss of his own anguish, languishing in the mourning of a broken obsession that only the dead can understand, and everything else faded into nothing.

He lurched into muddled consciousness at the sound of the door hissing open, and he squinted with burning eyes at the two figures dressed in bulky EMU suits that were squeezing into the tiny space.

There was really nobody else it could be, so he made a show of wrapping his arms around himself and turning away from them.

The door closed, and Danny shut his still-healing eyes and listened to them moving around for a minute. It didn’t take long for the sound of breathing to indicate that they’d removed their helmets, and then a hand brushed his shoulder.

He wanted to tell them to get lost, but the trouble it would cause wasn’t worth it when he was still so weary. Instead he stayed quiet, keeping his arms folded around his chest in clear indication that he was awake instead of allowing them to float weightlessly as though asleep.

Lowes sighed, and the hand released his shoulder.

He couldn’t stay quiet any longer. Even though his throat still stung, he managed to whisper a hoarse question. He should have been grateful to be able to speak instead of relying on writing to communicate, but the wake of his despair left him feeling washed-out and empty. “What do you two want?” he managed to rasp. “You should’ve stayed back there instead of risking the depressurised areas.”

Russell snorted. “And leave you here alone here, especially with Leah? No way.”

Danny sniffed, and it made his nose hurt too. He wondered if there was any part of him that wasn’t injured in some way and kept his eyes closed so he didn’t have to see their faces. “How do you even know it’s me? I could be Vlad, trying to trick you again.”

“You’re not though,” Russell insisted.

Danny shook his head. “I could be.”

“Shut up, Danny,” he snapped. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you? Don’t you know how long-term possession affects someone? I shared a body with that creep for weeks. Do you really think I wouldn’t be able to sense him when our souls were housed together for so long?”

Danny risked glaring at his friend, but the lights still seared his damaged eyes so it probably came across as a disgruntled squint. “How can you still trust me, after everything? I don’t even trust myself anymore!”

“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Lowes interjected before he could keep spiralling. “If Vlad really was possessing you, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be wallowing this much. He’d probably try to disguise himself by imitating your whole hero schtick, right?”

Danny redirected his squint-glare at her, but she didn’t back down.

“Your ghost crying was loud enough that we heard it all the way on the other side of the Persephone. I don’t think that’s a sound anyone can fake.”

Right. The casual way she mentioned his core-deep keening chafed, but he ignored the discomfort in favour of grudging acceptance that she was right.

Russell nudged him. “Seriously, man. I’d know if he was nearby. When he took me over it was the worst thing! I could speak and feel and move, but it’s like everything was controlled by the desires of Vlad instead of me. The worst moments were when he took over completely, and I was just a passenger in my own body. Once he started doing that, it was like there was nothing between us anymore, and whenever he would trap me somewhere and leave my body to go attack you guys or grow more crystals I could still feel that he was nearby, like an awful cold current or something.”

Danny closed his eyes again in an attempt to relieve the stinging. “Oh,” he breathed. His lungs ached, and he wondered how long it would take for them to heal. Guilt at the thought of healing while his teammates were dead pressed in beneath his ribs and he grimaced, curling tighter and biting back a groan.

“Do you need medical attention?” Lowes asked.

He shook his head minutely. “I don’t think there’s much you can do. We were out there unprotected.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should at least pull those crystals out of you?” Russell suggested. “We can help get the ones on your back if you want.”

Danny made no move to comply. “What about you guys?” he whispered, trying to save what little voice he seemed to have. Even so, his throat and chest felt like they were going to give out completely at any moment. “Are you hurt? And what about depressurisation?”

“We’re fine,” Russell insisted. “My soul feels all slimy, but I’m okay.”

“I’ll get you to help with the pressure loss when you’re up to it,” Lowes said. “For now, we’ll put Leah with the others, but I need to know you’re taking care of yourself. Will you need stitches when you pull out those crystals?”

He tried to shrug and made a noncommittal noise. “‘M too tired.”

