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Dry Firing: Chapter 1

Dry Firing: The dangerous act of a water or steam boiler igniting its flame after water reserves have depleted. Dry firing can result in irreparable damage to the body of the boiler. The low-water safety shut off should not be overridden.

TW: blood, violence, sickness, emetophobia

...

“We’re a lot like whales holding our breath,” Vlad said, with a hint of someone who had researched a lot of whale facts, and wanted to explain more things about whales, if only Danny would ask. “We can do it, and we do it quite well. However it’s a physiological strain on our human bodies to be suspended in death for too long. We will transform back if we try to hold our ghost forms past our limits.”

This was, Danny decided, a stupid concept. This wasn’t really “death” he was holding his body in, surely, because he was not truly dead in ghost form. His heart beat. His lungs breathed. His blood pumped, which he was certain of, as something of an expert on the topic of bleeding from ghost wounds. And he hated, deeply, the way Vlad explained it all with the ‘well duh’ unspoken and threaded into the tone of his voice.

“So how do I take a… a big ol’ breath and get back into ghost form?”

“You don’t,” Vlad said with the annoyance of someone whose whale metaphor was on shaky ground. “Not immediately. There’s a cooldown period.”

“How long?”

“Only you will know that. For me, if I spend more than one third of my time in ghost form, then the decision to stay in ghost form is rather wrested from my control. I don’t advise pushing against it, but I doubt you’d win anyway.”

There was a panicked adrenaline discomfort welling up inside Danny that wanted to lash back, to argue. And for once it had nothing to do with hating Vlad Masters in all his smug megalomania.

This was from the raw and quickly-beating center of Danny’s heart, because he was here white knuckling the pain of deep gashes—clumsy stitching—trying to understand why he’d transformed back mid-fight. Why had his Phantom-form given up on him? And what was the solution to fix it all, so that it never happened again?

“There is no solution, Daniel. No more than there is a solution to a whale needing air,” Vlad added, glad to rekindle his whale metaphor. “Spend less time in ghost form. ‘Breathe’ more as human. Don’t try to become the first person to invent immunity to drowning, or death.”

Easy for you to say, Danny wanted to bite back, viciously. And instead he said, “Ghosts don’t attack on a convenient schedule for me.” He leaned forward. “They’ve been attacking a lot more in fact. I need to deal with that.”

“Then be smarter choosing your battles,” Vlad offered.

…

The world was losing its shine.

Danny cut back on everything. No more flights of whimsy around the park. No more convenience activations of his powers. He locked and unlocked his locker now after a long streak of just phasing his hand through it. He took all stairs. He rode the school bus. He kept himself visible under probing bully stares.

He had a budget he needed to mind. A currency of power he needed to meter out with absolute scrutiny. A limit that threatened to break him down and put him back in the moment he relived every time his eyes closed. Depowered, suddenly. Fenton, suddenly. Under the assault of a creature that would rip his human flesh to shreds.

He tried to be mindful. But it happened twice more.

It came first as a feeling of blacking out. It was like air not reaching his lungs and blood not reaching his brain. It was the sapping of strength like he’d been plunged in ice water, and it was the dead weight of his body, and then the forced tearing of himself—his human self—back to the surface, like the desperate rattling inhale of a drowned man pulled above the surface.

And the sharpness of ghost teeth felt so much more fatal when ripping into human skin that he could not re-sheathe in his powers.

And “skin” and “teeth” were much how Danny escaped both times. Barely. By luck. The shaking would not leave his body for hours.

The third time it happened, it took him by complete surprise.

He should not have been at his limit yet. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe he had not truly been keeping track. Maybe he’d been borrowing too much from the previous days. Maybe he’d been treating midnight like too much of an absolute reset, self-soothing that he was stocked back up to his full time limit each morning. And now, late afternoon, his mishandling had caught up to him. His loans were coming due. His power was spent. He needed to breathe.

And he did. Ripped back to Fenton at a clumsy moment that let his opponent of long jagged black shadows and sharp talons slam Danny down through the rest of his fall. And when consciousness swam back into his eyes, Danny was pinned by the razor-sharpness of fingers like blades. And he was human. And weak. And so very killable. And maybe he’d die more quickly than he ever imagined, if the jack-hammer horror of his slamming heart meant he’d bleed out fast through the gash this thing pulled its hand back for and then raked through his torso.

Danny screamed when his flesh tore. Danny shoved. Danny could do nothing else, corporeal and human under the thing that pinned him and investigated him with intrigue.

Its fingers now worked with intent, with animal fascination, chirps and clicks pulsing from the ghost’s unreal mouth as it teased a finger into the slash it had opened in Danny’s stomach. It pierced. It dug. Danny screamed.

