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Danny Fenton walked over to the kitchen sink and exhaled slowly. His fingers softly clutched at the stainless steel edge as he shook the hair out of his cold blue eyes and looked out of the window in front of him.
It was the first day in far too long that the seventeen year old’s mind and body were even remotely relaxed. The house was unusually quiet, but for once, this was a good thing; the eldest Fentons were away at a convention, and his sister was working hard away in the peak of her college career. It might have surprised any of Danny’s casual acquaintances to see the seemingly inseparable trinity lacking the goth and the cybergeek, but they, too, were busy.
And Danny appreciated the silence.
The boy watched the dying leaves from the ephemeral trees drift in the cool autumn breeze; they spun in invisible hurricanes, pushed by an unstoppable force that did nothing but softly caress the faces of larger beings. The wind had come to fascinate him ever since he gained the ability to take to the skies. It was almost like an independent being, alive in a complex way. It did as it wished, pushed as hard or as soft as it wanted, and changed outcomes in the world around it; but it just as quickly could be tamed by something as simple as a wall. Sometimes Danny liked to fly up above the clouds to where the wind was the strongest, and then turn intangible; it allowed him to feel the natural course of events without interfering with it. But he could never have explained feelings like this to his earthly friends, his need to just watch.
After one or two passings of street walkers, the hands let go of the cool metal surface and the body they connected to turned from the portal to the outside. The steps were inhumanely quiet, but the figure they belonged to moved nonthreateningly. One hand grasped the knob of the front door but the mind was only semi present as the body went for the stroll.
Danny’s ghost form was convenient; it was perfect for keeping up the superhero charade. In a fight, it was nearly impossible to keep the concentration required to remain invisible and, were his appearance static, everything would have been that much harder. But Danny had always preferred his original body, especially once he had mastered his powers in his human form. He would often disappear from the visible spectrum in public places just to see what people were like when they didn’t think they were being watched. And he was doing so at this time.
The almost human boy walked into the downtown at the height of traffic, as it would have been on any other late Friday afternoon. But even other watchers would not have seen him. The sun was just beginning to caress the tops of the uptown apartment buildings, turning the clouds into calm orange and maroon flames. The clouds in turn were reflected in the windows, and the whole western sky was ablaze, violently contrasting with the deep indigos that swallowed the eastern horizon.
These strolls had become an almost unconscious act in Danny’s mind. He sat just on top of this one central wall as he had been on every otherwise empty afternoon for the last few years and would watch. A scene began to unfold in the present that distantly echoed one from the way back when Danny had only recently become semi-removed from the world of the living, and hadn’t understood very many things at all. After all, he was only fourteen then.
There had been this boy, about fifteen years old at the time. Danny had been practicing holding his invisibility for long periods of time when he watched the boy pick pocketing and stealing his way all through the downtown. The ghost shadowed the living teenager to confirm the previous, and then continued until the boy was removed from the crowd. Danny hid, turned human (as at the time he wasn’t skilled enough to be invisible and control it well without being completely made of ectoplasm), then confronted the thief. The Fenton made a respectable effort, telling the boy off about his poor life choices, when the Thief (who had been cornered at this point, escape was not an option) explained that it was the only way he was able to provide for himself, living on the streets. Danny was a little crestfallen, and embarrassed at having incorrectly assumed that the situation was not as immediately rectifiable as he had previously thought. But it did little to deter him.
Danny took charge of the situation. The ends did not justify the means. He slowly and unconsciously crept into the boy’s already small bubble of breathing space, saying there had to be a way that both took care of the boy and kept his fingers out of what belonged to others. A home, that’s what the boy needed. Foster care seemed like a great idea.
So Danny got the boy into the foster system after a long argument and more than one threat.
And in less than a year, he read in the paper that the boy killed himself. Abusive foster parents, newbies that went a little too far. The Thief probably had an undiagnosed problem or two, something that the parents wrote off as behavior that needed to be fixed with force.
That was the beginning of Danny’s inward turn.
On the outside, Danny remained “the same”, so no one ever really noticed. But the high school years of most children are often very transformative, so the stagnancy was a red flag in disguise. He still cracked the witty quips and puns that had characterized his middle school self, and on more than one occasion his friends and family had used the unchanging Danny Fenton as the rock in their coursing lives they had so desperately needed. But inside, he was far too old for his age. Cynical, wary.
In an uncommon turn of events, a boy’s own death had taken a greater toll on himself than on his friends and family in the years following. But I suppose that happens when no one else thinks you are dead.
Danny wondered about this often. About his own mortality, potential lack thereof. He sometimes felt he was simultaneously the entirety of reality, the literal entity of life and death, while simultaneously not existing at all…
The ghost boy was suddenly jolted back to the present. His invisibility flicked briefly as his anxiety told him to look around, find the danger!