A small part of him was surprised that he felt tired despite the horror of the entire situation, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to care. He wondered if he was in shock, and then would have laughed at himself if he had the capacity to do so. Of course he was in shock.

She sighed. “Fine. Rest while we move Leah, and then we’ll deal with your crystals.”

He didn’t respond, and drifted into a blur of fuzzy pain as they moved around him.

It felt like only moments later that he heard the door through the haze, followed by a hand on his arm. “Sorry, Danny,” Russell said, “it’s time for you to wake up.”

He moaned in protest but slowly rubbed his eyes for the first time, trying to make out anything through the glare. They felt like they were filled with glass powder, and he pulled away with a hiss and squinted at his friend. “How long was I out?” he tried to ask, but barely managed to whisper again. He felt as though he couldn’t draw more than the shallowest of breaths, and wondered if his destroyed lungs were filling with inflammation and fluid.

Russell offered him a water pouch, unclipping the straw and pressing it to Danny’s lips when he couldn’t move without wincing. “About an hour,” he said as he took slow sips, the water equal parts blessedly refreshing and ridiculously painful to swallow. “If you can keep this down you can have some soup later.”

“Let’s get some of those crystals out first though,” Lowes said from somewhere beyond Danny’s blurry line of sight.

He motioned for Russell to take the straw away for now. “Are you sure?” he breathed.

“The med team and the ectoscientists both agree,” she insisted. “You need those out to start healing properly.”

He wanted to argue, to say that he’d do it himself when he was feeling better, but the bitter memory of Clockwork’s warning rose to the forefront of his mind. “Alright,” he finally conceded, closing his eyes again and using touch to begin to peel away the sleeping bag.

As they positioned themselves he realised that the most uncomfortable thing about all of this wasn’t the anticipation of further pain. Rather, it was the simple act of admitting that he needed help that chafed so strongly.

He couldn’t recall ever asking for anyone to help him in such a personal way before.

Danny swallowed his pride and reached for his core, pondering the points where crystals were stabbing such a delicate depth. There was still potential there, potential to give the crystals root and allow them to consume him. He could become something new, something stronger than he currently was, and then he wouldn't ever need help again.

He could keep them all safe.

Warm hands ran down his wrist, coaxing his fingers to uncurl and relax to give access to the crystals growing in the creases of a palm.

He wondered if his parents had advocated for the removal, or if they’d prefer to study whatever he would become if he were to give the crystals root within himself.

Something metallic clinked against one of the protrusions from his hand, the contact stinging like nudging a thorn with tweezers. Danny tensed and hissed a curse as the pain reverberated between all of the growths down his arm and shot directly to his core.

He took a tense breath, held it for a moment, and then released it in a rush that loosened the tension within.

Unbidden, words from a locker room across the galaxy slid through his thoughts. He… He’d tried, right? Even if he couldn’t save everyone, at least he’d done his best.

And really, that was all that anyone could ever ask.

His taut core settled, the new resolve to just do his best regardless of everyone else rising to the forefront of his needs. The acceptance of the shift adjusted his obsession, satisfying his strained purpose, and Danny could finally start to believe that he had truly done all he could to succeed in this mission.

There was nothing else he could have possibly done, so now, he had to let go.

The resulting relaxation with that admission was enough for the crystals to slip free from where they’d begun to take root, and Danny shuddered as the first spike pulled out of his hand with a relieved sigh from Lowes.

“That’s it,” she said, and her fingers briefly feathered through his sweat-soaked hair. “We’ll get you through this and then you can rest as long as you want, okay?”

He nodded and allowed them to move his hand to better reach the next one. “Sounds good,” he murmured.

He let them work, feeling both far too numb and far too sad to process much else beyond stinging followed by relief as each shard was removed from his flesh.

He hoped it wouldn’t take too long. As distantly grateful as he was for the first aid, he really did want nothing more than to sleep until he felt strong enough to face the challenges ahead. And he knew now that when he did, he’d be able to look at himself in the light of a new day and accept all that he had become, without needing to justify his right to exist by how perfectly he saved everyone around him.

His best was more than enough.