And, perhaps in vengeance for disturbing its curious probing with his screaming, the thing slashed through Danny with all three of its claws.

Danny felt wet before he felt pain. The three fresh gashes started at collar bone and exited at hip. Intersecting lanes with the already fresh and bleeding gouge through his midsection. Danny writhed, bloody wet and tainted coppery. And some part deep in the back of his brain understood that this horror, this thrashing, this screaming tearing raw in his throat were not even conscious actions. This was a death struggle. This was an instinct so entirely primal, preserved from ancestors who’d been hunted for food or sport. It shut down all higher thinking.

His brain moved at a pace faster than thoughts and reasoning. He twisted with injurious motions, the kind that would rip sockets from joint and strain tendons and break bones, possibly, if he could find the leverage. And maybe only because he was slick wet and oily with blood, he could find no such leverage. The floor and wall and ghost arm he clawed at slipped wet through his fingers. Heaves of body mingled with heaves of breath as he shoved without traction and split his nails on the floor and choked on mucus and saw what had to be his last sight as the thing reared one blade-sharp and clawed hand back for a final death blow.

That primal instinct at the stem of Danny’s brain that knew only pain and fear and no higher thought activated its last measure. It denied drowning. It seized death. It split those phantom rings around his body and tore itself back into grim pallor and dead bones and—green eyes, white hair, blood soaking anew into bodycon black spandex—Danny phased himself free of the thing’s grasp the moment before its claws found his flesh.

Danny lunged. He threw himself across the bloody wet hallway floor. He fell into a heavy tangle of limbs, heavier than a ghost should be. But he held his form. He held it, as the ghost screamed, and Danny righted himself quickly, and scooted back fearfully, and unleashed ecto-blasts aimlessly. He was hyperventilating, and the only true thought of human cognition that went through his head was thermos.

His hand slapped down heavy on the thermos. He was trembling too much to even grab it properly. His gloved hands were perhaps too soaked-through with blood to unscrew its cap, and he was simply lucky the cap was already unscrewed from earlier. Danny felt a wet relief over that fact as he got enough control of his thumb to press the switch of the thermos tractor beam.

A blue-white vacuum of light erupted from the thermos. The thing of black shadows and sharp claws shrieked, and shielded itself, and was caught in its beam, pulled in, and collapsed into nothing within the guts of the thermos.

And then it was quiet.

Danny pulled in a wet, shuddering breath. It exhaled in a choked trill, a bubbling half-laugh that hinged on hysteria. Danny dug his hands into his hair and grabbed his roots. He curled in as much as the pain would let him. His eyes were open and everything was bright with the off-green glow that pulsed from them—“everything” being the sight of his knees and calves as he buried his head in his knees, and wrapped his arms around his legs, and hugged himself.

He'd done it. He’d done it. He’d overcome Vlad’s stupid little limit. He’d proven himself better, or more determined, or more desperate, maybe, than Vlad ever was. But whatever the explanation, this was good. It meant he could bring out his ghost form past his limit. And that was good. Good good good good good good because there was no other way. Because being turned human mid-fight was the worst thing he’d ever experienced, and he could not live with that as an inevitability.

He'd tell Sam and Tucker what a crazy cool victory this was. He’d tell them Vlad was senile and stupid and off his cheese-gourd—a liar, probably, he was probably lying when he said there was no pushing past this ghost limit. Danny was living proof, as he flexed and unflexed his ghost hands grabbing his ghost legs and held his form that saved his life. This was a crazy cool victory for Danny, and everyone would be so excited for him.

Danny thought this to himself, and because there was no one left in this Friday-evening vacant basement hallway of Casper High, Danny gave himself five uninterrupted minutes to sob at the top of his lungs, because maybe the shaking would stop just a little if he allowed himself that much.

…

Danny loved Sam, and he loved her skeptical nature, but he wasn’t sure he could say either of those things with confidence right now as she pursed her swollen lips and surveyed him with eyes that felt like daggers.

“You shouldn’t be in ghost form right now,” she said, with a head far too cool for someone who’d almost just died.

Tucker was back on his feet too. Danny hoped he hadn’t dropped him too hard. Danny hoped Tucker didn’t fall on his bad knee—which was another thing that was Danny’s fault, during the very first time Danny had been forcibly de-transformed mid-fight.

Instead Tucker brushed dirt from his cargo pants and pulled a twig from his hair—beret lost elsewhere to the wind. And he glanced to Sam for cues before matching her skeptical glare against Danny.

