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“What are you thinking?” he asks as the night draws deeper into its slumber.
He is quiet in response, rubbing blades of grass between his fingers as they half slide inside his flesh, half slide back out.
“Dan,” he says again, and Dan twitches, one fang catching against the side of his lip.
“What?” he hisses back out, pulling his hand from the forest floor and letting it lose transparency, letting it settle back into flesh.
“What are you thinking about?” Dmitri-”Call-Me-Mitya” Masters asks, poking the campfire with a stick he has slowly, carefully, shorn of bark with a sharp stone and a dogged determination.
“I’m thinking this entire thing is pointless and I should fuck off,” he bites out, snagging a jumping worm and tossing it into the flames. It crackles, pop pop pop , and he knows without knowing that it is a terrestrial invertebrate of the phylum Annelida, the little rings. This one is invasive. They can regenerate to some degree, he knows, but this one will not. This one he has cut off where it matters most, knows the liquids will boil out, the erratic thrashing of its disturbance cut short by the flames.
It would have died by winter anyway, he justifies as he tosses a fistful of leaf litter in for good measure, watches the smoke pour.
“What, camping?” Mitya asks, sinking back in his makeshift chair. He was crafty in the way most of his siblings were not, a talent for building and creating and tying things together into something new that if Dan didn’t know better, he’d say was inherited from the best parts of their parents.
Daniel’s parents, that is. Not Dan’s. Not Mitya’s.
Jack and Maddie were not theirs. The thinking was just a holdover, sometimes, of when Dan was as much Danny as Vlad. When Dan was once Daniel.
“Not the camping,” Dan says when Mitya makes a soft prompting noise. He shoves another green stick in, something in him thrilling at the smoke curling up, water boiling off. “All this bullshit.”
“You still think Danny should have left you in the thermos,” Mitya says after a moment.
“No I fucking don’t,” he hisses, fangs bared, and Mitya is entirely unbothered. “No I fucking don’t. I never thought that. I don’t think that.”
“But you don’t see a place for yourself in this world,” he says, calm, easy.
There isn’t.
Dan’s world is gone , it is gone , and his point, his reason for being is fucking gone. Jack and Maddie live, Jazz and Tucker and Samantha still live, Danny and Vlad still live, but not his. Amity Park still stands, the clones have come back, the wheel still turns, and none of it is his.
Everything he has done has come undone, has been erased, and Dan is still here.
Dan is still here.
(He remembers the human remains of Vladimir Mykolavych Masters sitting in that chair, sitting in that room, so fragile and old and a ghost— ha —of himself. Dan remembers so very many things).
“You wouldn’t fucking know anything of it,” is what he says instead of all of that. “You don’t know anything—”
“ I don’t know anything?” Mitya asks, one dark eyebrow raised.
“You don’t,” he snarls, teeth snapping and shimmering in the pale light of the moon, the warm heat of the flames of the campfire in the woods of Wisconsin.
“That’s funny,” says Mitya, soft and careful as he rolls the words around his mouth and he is the quietest of them all, of the clones, speaking only when he has something to say. “That is funny indeed, when I was never meant to exist. That is the— mhm, the point of me. Danny and Ellie are just not very good at all at accepting impossibilities.”
“So you’re a fucking clone, so fucking what?” he snaps, sharp and biting and that is all he knows how to do anymore no matter how much they try to tame him, to fix him, to make him something not worth culling. “You don’t fucking get it. ”
“Then tell me,” Mitya says, and he could.
Dan could. Dan could howl from the rooftops that they are all gone , that they are gone, that even though they have been gone for almost as long as he can remember, that he can barely even remember what his Sam looked like, can barely remember the exact shade of Tucker’s glasses in third grade, can barely remember when Maddie looked like when she held his hand and showed him all the pretty, pretty chemicals pouring through glass, six years old and so many more to go. And maybe Dan can go to Amity Park, can find Jazz and Sam and Tucker and Maddie and Jack and Paulina and Dash and Star and Valerie and Lancer and everyone, everyone, everyone, but they won’t be his.
His are dead, by his hand or by circumstance or by his actions tip-toeing into dominos falling until all he had was the wreckage of his obsession and the boiling hatred of Plasmius married with the endless, raging grief of Phantom until it was all one.
Dan can never go back. That is his punishment, his stone to bear. He can look but he cannot touch, fruit darting from his starving fingers, clear waters swimming from his parching mouth. He is Tantalus in hell, the ghost of the worst parts of the men he was stolen from (that he stole from), stuck in a time that is not his own, that he was never destined to win. It was inevitable.
“I can’t,” Dan says, flames swimming in his eyes.
“Maybe not yet,” Mitya admits. “But you will, sometime.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Isn’t that the funny part?” Mitya asks, watching as the campfire smoke curls up. There is no smell of worms. The wind catches the smoke and it blots out the stars, just for a moment. “We spend so much time trying to make other people understand that we don’t even know what it is we want, in the end.”
“I don’t want this.”
“I thought you swore you’d never be a memory?” Mitya says, shifting to crane his head back to look at him, black hair streaked with white, blue eyes flashing red just for a moment, just for a breath. In the firelight, his skin looks almost the blue it is as a ghost.
“I did.”
“And that’s all you would be, if you got what you said you wanted,” he says, weighing his stick in his hand before he pokes the wood again, watching it collapse.
“You don’t fucking know shit,” he bites out. “You were a pile of fucking goo until a few years ago. Don’t talk like you know anything.”
“I would say it gives me a certain distance,” he points out, quiet and calm as he adds new pieces of wood to the dying flames.
“I agreed to go camping—”
“Reluctantly,” Mitya agrees as if he hadn’t been threatened and cajoled and bribed into this by Dean and Dana, as if Dan and Mitya weren’t somehow left awake and alone by the two idiots passing out after wearing themselves exhausted exploring.
“—not to be psychoanalyzed by a brat.”
“So you want to sit and watch the fire until it dies?”
He grinds his teeth and throws another fistful of damp leaves into the flames.
“Is it so hard to say what you actually want, Danny?” he asks, quieter.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Danny?”
“That’s not my fucking name.”
“It used to be,” he says, softer, quieter. “Didn’t it?”
“I was a child,” Dan says after a longer pause, teeth sharp in his lips. “And now I’m not. I’m hardly all Danny anyway.”
“Just mostly,” he says, and it is what none of them like to admit.
“Shut the fuck up,” Dan replies into the crackling of the fire.
Mitya does, humming quietly as he watches the stars.