For the first time since he had stepped into that dark portal all those years ago, the pressure of self-doubt and loathing lifted, just enough for the warm rays of the beginnings of self-acceptance to shine through like the first rays of sunlight after a long, cold night.

Chapter Text

One of the many things Danny appreciated about being on Mars was the ability to sit down. The pull of gravity was still almost a novelty after so long being in space, and the weightlessness of using his still-healing core was far more noticeable, making the physiotherapy exercises easier to monitor without constantly checking data.

Still, the opportunity to relax in a chair or on a bed while he read his emails wasn’t something that he’d realised he’d missed until he tried it. There was just something satisfying about relieving the pressure of a hard day’s work by relaxing on something soft.

He usually wouldn’t have focused so much on such simple pleasures, but the process of recreating himself had been brutal, and part of his psychological recovery involved living in the moment and feeling gratitude for the things he liked. They were concept that should have been easy for him to grasp, but Danny had deprived himself in order to serve the people around him for so long that it had become second nature. He wasn’t sure when the drive had become toxic to his wellbeing, but he knew he hadn’t been able to experience real contentment for a long time. Possibly since he’d first had his accident, but he couldn’t be sure.

The important thing now was that he was getting better. Sometimes, when Lowes or Russell were too tired or feeling down, he’d still feel the urge to make everything better for them, no matter what it took. He was learning to tamp it down though, and slowly, the deep drive for perfection in his support of the people around him had mellowed into a far softer need to just do his best and accept that that was okay.

Some days were better than others, and he still felt bad that he’d needed so much psychological support when he was supposed to be stable for a mission like this, but Lowes had reminded all of them over and over again that the traumas they’d faced weren’t the typical fare for astronauts. It was okay to struggle sometimes, and that was when they’d have each other’s backs.

So, Danny relaxed at the table, working his way through emails during some free time. Russell was doing the same, and Lowes had gone to have a nap.

They’d been on Mars for long enough now that the Persephone II was only a few weeks away. Danny scrolled through messages from the crew’s members, typing out a few replies and sending some photos that he’d taken of the blue-and-grey Martian sunrise. The first time he’d seen it he’d marvelled at the colour switch. It felt somehow poetic, with red sunrises back on the blue planet and blue here on the red. Now, the horizon was slowly becoming familiar to him, its ridges and valleys feeling more like home every day. He loved it here, and though loving something when he knew he’d have to leave it was difficult for his attachment-driven core, he comforted himself with the knowledge that nothing could stay in his life forever. It was becoming easier to accept, and he hoped that one day he’d be able to finally be rid of the underlying separation anxiety that had always been such a fundamental part of his identity as Phantom.

Still, he never thought he’d be so grateful at the prospect of returning to Earth. As nice as it was to spend time on Mars — something that had been thrown into question for a while there before they’d ruled that a slingshot back to Earth was far too dangerous with the damaged vessels — he’d had to process a lot while only receiving specialised healthcare and support through emails and the occasional photo.

Most days were difficult in one way or another. The majority of research had been cut from their mission due to the reduction of able bodies, and goals had been reduced further since Danny was still recovering from his extensive injuries. He was often left inside while the others went and collected samples and monitored equipment, working on less strenuous analysis tasks from the safety of the table and trying not to think too much.

Still, he’d had plenty of time to start working through what had happened. He didn’t want to email a therapist too much before getting home, but even just taking the time to write things out was supposed to help, so he’d given it a try. And it really did help. Despite the fresh grief of everything that had transpired and the constant pondering of potential what-ifs, the relief that he hadn’t lost every single person was beginning to be enough for now.

He’d make this work. Vlad was gone, they’d finally reached Mars, someone was coming to bring them home again, and then… well, he’d face that when he got to it. Danny knew that pursuing this recreation of himself like this was going to be difficult, and working through both chronic anxiety and the guilt and grief of this trip was going to have to take a ton of therapy, but there was something to work for in amongst all that pain.

Whether or not he saved everyone, whether or not he ever went to space again, or if his father would have left him out here alone, or if his family even loved him anymore, his best was more than enough, and that made all the difference in the universe.