“That’s a funny way to say thank you,” Danny said, and it was supposed to sound funny. But he barely got the words out. His voice cracked midway. His heart rate hadn’t come down enough to meet the smile he was trying to wear on his face. He wasn’t over the shock of watching them both fall.

“Thank you. Also, get out of ghost form,” Sam repeated, as an order this time. “I saw you detransform, Danny. Don’t push it.”

And she had, in fact, watched him detransform. For the fifth time in total, Danny had scratched up against that limit, which had felt like claws raking out the basin of his stomach. He’d had only enough heads-up to drop himself close to the ground before blackness had ripped away his vision, and humanity ripped away his ghost form.

It was hard to remember what had happened right after. But he’d been left vulnerable again. And Sam and Tucker had raced to intervene, and they’d covered for him, and they’d been grabbed by—

“I got it, right?” Danny asked. “In the thermos?”

“Yes. You got it.” Sam lifted the thermos from the grip of his hand, and it took some prying of his fingers to release it. “Get out of ghost form, Danny.”

“It’s fine now, actually,” Danny said, and the still-tremblingness of his whole body was botching this for him. Crazy cool victory, he was supposed to be telling them. No more limit. “Vlad’s an idiot. Cheese-head. Who’d’a guessed, am I right? But I’m a ghost and I’m fine.”

“I think you should sit down,” Tucker said.

“I’m fine!” Danny said, arms thrown wide. Breathe, idiot. Calm down. You caught them. They didn’t die. You were able to transform back. But his heartrate didn’t know how to come down from the panic of being turned human.

“We’re all fine, Danny,” Sam said soothingly. “And you’ll be more fine if you detransform. You don’t want to burn more of your ghost—”

“There’s no time limit anymore!” Danny interrupted, and he failed to sound triumphant about it. Cool victory. Proved Vlad wrong. Come on. Danny screwed his eyes shut and tried to breathe normally. “I’ve proven Vlad wrong, okay? Friday and today I was able to go ghost again even after my ‘limit’ ran out, so it’s not a limit. It means I can keep using my powers and fighting.”

“…Should you, though?” Tucker ventured, cautiously. “You look a little—”

“—freaked out? Yeah! But that’s from detransforming and thinking I just got you two killed, okay?!” Danny said with another crack in his voice. “This is GOOD, look! I’m a ghost! You’re not dead!”

“We’re not dead. And I believe you, alright?” Sam said. She stepped closer to close the gap between them, and she gently threaded her fingers into Danny’s hand which had held the death-grip on the thermos. “Please just turn back human now.”

…

Quick moments in the hall between classes were not long enough for the three of them to truly talk this through. The lunch hour was stolen from them because Danny fell asleep in science class, and this was one transgression of consciousness too many, which earned him lunchtime detention.

A Box Ghost invasion almost saved Danny from his lunchtime fate, but Sam trapped the Box Ghost in her thermos before Danny could barter an excuse to leave detention, which Danny took a little personally. It maybe meant Sam didn’t think he was capable of ghost fighting right now. And silent and bored in detention, Danny refocused his thoughts on how to prove her wrong. Danny accidentally fell asleep again before he came up with any kind of plan, which earned him a next day detention as well.

His afternoon classes passed without any further ghost interruption, but Danny still tensed at every snap and sound and momentary gust of chilly air. And maybe that lack of ghost attacks was really well-timed, because Danny might have hit the ground a little worse with that detransformation than he originally thought. His shins ached.

And at the final bell, Sam, Tucker, and Danny all peeled out of school without bothering to stop at their lockers first. Homework mattered much less than finding a quiet place to talk right now. At least, that was Danny’s thought process. Maybe Sam and Tucker followed him because they were afraid to let him out of their sights.

“Kind of chilly today,” Danny ventured hesitantly, stepping a bit fast along the sidewalk and looking over his shoulder to confirm Sam and Tucker were with him, but mostly to confirm that everyone around the falling-away Casper High building was too far to be within earshot.

“I guess you could think that,” Tucker said, which wasn’t really agreement.

Danny slowed his pace. He let his shoulders drop a fraction from their artificial held-tallness. He exhaled, and looked at Sam and Tucker with what he hoped was a look of genuine openness.

“I am… fine, you guys.” Danny said. “I’m calm now. I’m chill. And you can both like, stop looking at me like something’s wrong.”

“You really feel completely fine, dude?” Tucker asked.

“Completely,” Danny lied.

“I just…” Sam trotted to catch up with Danny, “think you’re being a little dismissive, Danny. Vlad didn’t say you can’t push past that limit, he said you shouldn’t try.”

“And why do we care what Vlad thinks? Vlad lies,” Danny said. He slowed more, grateful he could pretend it was to let Sam catch up, and not because walking fast was making his heartrate pick up and his head swim.

