Phic Phight: stamina, stamina (i used to be holding the camera)
Prompt from @q-gorgeous: Dash finds out Danny is Phantom. What does he do to help Danny? Does Danny know Dash knows?
@currentlylurking @phicphight
You couldn’t pay Dash to admit this out loud, but he’s kind of regretting coming to this party.
He doesn’t even know the kid who’s throwing it; some freshie whose dad works with Kwan’s dad anxious to score popularity points. The house is the same kind of nice as any A-listers, including his own. Fifteen enormous rooms with three people to rattle around them on a normal day, a swimming pool with a waterfall, all of the furniture artfully arranged like it’s been freshly plucked from a Pier 1 showroom. The kitchen’s got two ovens and a separate stove for some goddamn reason. No way either of this freshie’s parents are actually utilizing the space-age kitchen the way it’s designed to be. Daddy freshie works 80 hours a week and, from what gossip Kwan overheard his own dad spilling on a conference call, spends most weekends in the bed of a woman ten years younger than his wife. Mommy freshie is platinum blonde with heavy laugh lines at odds with how her forehead refuses to move and acrylic talons done in a French manicure. She laughs too loudly at the kind of chaos that only thirty drunk teenagers can wreck as she plays indulgent barkeep. Mommy freshie reeks of tequila and desperation. Dash’s own mom would flay this woman alive and be thanked for even bothering.
The music pumping out of the giant speakers (looming in a living room that doesn’t look like it’s ever been sat in) is loud enough to resonate in Dash’s chest, warring with his own heartbeat. THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD. There are words to the song, rattled off too quickly for him to pick out more than a handful. He has no context for the wrathful tone of the musician. The N-word is one he picks up a half dozen times in quick succession. There’s not one black kid at this party that he’s seen yet.
Mommy freshie might have been an actual bartender in her former life; whatever she’s serving out with a wink and a nod and a “Better you have fun here instead of somewhere dangerous!” is strong. She’d handed him a paper cup brimming with something ink-dark, nearly no ice to water it down with. He’d downed it in three grimacing gulps alongside Kwan and Toby, the new wide receiver, and in no time at all his easy buzz had slam dunked into a total drunken topor. Damn, that took him out at the knees.
Dash parks his ass in a corner until the room stops spinning, attempting small talk with a redhead chick wearing fake eyelashes and glittery lipgloss. They have to shout to make themselves heard. She’s got a laugh like a roughly squeezed dog toy, but she’s actually pretty funny. Eventually she wanders off to go dance with her friend, and it occurs to Dash that he doesn’t know where Kwan went.
He gets up, abruptly realizes he’s still very fucking toasted when he tilts right into a bookshelf, takes a minute to laugh at himself. What a fucking waste of time. He could be home right now, working on The Plan. His big ticket out of the most haunted town in America. His one shot at not ending up a washed-up joke with a wife he’ll hate, a couple of kids he’ll regret, and a back surgery all under his belt long before he’s 30.
The last thing in the world he wants to be when he grows up is his father.
He meanders from room to room, shying away from shadowed corners where limbs and tongues are tangled with total disregard of the leering and whooping. Kwan’s no voyeur. That’s half the reason they’re still friends, actual friends, despite the hell high school turned out to be. He shoulders past some kid he vaguely recognizes from geometry class sophomore year—the nose ring’s new—keeping an eye out for any glimpse of familiarity. Somehow the number of people here has doubled since he and Kwan got here. Mommy freshie’s vanished from the kitchen. Something glass bursts in a wet and brittle burst of noise barely heard over the pounding bass. Someone swears. Onlookers laugh.
No sign of Kwan on the first floor. There was a moment of hope out in the backyard, but the guy who climbs out of the pool shaking his head like a dog is only Kwan-adjacent in body type. His face is all wrong, a stranger. Definitely older than most of the people here. Hopefully he’s just a neighbor or something. Somebody normal.
Upstairs is a bust too, and he nearly busts his ass going up and down the stairs. Dash has to swallow a bizarre jolt of envy when he sees the freshie’s bedroom. It’s fucking massive, easily twice the size of his own, and the bed’s off in nook that must be part of the circular tower that marks the entrance to this wanna-be castle. There’s a flat screen hung on the wall bigger than the one in his own living room, an aquarium screensaver at odds with the framed posters of bikini girls draped over loudly painted muscle cars.
Dash feels out of his element, and vaguely wanting something to busy his hands with. He takes another loop through the kitchen, failing to find Kwan there but managing to arrive in time to find another senior doling out shots of something they call a blue suicide, never mind that it’s a garish shade of purple. It tastes like drain cleaner and numbs his whole mouth. He’s going to regret everything when he spends all of Saturday huddled miserably over the toilet, but—
—fuck it, he thinks sourly, grabbing another shot amid a loud chorus of whooping. Absolutely fuck it. What’s it even matter. He’s young and stupid and full of wasted potential, and for all he knows a ghost could kill him tomorrow. So. Fuck it.
Three guys are huddled around the kitchen sink, doing something horrible with a bottle of Everclear and a watermelon. He already knows that combination only ever ends in vomit. He cradles his second horrible shot carefully in both hands, skirting his way past two giggling girls. The music pounds and shrieks; somebody’s put on some bullshit from that DDR game everybody loved a couple years back, and now the whole house is brimming over with mean and incredulous laughter.
Even as the first shot starts to freshen up the tingling numbness of his hands he accepts that he needs a break from the crowd or he’s gonna flip his lid. He eyes a trio of doors in the hallway perpendicular to the main entrance. One of them’s gotta be the garage, right? He doubts too many people would be in there.
He fumbles his drink to one hand, grimacing when it spills a little, and tries his luck.
“Voilà,” he mutters to himself, when it’s not a coat rack he opens up on but the garage. He totters down the two steps, slamming the door behind him harder than he meant to. Whatever. Not like anybody’d hear it over the shitty music.
There aren’t any cars in here now, though there’re stains on the concrete suggesting two park here regularly. There are a bunch of storage shelves, cardboard boxes labeled in bubbly black letters. CHRISTMAS, a bunch yell at him. HALLOWEEN, half as many holler. The world’s smallest Pomeranian barks at him from the lap of none other than Danny fucking Fenton.
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