…But nothing was there.
No ghost sense.
No noticeable change in the crowd.
Yet… something wasn’t right.
Now this wasn’t the first time that he had had feelings like this. But this was the first time that the feeling wasn’t accompanied by anything at all. Sometimes there would be a chorus of barking dogs, followed by the inevitable chorus of “SHUT UP” by their owners; sometimes babies would start crying in series, or all of the watchers would start to look around a bit more nervously; and usually the source was revealed within a few minutes.
But not now. Suddenly! Not a god damned thing.
The boy decided it was time to continue his stroll. He jumped off the wall and landed in a perfect crouch, slowly moving his head and eyes to look forward like some sort of action movie; it was a bit over dramatic, to be sure. But it made him feel really cool and even overly cynical teenagers are still teenagers.
The stores were starting to give him the heebie-jeebies and he’d been doing nothing but lounging all day anyways so Danny decided to book it through the crowd.
Literally. It wasn’t as though states of matter were any hindrance to him anymore.
Danny ran, halfheartedly trying to see if he could dodge people at the slightly higher than are natural speeds he was achieving; and at least here, if he messed up, his victims felt nothing more than a cold chill on a fall evening.
His old worn out converse took him through the town, past the park, past Sam’s mansion, past Tucker’s humble house. The cold air had no effect on him anymore, and the foot traffic had died out completely, so Danny shifted back into the visible and solid spectrums to let the breeze lightly whip at his face, hair and clothes. His eyes glowed green from the raw power that he let course through his veins, and anyone who saw him wouldn’t have recognized the quiet kid from school in his natural habitat: absolute freedom.
Each foot in front of the other sent a rush of ecstasy rushing through his system, reminding him what it felt like to be alive while the ever present inner death reminded him of the forever stillness that came intermittently. Danny upped the ante, running faster and into more desolate parts of the town as the moon started to rise and most of the population was either at home or in one of the few weekend hotspots in the center of the city. It was possible that he was trying to run from the earlier disturbance, which still sat fresh at the back of his mind. Maybe he was running to something. He didn’t know. But running felt good and so he went.
The adjacent city Elmerton wasn’t too far, and the was no earthly nightlife that could have been dangerous to the phantom. Nowadays Amity Park had cultivated quite a few amateur ghost hunters besides the Destructive Duo that were the elder Fentons and the slightly-more-(accidentally)-destructive single that was the younger, so Danny decided to slightly loosen the tightly knotted ropes that held his other half in check. Not the ghost half, but his real half. The side he never showed anyone because that was not what they needed him to be.
The Phantom ran down the side of the highway in his almost human body. Sometimes he existed and sometimes he didn’t as the hum of his power naturally ebbed and flowed.
But like any living person, he tired out. The ecstasy dissipated and the converse came to a gradual stop as they wandered into the area’s industrial sector. His green eyes let him see the empty streets clearly in the darkness that pervaded fabric of the warehouses and chain link, barbed wire fences. Still forward Danny went, passing the boatyard that took goods down the Mississippi, until he came to a public recreational area that led straight to the water’s edge.
Again, silence reigned supreme. Only the rushing water broke the quiet of the night. Danny’s soft footsteps crushed across the dirt bank and he mentally returned to a relatively “normal” state of being. The moon shone bright over the river, allowing the boy to release the ectoplasm from his irises. Part of him wanted to go ghost and float across the river as he had in the past, dragging his fingers through the very top of the slow moving current… but this time, he felt slightly put off by the idea. So he sat and watched the stars, finding the constellations he knew by heart, until the moon had begun its descent and the boy decided it was time to head home.
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The weekend passed like that. Danny was alone for the most part; his parents were going to be at that convention for at least a week and a half, presenting their latest finds on the supernatural realm. He met Tucker at the mall when his beret’ed friend needed to purchase new parts for the computer he was working on that Sunday, and then they hit up the arcade for a few hours before parting ways again. Sam would occasionally text Danny throughout the weekend, complaining about how boring family events are or something or other. They’d talk for a few before something else required Sam’s attention and Danny resumed his relatively uneventful weekend.
School came as it always had: too quickly. Danny met his two best friends in front of their respective houses and together they walked to school, deepening the rut they had begun work on their freshman year. Their talk was empty, yet lighthearted. Danny noticed this because that is what he did; as someone who tended to be overlooked himself, he had developed an acute knack for noticing what others did not. He idly wondered if it was even such a bad thing, this emptiness. It caused no pain, and it filled the silence. But something small in him was put off by the small talk. He ignored it.
