“Maybe they’ve pavlov’d themselves”
@bloggerspam you cannot make me cry like this over tags this early in the day.
Danny’s family made a lot of fudge.
Danny ate a lot of fudge in high school. It was safe.
Well, ok, physically it was probably only marginally safer than any other food cooked by his parents, and only by virtue of definitely having no meat in it….. probably. It was, supposedly, a Fenton family recipe, though Danny was pretty sure Marshmallow Fluff didn’t actually count as a “secret ingredient”. …Danny really hoped that was what his dad meant by “secret ingredient”.
Potentially dubious nature or no, Jack Fenton was thrilled when his son started taking him up on the fudge offers way more often some time after age fourteen, and basically doubled the fudge production in their home that year. Danny was happy he was happy. And glad to be able to satisfy his sweet tooth with something that was safe — easy.
It was just that convenience stores and large grocery chains had never carried fudge. It wasn’t something he’d ever paid for with crumpled allowance money. Not at age eight when he thought he’d cracked the code to being street wise and cool about friendships. Not at age ten, when he’d gotten pretty excellent at instinctively dodging or catching candy bars tossed at his head, and hadn’t really processed the Snickers in his hand until Jason sat down squinting angrily, like a person determined not to cry, and looking like he hadn’t slept in about a week. Not at age twelve when he’d hovered in the bodega aisle wondering how many pop tarts it would take to cover “my parents have decided to move us to the middle of nowhere, Illinois, but I think we should still keep in touch anyway, even though you’re somehow busy all the time even more than ever these days.”
Danny had stood there so long, the cashier had started giving him suspicious, sideways looks, in true Gothamite fashion. His imagination had begun running away with scenarios in which the guy accused him of trying to steal something, called the cops on him, and, somehow, got Robin on the scene. Jason would absolutely think the whole thing was funny as hell, and probably never let him live it down, which was definitely not the deterrent he held over most criminals, but the swooping embarrassment Danny had felt over the (in retrospect deeply unlikely) prospect of getting caught supplying himself for a very serious conversation before he was ready left him ducking back out the store. He’d gone out of his way the next morning instead, made a whole detour on the way to school and grabbed two entire boxes without thinking about it too hard. Jason had whistled low when he’d dropped both unceremoniously on the picnic table that afternoon. The “Damn, Danny. Are we hiding a body or something?” Had been delivered with that same incongruous mix of levity and concern that Danny knew had gotten Jason through a lot of caring a lot more than was smart or safe for him to really show.
A lot more than was survivable, as it had turned out.
Not that Danny was one to talk.
It was just that eating home made sweets didn’t feel quite as wrong as casually accepting MnMs from Tucker, and wondering if he could have done something if he’d still been in Gotham to accept them from someone else. It didn’t feel as transgressive as eating Skittles when he was too sleep deprived to even explain their latest math classes to himself, let alone someone else. Pretending fudge was his favorite felt less like breaking faith than actually explaining to someone else why he gave everything but the apples a pass at Halloween parties. Those and candy corn. Jason had hated “that waxy shit”.
He had never once accepted candy corn. He had never once accepted food out of Danny’s house.
These things were safe. These were things that didn’t taste at all like regret.
And if anything chocolate still kind of always tasted like “Help, no questions asked. You’re the person I’m coming to”? Well, Danny could pretend, at least to himself, that his parents meant it that way. That maybe someday, they might not try to shoot him out of the sky for trying.
Tucker called him on it once, sometime around their Junior year after Jazz had left for college, and Danny had begun playing with the idea of actually learning to cook more than instant noodles for himself. They were pretty sure his diet still mattered, especially since he’d started actually working out in human form.
“Wait,” Tuck had asked, crunching a potato chip as he scrolled the local social media and hero-spotting sites for embarrassing blackmail material a check on public opinion of Phantom this month. “Jazz did all the grocery shopping for the house before? I swear I’ve at least seen you pick up, like…” He trailed off, then cackled, saving a particularly unflattering shot of Danny’s face as he took a collision with a full-sized and very hyper Cujo yesterday. “I’ve definitely seen you buy stuff you never personally ate. You buy candy like, all the time. And you never eat any of it except, like, the peppermints.”