“Yeah, but does he lie about ghost power stuff?” Tucker asked.

“Vlad lies about everything,” Danny countered.

“Okay so, forget Vlad,” Sam offered. “We—by which I mean you—have your own evidence to go off now. You said you were able to pull this off Friday. So what happened Friday?”

Danny tensed. “Nothing. Ghost attack. I got forced back to being human. Then I un-forced it to go ghost again. Beat the ghost. End of story.”

“How did you feel after?”

“Fine!” Danny insisted. “Tired, maybe. I slept for like half of Saturday, but I was already not getting enough sleep. I was also… um…”

“Also what?” Tucker asked.

“Never mind. Mom cooked something weird for dinner Friday night. But!” Danny tossed his arms up. “The point is I did it, and I was fine! And I did it again, and I’m fine right now again. I would know if something’s wrong with me, and nothing is wrong. I’ve got this.”

He didn’t like the way Tucker and Sam were still looking at him.

Danny dropped his hands. He let his eyes drop too as he picked his pace up a bit. It was getting cold, and it prickled his skin and made him sweaty.

“If I… seem a little weird,” Danny continued, quieter, “it’s because the being-detransformed stuff freaks me out. But I’ll get over it now that I know it’s a problem I can solve.”

“If you need me to trust you, I’ll trust you, dude. You’ve got this,” Tucker said, and he clapped an open hand onto Danny’s shoulder, overtaking Danny’s step. “Do you and Sam wanna come over and play Man vs. Zombie? You can stay for dinner too.”

“Only if you want me to wipe the floor with you two,” Sam answered.

Danny would have answered, but he needed to swallow weirdly. So instead he just nodded, and fell in step behind Tucker, grateful to be out of anyone’s direct line of sight for a moment. Though he could not help but wonder how much of Tucker’s invitation was genuine, and how much was a veiled means of keeping Danny under supervision.

“There’s a new loot box patch, so you can’t exploit the infinite potion box glitch in world four anymore, but it adds two new stat packs I want to try out,” Tucker said.

“Which two?” Sam asked.

“Melee and Sniper. Melee pack is a +20 perma-buff to strength and Sniper pack is infinite ammo.”

“Absolutely not. That’s totally busted.”

“Which part?” Tucker asked.

“The Sniper pack, duh.” Sam was now walking shoulder to shoulder with Tucker. “Sniper is already stupid OP since only another Sniper can take them out. Limited ammo is the only thing that balances Sniper. You literally can’t remove that—”

Danny swallowed weird again. His insides wormed weirdly too, and it sent an icy chill through his body, prickled his clammy hands. His shins hurt more than before. So did his head. So did his feet, keeping pace with Sam and Tucker, who sounded further away as Danny swallowed again. And again. And his heartrate kicked up far too high as the worming feeling in his stomach turned queasy.

“Danny?”

Tucker noticed a fraction too late. Danny had already crashed to his knees and violently lost his lunch in the grass beside the sidewalk. Danny pulled in a shaking mucusy breath, which was gross and hurt, and Danny did not feel instantly better like he’d hoped. He was racked with a wave of convulsive swallowing, sucking in breath, saliva pooling in his mouth, until his stomach flipped again and he vomited up another wave that splattered to the sidewalk.

“Dude!” Tucker said now, voice pitched high with concern. He jogged a few steps closer but kept a slight distance. Sam was at Danny’s other side now, her hand on his back.

Danny wanted to say something, but he was at the mercy of another heave of bile, which burned his throat and burned his sinuses and burned his eyes and smelled abysmal. He was deeply grossed out and yet not in control of himself enough to pull away quite yet.

“…Fuck…” he muttered, weakly, and spat onto the ground.

“What the fuck happened?” Tucker asked, who had been chill in the face of tumbling from the sky, but whose aversion to sickness came through crystal clear in his shaky voice.

“It’s fine!” Danny insisted, voice equally shaky. “I’m just still a little sick from Saturday.”

“Wait. You were sick on Saturday?” Sam asked. “As in the day after you broke your limit the first time. That Saturday?”

“That doesn’t mean anything!” Danny insisted, and he wished he had a little space to breathe. “It was food poisoning.”

“And you think it’s coming back now, specifically?”

“Danny, you’re freaking me out,” Tucker said. And he closed in on Danny now, and Danny stuck a hand up to halt him as the thought of being closed in on both sides flipped his stomach again.

“I’m fine, Tucker. Stay there,” Danny said. He held his hand high, palm out, toward Tucker. It was acting as his shield right now.

“Woah. Oh my god…” Tucker muttered. His tone had changed, and it had not changed in a good way.