He scrolled down his emails, checking for any more messages that needed immediate response, and his breath caught when he saw the message near the end of the unread list.

He must have made a sound, because Russell looked up from his own tablet across the table. “You alright?”

Danny nodded more to placate any concern than actually convey wellbeing and opened the email.

It wasn’t long, but it didn’t need to be. He read it several times, stopping only when the words grew blurry as his eyes burned with tears.

He put the tablet down and sniffed, wiping his sleeve across his face.

“Danny?”

He swallowed, not trusting himself to speak with how tight his throat had become, and nudged the tablet across the small table. Even months later, his lungs generally struggled under the pressure of too much tension, and his body ached now with the strain of holding back tears, so Danny closed his eyes and tilted back in his seat, face turned up to the ceiling. A couple of errant tears slipped down his temples and disappeared into his hair and he sniffed again before taking a slow, steady breath.

His friend swore softly. “Are you telling me that none of you have sent anything this entire time?!”

Danny sniffed again and risked a nod, but the pressure squeezed tighter and a sob broke free.

Russell swore a second time, and Danny leaned forward once again and buried his face in his hands as more tears squeezed out.

A chair scraped, and then Russell’s hand rested on Danny’s shoulder. “You Fentons are hopeless,” he said, but his tone was gentle.

Danny broke.

Russell stayed there, squeezing his shoulder and simply being there while he cried. It had become a familiar routine, teammates standing in solidarity when one of them broke down, and Danny felt no pressure to stop before he was ready.

“Seriously,” he continued once the tears finally slowed as though there had been no interruption, “this has gotta be some of the worst miscommunication I’ve ever seen. Family gatherings must be wild!”

Danny managed a small chuckle, thick with congestion but not mirthless. “You know, I haven’t had a single Thanksgiving without drama, and Christmas is even worse.”

He snorted. “Y’all need therapy. Like, serious therapy. No wonder your sister’s a psych.”

Danny laughed again, a bit stronger this time. Russell squeezed his shoulder once more before passing the tablet back and returning to his own seat. “For the record, if you ever invite me, don’t be offended if I say no.”

“Would you really want to miss out on the possessed turkey?”

Russell stared at him in horror. “No. Nope. I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” He plopped into his chair and reclaimed his own tablet. “I don’t know about that, and you’re never going to mention it again.”

Danny smirked. “Whatever you say, man.”

Russell grumbled good-naturedly and Danny looked back at his own tablet, reading the message again.

Danny,

We’re sorry it’s taken so long to write. We wanted to let you reach out first, in case you didn’t want to talk to us yet. Sorry about the video call.

We just wanted to say that we’re so proud of you and hope that you’re doing well. When you get home, know that we’re ready to talk whenever you are. We promise to listen.

We hope you know that we love you, Sweetie.

Love from your parents.

Kind Regards,

Madeline Fenton, PhD

Sent from my iPhone

The tablet trembled in his grip and he took a deliberate gulp of air before opening a reply.

I love you guys too, he typed. Sorry for taking so long to message you.

Mars is even more spectacular than I’d imagined…

He wrote for the better part of an hour, choosing his words with care and focusing only on the good for now.

Something loosened in the depths of his soul as he attached his best selfie with the blue Martian sunrise behind him, his glowing white hair drifting around his head like a halo as he floated freely above the rust-red dirt. Mars’ moons were just visible beyond, and it was one of the most wonderful pictures he thought he would ever take, even if he had all of eternity to do it. The sudden relief of finally finishing a message home was unexpected, and a small dark knot that had been festering deep within the essence of his being since the first moment that the portal had fried his every molecule melted away.

He felt freer than he ever had, and the anxiety that had plagued the background of every thought and interaction in the decades since his accident evaporated with the final acceptance that it didn’t matter that he was dead. He didn’t need to be perfect, or powerful, or hide himself away anymore.

He could just be Danny, and that was enough.

He hit send, leaned back in his chair again, and sighed.

It was good to be alive.