Danny had taken the totally mature and transparent route of ‘distraction by way of complaining loudly at the next photo Tucker found’. It was easier than explaining that no one in his family ate what he’d been regularly spending allowance on for the last three years — it was for someone else. Definitely easier than admitting out loud that it was more of an… observance, at this point — a refusal to openly stop, to give up — than an actual hope that he might need it at some point.
Sometime, between his parents’ disaster of a college reunion, and getting dragged into a ghostly mirror image of his own high school, it had occurred to Danny that living over a literal portal to the afterlife might, possibly, let him see someone he knew again, too. If anyone was stubborn enough….
With the buzz and the slightly-manic buoyancy of all mildly-desperate hopes, he’d run to a corner store after school. To grab skittles. Because he’d mailed the last ones, and he needed some on hand. So he’d be ready when they met again. So he could ask all the things that had been running on repeat in his mind since they’d started using the word hero for what he was trying to be, here.
Please, teach me your flippy tricks. Show me how you did that thing where you made guys who tried to hit you fall with their own momentum. Rate my quips, I know you would have opinions. How on earth did you manage to do this kind of thing and still get homework done? Am I doing this right???
… do you regret doing this? With how it turned out?
… do you still dream about dying too?
By Junior year, Danny knew ghosts from pretty much every part of the Zone that was Earth-adjacent, one way or another, including several whose domain covered the entire Earth at least. He’d made a habit of asking, once there were ghosts he knew enough to have a civil conversation. He’d looked out for a familiar face each time he went somewhere new. He’d poked for any information on “the kid in pixie boots”, just to see if he could annoy Jason into showing up at his door faster. This approach had, admittedly, led to a weird encounter with a ghost who might possibly be The Peter Pan, but it was worth it. He had to try.
By the time he and Clockwork, who would definitely know, were on casual speaking terms, the list of probable, unchecked places had dwindled so much that Danny found he was too afraid to ask after Jason again. He didn’t want to hear it was hopeless. He wanted to keep replacing his candy stash, updating his latest supply as his choice of conversations evolved.
Over time, teach me how to do this skittles became, be my backup? The rest of my team would love you MnMs, to Can I think out loud at you? You don’t actually have to say anything back bubblegum. For a while, he settled out at a continuous stream of I need to talk about family. I need to talk about my parents. Snickers.
He bought a lot of Snickers, Junior year.
Eventually, by the end of high school, Danny had settled back into a steady alternation. 1) Skittles: not for big, world-ending questions, but more just to think about what Jason’s takes would have been on the insanity that had become Danny’s life. Did you ever meet inter dimensional beings? I met alien ghosts the other day, want to compare notes? I still suck at English class, sorry, I know you had opinions on this book but I definitely can’t replicate the essay you probably had just… ready in your head. 2) Caramels: one of the world’s more impossible candies to talk and eat at the same time. They’d only really started using those in that last year or so in Gotham. After Jason started at a new school and they began meeting at parks and libraries, instead. Can we just hang out? Just do our thing side by side? No talking required.
There were exactly two store-bought types of candy that Danny actually ate anymore. Peppermints at school because, for all that he hated the flavors of Christmas, the mint feeling was just reminiscent enough of his ghost sense to keep him awake in class. And sometimes, on patrol, he’d break out the caramels. They felt a bit less like sacrilege than anything else. No talking, no expectation he’d hear an answer. Just sweetness with the slightest bitter bite of sugar heated just to the edge of burning. Just two dead guys, out on patrol.
After high school, for a while, Danny stopped buying candy altogether. He’d timed the conversation after graduation, after turning 18, so he’d be able to leave if he had to. Still, he’d had hopes.
His hopes ended with a broken portal, an extended stay in the Ghost Zone while he regained his bearings, and the knowledge that fudge was another thing, now, that was going to taste like regret.
(I have a Jason half planned along this train of thought, but this is all I can manage in my lunch break)