“What?” Sam asked.

“Dude, your fingers,” Tucker said, raspy.

Danny pulled his face up from the ground. He ran his sleeve across his chin and then held his hand near his face. He stared at his knuckles, and he understood the spread of a half-dozen lesions that wove over his knuckles and tendons, the whole back of his hand deeply inflamed, red and cracking.

“It’s an ecto-burn,” Danny said with no confidence as to whether he’d even taken a blow to his knuckles.

“No. Dude. Come on. Your fingers. Your fingertips.”

Danny paused. He swallowed. He flipped his hand palm-side to his face, so he could see. And as a consequence, Sam could see too.

Danny said nothing. He only stared at each finger, in sequence, understanding them all. It reminded him for a moment of fingerpainting. Or charcoal art in art class. But the color was deeper here, and darker here, and rotted into his fingers, which Danny surmised as he came to understand what it meant to see the tip of each finger blackened halfway to the first joint.

…

“We need to call Jazz,” Sam said.

“We’re not calling Jazz,” Danny answered.

“I do think it would be a good idea to call Jazz,” Tucker said, leaning over his shoulder while his fingers still skated along his keyboard, typing quickly, greenish glare of his monitor catching in his glasses. He’d shifted from his shoddy palm pilot internet access to his computer once they’d made it to the Foley house, Sam supporting Danny the rest of the walk with all thoughts of Man vs. Zombie forgotten.

“What’s Jazz going to do? She’ll just freak out too.”

“She might know something,” Sam answered. She held Danny’s hand by the palm, kept his fingers spread, first-aid kit open in her lap as she prodded cautiously at his blackened flesh. “Your fingers are necrotic, Danny.”

“A-and I’m a ghost, so that sounds fine to me,” Danny answered. He was angry, and frustrated, and scared, to feel like he was the only person on his side in this ordeal.

“But you’re not a ghost right now. You shouldn’t be ghostly right now. You shouldn’t have rotting flesh.”

“Don’t call it that, Sam,” Danny muttered, strained, through another uncomfortable flip of his stomach. He was sweating again. He felt like too many things were closing in on him again. And panic or bile or both were rising in his throat. He knew with clammy certainty he was on a timer until he threw up again.

“I’m not really seeing any cures for necrosis, guys. I AM seeing a lot of really grotesque images. Jesus Christ.”

“Not helping, Tuck,” Danny said.

“Okay but this is serious, right?” Tucker added, spinning away from his computer. And maybe it was the pallor of his screen outlining him, but Tucker himself looked ashen in the face. “Like I don’t think you just ‘heal’ from this, Danny.”

“I might heal in ghost form,” Danny said, and immediately Sam’s grip on him tightened painfully.

“Do not.” Her acrylic nails were digging into his skin, and Danny recognized in a moment of surprise that it was fear he heard piercing Sam’s voice. “You’ll only make it worse.”

“We don’t know that. We don’t actually know what’s causing this,” Danny ventured, and Sam’s tug on his hand quieted him.

“What are you not getting? Vlad spelled this out. Your ghost form is putting your body through death. And if your cells are dead in ghost form, then the limit is how long you can stay in ghost form before they can’t come back.” Sam raised his hand. “The cells in your fingertips are dead, Danny. And I don’t think they’re coming back.”

Danny snatched his hand back. And maybe Sam understood the sweaty pallor on Danny’s face, because she gave him some space.

“And if the cells in your stomach lining are dying, then that explains the vomiting,” Tucker said, a shade more ashen than before. Both Sam and Danny looked at him, and Tucker hastily elaborated, “WHICH, I HATE, by the way. I’m an emetophobe with access to Wikipedia, so I have researched everything I have to be afraid of.”

“Emetophobe?” Sam asked, just as Danny kicked up frantically from his chair, hand clasped to mouth, body heaving forward as he raced to the bathroom down the hall.

“That. I hate that,” Tucker said, plugging his fingers in his ears to drown out the sound of Danny vomiting. “Oh I hate that.”

Sam herself shed one shade of her skin tone as the seconds passed, and she stared out the door where Danny had vanished. It was not the vomiting sounds that bothered her. It was the compounding thoughts that piled in her mind and threatened to take her breath away.

“If his hands and stomach cells are dead already,” Sam muttered, mouth too dry for comfort. “What else is already wrong with him?”

…

“Stomach flu,” Maddie Fenton explained over the phone when she called her son out of school the next day. She felt a little bad that she’d first suspected Danny of faking sick. He hadn’t sounded that bad when he’d called home, and said he’d gotten sick at Tucker’s, and needed to be excused from school the next day. It hadn’t even been baseless suspicion on Maddie’s part, because Danny had faked sick to get out of school in the past, just not recently.