The trio bounded up the concrete steps, dodging similar groups of friends who lazily lounged on the brick railings and leaned on the longstanding almost-mint lockers. It didn’t take long for the shrill whine of the bell to cut through most social interactions and urge all students to their homerooms, breaking Danny and Tucker away from Sam. Tucker remarked something about the cruel mistress that was the surname, and Danny nodded as he watched Sam’s black figure saunter away into the starving crowd.
Tucker sat in front of his paler friend while roll was called and announcements were made, making suggestive glances at any popular girl unfortunate enough to make eye contact with him. His smile held steady with every rejection, even though his shoulders would sag momentarily with each eye roll. Danny watched this, though he saw less of what was actually occurring in front of him than he saw the memory of every single homeroom that had already occurred, every other eye roll, the one long smile. Routine could be comforting when life feels anything but.
Right before lunch, Danny’s body shivered with the familiar goosebump inducing chill that had become deeply ingrained in the boy’s life. Ask him now, and Danny could assume he raised his hand; he probably asked to leave the room; the ghost was caught—it was only a low level spectre with very little form to speak of after all— so it was easy to deduce that the fight had occurred just as all the others had. But the literal firsthand account would just take up valuable mental space, and so it dissipated into the fog. He promptly returned to class, went to lunch, saw his friends, and went to finish out the rest of his classes for that day.
It was in Lancer’s class, of all the places, that the Feeling struck him again.
This time it crept up on him like a feral cat, digging its claws into his heart like icicle daggers. Anxiety and adrenaline coursed through his veins, threatening to tear him apart. His breathing was silent, yet rapid and shaky, accompanying the equally unnatural heart rate. He looked around once to make sure no one was aware of his sudden plight— because, as a half human hybrid, secrecy tended to be a number one concern. The actual personal worry came once he realized that everyone else was either too caught up in the lecture, or, more likely, not paying attention to anything in their surroundings.
The room around him seemed to bend and breathe in ways that plaster never should. Danny’s mind raced: his ghost sense hadn’t gone off, and no one else seemed to notice anything. But still the air rippled as though it were alive. Sounds seemed muffled. Danny’s arm lifted his hand and he began to inspect it. It shook with the beat of his heart, his fingers twitching as do the fingers of most other living people. But the movement seemed pronounced in his mind, the joints not quite straight enough to be natural. His wrist turned and he observed his palm, noticed the way his skin frayed at the edges of his calluses, took in the swirls in the ridges that created the microscopic volar topography. His tendons shifted with each phalangeal twitch.
And Danny felt the Distance.
The bell rang.
Everything became solid again. Inanimate.
The shuffling and voices around him became unbearably loud as the poor English teacher yelled in vain at the disillusioned students— “Read through chapter six!…”— he faded in the commotion like the force of the outgoing tide—”…next week is the… don’t forget to…. hey, knock it off.”
Danny felt as though he could feel nothing but the overwhelming pinpricks of the chaos around him as everyone left the school for more interesting things.
So he shoved his notebook in his backpack and ran.
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Each limb tingled uncomfortably as Danny fell through space, down the sidewalk and into the city. His feet pounded across the pavement like a hammer striking an anvil. But the blacksmith was young and new at his craft, striking the iron with poor rhythm and inconsistent strength. He found himself on a primarily residential city block, surrounded by high rise apartment complexes. By the time he finally slowed down to lean on one of the decaying brick walls, a half an hour had passed since the incident.
It all started to seem silly in the ghost boy’s mind. His physical reaction to the feeling had been so strong that someone would have noticed. But no one did, leading him to question if he remembered events correctly. It was unlikely that such things had occurred. He had probably imagined it all.
After all, his life was finally settling down. Ghosts were usually worth no more than a few minutes of his time; the more serious ones were even a cinch with his two friends by his side. Not to mention the local ghost hunting career track had begun to pick up, so all of Amity was no longer completely Danny’s responsibility. He was sleeping regularly, though not much, and the quality was poor… but it had to be better than the frequent sleepless nights from his previous two years. There were no major incidents. His family’s career was picking up. Jazz was thriving in college. His friends were all getting ready to begin their adult lives, looking into colleges and trying to decide what was coming next. Each day progressed as the previous had.
Nothing was new. So nothing should be different. There was no cause, and when there was a distinct lack of proof besides Danny’s own fallible memory, it was logical to conclude that it didn’t happen at all.
So why did he run?
Danny shoved his hands into his pockets and slid down the wall into a sitting position. With his elbows resting on his knees, he ran both of his hands through his hair and inhaled deeply, looking up into the heavens with those piercing blue eyes and letting out a long sigh. He felt exhausted, in more ways than one.