The suspicion had vanished from Maddie’s mind the moment Danny had gotten home, whiter in the face than she’d ever seen him, bundled in a borrowed jacket, hands stuffed into pockets. She’d tried to get near him to feel his forehead, but he’d backed away from her touch.

“Don’t want to get you sick,” he’d said with breath that smelled like vomit.

He’d shut himself in his room upstairs, and requested Maddie not hand him anything directly so that he’d keep his germs to himself. And losing sight of her son did distress her, because Maddie could not know if the silence from his room was Danny sleeping or something much worse.

She’d broken his wishes once in the middle of the night, nudging his door open, using only the hall light to assess the bundle that was her son thoroughly tangled in his blankets. She’d come closer, and she’d understood the darker tone of the sheets that webbed from Danny—soaked through with sweat. Maddie had touched the back of her hand to Danny’s forehead, and it had burned under her touch. Not enough to alarm her, but certainly enough to worry her.

…

Danny had been outvoted on the matter of looping Jazz in. It took very little explaining from Sam and Tucker for her to understand what was happening, and very little convincing to get her to agree to her job: recruit the Fenton parents.

Jazz sweated, and hoped nothing in her tone implied any connection to her fever-stricken brother upstairs when she sat her parents down and funneled the genuine worry in the pit of her stomach into her voice as she told them the ghost attacks around town were getting frightening, and she heard something happened to Danny Phantom, and everyone needed Jack and Maddie Fenton to step up to protect Amity Park.

Under different circumstances, Tucker and Sam would have rock-paper-scissor’ed over the second job. But unfortunately the correct assignee was already clear, because Valerie hated Sam, and Valerie maybe tolerated Tucker as an ex-situationship that was never serious enough to leave heartache on either side.

The harder part was figuring out how to approach Valerie with knowledge of her identity and not end up hanging upside-down from a basketball hoop.

Tucker had just enough of Valerie’s good grace to pull her aside, one-on-one, into an empty corridor of Casper High. Though he quickly watched that good grace evaporate from her eyes as he fumbled to find his words. And he DID, admittedly, flinch more than a little when Valerie’s “Get to the point” became his “I know you’re the souped-up girl in red gear who hunts ghosts!” and Valerie’s impatience flash-ignited to anger.

“Who told you?” Valerie closed in on him. Tucker blurted out “Phantom!” not incorrectly.

“Why Phantom? Why is he telling people my identity?”

“Not… people! Just like, me and Sam.”

“Sam Manson?”

“Sorry. Sorry! Sam and me are on good terms with Phantom! We’re hunting allies so like—” Tucker swallowed, “A-and now something really really bad happened to him. Phantom. So he’s maybe not gonna be… around… for a while. And if he’s not around while the ghosts are attacking—”

“You want me to pick up the slack that useless fucker is leaving behind,” Valerie concluded, icily.

“No. Yes! Well—I mean—you’re an amazing ghost hunter—”

“And he thinks he can just quit the game and leave it all on me.”

“We’re making him quit. Sam and me. I really mean it. Something really really bad happened.” And maybe something about Tucker’s small and shaky tone granted him enough grace in Valerie’s eyes that she dropped the accusation.

“What ‘really bad thing’?”

“I don’t totally understand it. But it’s scary, and he’s in a lot of pain.”

Valerie considered this quietly.

“Will he be okay?” she asked

“I really really really hope so,” Tucker answered.

…

“You… did NOT… need to recruit my parents,” Danny declared, dodging an enthusiastic wave from his father patrolling down the Casper High hallway on Wednesday morning. Danny fixed his glare at Tucker, and his acid scowl lost some of its power beneath the gray exhaustion and sallow thinness of his face.

“Well that’s not really fair. We recruited Valerie too.”

“No,” Danny declared, more strongly than before, but his words did very little to undo reality. He noticed he’d stopped in the hallway and jogged at half pace to catch up with Tucker. “Why did you do that?!”

“Because you’re a little out of commission, Danny,” Sam answered, with a careful prickliness that suggested she wasn’t planning to take Danny’s side.

“Not anymore! I’m back. I can go ghost again.”

“Have you had any solid foods in the last 48 hours?” Sam asked. Danny pivoted his acid glare at her and then buried his fingers in his backpack straps as he noticed her eyes trail to them.

“You’re looking really rough dude,” Tucker chimed in.

“Okay so what?—Are you gonna recruit Vlad to take over my ghost hunting duties next time I have the stomach flu or—”

“This was not the stomach flu and you know it,” Sam said, turning sharply to jab Danny in the chest. It caught Danny off guard enough to silence him. The tension in Sam’s finger loosened a bit, apology in her voice. “This isn’t over, Danny. This is scary. You shouldn’t go ghost.”

Danny balked at her last statement. Whatever words were on his tongue evaporated, and brand new and frantic calibrations were spinning in his head.

“Wait… you can’t be serious,” Danny answered. He pushed Sam’s finger away from him. “I’m recharged. I’m at full strength! I can go ghost again!”

“Show me your fingers,” Sam bit back, icy, needlessly cruel—in Danny’s book. Danny did not immediately respond. He curled his fingers into his palms, hidden behind his backpack straps, and he swallowed. “Yeah. I thought so,” Sam responded.

“Come on. Come on…” Danny picked up his half jog again as Sam moved with the momentum of the Casper High crowd. She was scaring him. Or maybe, Danny realized with a tightness in his chest, he was scaring her. “Not fatal. Just my fingers. Just the tips of them. I don’t need them to live—”

“So have you told your parents yet?” Sam asked, voice tight. She wasn’t looking at him now. “Have you explained yet why their son needs his necrotic fingertips removed before the gangrene eats him?”

“Not… yet,” Danny answered, small. “I’ve been really sick, Sam.”

“You have. You have been really sick!” Sam turned on him, and Danny felt the electric shock to his system at the crack in her voice. “Which happened because you went ghost to save me and Tucker. And now something really really scary happened to you. Don’t do it again!”

Danny’s pulse slammed too fast, and his body’s exhaustion screamed through his pounding headache, and the sight of Sam crying upset him. And the thought of never going ghost again stirred his weak heart into a panic he couldn’t handle right now.

“I just think there’s a middle ground here,” Danny said shakily.

“And I just think you should take a break, dude,” Tucker answered, wary eyes to Sam. “I agree with Sam. That was… fucked up. You shouldn’t push it.”

“I won’t. Push it. I won’t push my limit,” Danny bargained, throat dry. “I’ll go ghost, but I won’t go past my limit.”

“But why even risk it?” Tucker countered. “You can just let your parents handle it. This is their ghost mess.”

“I just think—”

“Is turning into Phantom really thatimportant, dude?”

Danny’s hands shook. His nausea was back, utterly unwelcome after he’d spent the last 48 hours twisted in its clutches. He said nothing, but he thought about claws raking his chest, and claws pinning him down, and blood soaking his clothes, and that terror that threatened so strongly to break him into pieces of being human, helpless, human, weak, human, under the hot breath clutches of the thing that would rip his flesh apart.

“Danny?” Tucker asked, and Danny hated how easily that fear cracked into Tucker’s voice. “Are you still sick? I can get you to the bathroom,” Tucker offered, despite the fact that Danny knew he wanted nothing more to do with supervising sickness.

Danny held his hand out to ease Tucker, and he remembered too late that the gesture put his black fingertips on display.

“I’m okay,” Danny muttered, and he just tried to breathe, and tried to calm down, and tried to understand why he could never pull himself away from that spiraling panic that welled up at every reminder of the clawed ghost who’d nearly gored him open when his powers failed him.

…

Danny hated this. Immensely. But he was running low on allies who would take his side.

“Ah, Daniel, back once more. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Danny had been careful getting here. He’d gone ghost and sat with himself for 10 minutes, probing and investigating every feeling in his body for anything that felt wrong or out of place. It had made him sweaty, but Danny could chalk that up to nerves. And with 10 minutes of careful introspection, Danny had come to the conclusion he felt all-around a bit less shitty in ghost form than he did as a human.

He’d been mindful too while flying all the way to Vlad’s. What had Jazz called it?—“Checking in with himself”, to make sure no part of him felt wrong in ghost form. He’d rationalized it the whole way. He needed to talk to Vlad, and there was no convenient way to get to Vlad beside flying. And this was a test, too, actually, to check how his powers still worked. And if none of his friends would let him use his powers, then maybe his enemies would allow him to demonstrate.

“I don’t think I’ve wrought any particular havoc in your town as of late, so I’m not due for any subjugation to silly teenage banter.” Vlad shut his book, uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “But you look like you have something in mind.”

“My ghost limit.” Danny was hit with a wave of self-consciousness from the way Vlad’s steel eyes and casual smile dug into him. Danny straightened his posture, held himself higher in the air, flashed his aura a bit brighter, and that included the gleam of his green eyes. “What does happen when I push past it?”

“Likely irrelevant. I doubt you’d ever be able to.”

“I have. Twice now.”

And this earned an eyebrow raise of genuine surprise—and if Danny weren’t deeply cynical right now, he’d almost say Vlad looked impressed.

“Well.” Vlad set his book down entirely and rose to meet Danny at eye level. “I suppose I’ve never accused you of being weak-willed. Only weak, and willfully stupid.”

“What’s happening to me?” Danny countered. “Explain it to me.”

“I don’t know,” Vlad said, as he took to pacing a slow circle around Danny who hovered in his library. “What is happening to you? You’re my first specimen. So give me something of substance to work with.”

A scared and cold clamminess crept back into the inner weavings of Danny’s organs. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting, but he’d at least expected information Vlad could deliver with certainty.

Danny lowered himself from the air. His feet tapped quietly to the ground, and just as quietly he let the rings sweep past him and wash him back voluntarily to human. Danny watched Vlad carefully, in case Vlad had any inklings of taking the offensive. But Vlad merely watched him back, content and curious, like Danny had come to show off an interesting toy.

Fully human, Danny hesitated, then he raised an open-palm hand up.

“Will this go away?” Danny asked, and he hated the childish tinge that entered his voice.

Vlad made a noise like he was pitying a sad kitten in a cute animal compilation video. Danny flinched only slightly when Vlad’s cold palms, cold fingers, grabbed at his—prodding and pinching lightly, and pulling Danny’s fingers closer.

“How long have your fingers been like this?”

“Two days…. Maybe like two and a half.”

Vlad released Danny’s hand. “I would not be optimistic. You may want to look into tailoring your ghost form gloves a little shorter.”

Danny snatched his hand back to his chest. A lash of anger festered, directionless, in his ribcage. The answer stole more air from his lungs than he was expecting.

“It might heal,” Danny countered.

“You might give yourself sepsis waiting to cash in on that bet,” Vlad replied. “My advice remains the same to not push this. Especially now that your limit is undoubtedly so much weaker.”

Danny felt his stomach bottom out, like he’d missed a step on the staircase. “What?”

“You can think of us like professional athletes,” Vlad said, with the voice of someone who’d lost his interest in whale facts and had since been binging professional football documentaries. “A healthy athlete may train to soreness, rest, and repeat almost indefinitely. But an athlete who trains to injury is not coming back quickly, or perhaps ever.”

For the tenth time in much too small of a timeframe, Danny felt his heart kick up to a frenzy just shy of panic.

“I don’t think… everything’s a fucking metaphor,” Danny bit back. “What’s your evidence? A sports analogy? You’ve never pushed your limit, so how would you know?”

“Oh I don’t recall ever saying that.”

Danny stared, wide-eyed, and Vlad stared back, and Vlad smiled.

“What was your limit previously?” Vlad asked.

And Danny hesitated. “Six hours a day. Just about.”

“I see,” Vlad said, and his smile widened, “well, I sure hope you’re capable of making it home from here.”

…

Danny flew home desperate to enjoy it.

He flew through bright sky and fresh air. His shadow swam rivers, ran mountains, wove canyons. He smelled the floral tinge of meadows and the woodsy wet petrichor of forests. His skin tingled under the warm sun and bristled at the cool mist of clouds, which he wove through, dove through, spun shapes through, each time met with a new spectacle of bustling city, rolling farmland, or industrial tinkerwork on the ground far below. And the beauty of it all was smothered dead beneath the dread knowledge Danny held that he may not ever be able to do this again.

When he set his boots down on the pavement edge of Amity Park, what he felt was perhaps not fully relief, and perhaps not fully grief. It was some child creation of both, which made Danny fold his knees, and lower himself to the sidewalk, and stare for a long time at the drifting clouds of the sky. He’d made it home, for the last time maybe.

Maybe Vlad is lying, Danny thought like a broken record. But he did not actually have faith in that. He repeated those four words to himself much like an animal gnaws at the bars of its cage. If it was true, it could free him from the reality that scared Danny more than he had words for. But he had no real faith it was true.

Danny held his knees, and felt the wind, and breathed slow. He wished his friends would be a bit more understanding, and a bit less accusatory, so he could admit how afraid he was. Because he was afraid, down to the marrow of his bones. He was afraid of his rotted flesh and liquifying insides. But he was equally afraid of his weak humanity, of dying pinned and gored beneath a hundred different creatures with a vendetta against him. He was afraid of giving up himself. He was afraid of failing. He was afraid of other people getting hurt because he failed. Danny curled in, and hugged his Phantom self for perhaps the last time, and he wished anyone would be nice to him right now.

He was torn from his thoughts by an ear-piercing shriek that rattled the air, and the bone-chilling rasp of mist from his mouth, and the certainty solidifying in the moment that someone was in trouble.

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