Horrified, Danny can’t help but take a step back.
He’s dealt with a lot of creepy things as Phantom, is a creepy thing himself in fact, but everything he’s faced so far has at least been… somewhat humanoid, or familiar, in form. He could always recognize some kind of a face, a chest or other ‘main body’, and limbs.
Ghost powers, with their alarming variety and blatant defiance of basic physics, made it anything but a clean science but Danny always knew at minimum the basics of how to fight them. Avoid the limbs, aim for the main body, watch the face for clues like eye movement. And ghosts aren’t exactly known for being physical either, even if Danny’s own abilities and Fenton-tech make that particular quirk of the species obsolete…but the Thing hovering in the hallway by the police?
The large, ethereal mass of floating spectral wings and blurry eyes bound by nothing but sourceless light? There is no face, no limbs, no body at all, it just is. And yet, it also just isn’t, the very dimensional fabric making up Casper High distorting around it into something equally unrecognizable. It shifts in and out of focus, filling the space with colours Danny has never seen and an unsettling echo of senseless voices at frequencies he didn’t know he could register.
The cold leaching the strength from Danny’s limbs has nothing to do with his ghost-sense or Core Affinity, but rather everything to do with Fear.
How is he supposed to fight that…?
Distantly, he can feel Sam jam her elbow into his side and hear Tucker talking to one of the cops—when did he get so close? Are they a ‘he’? A ‘she’? Danny shouldn’t assume, right?
Danny can’t take his eyes off the…Mass… to check, but then the cop is gazing into his eyes, crouched between Danny and the thing and Danny can no longer see It. Danny swallows, the world gradually re-twisting itself into something more manageable around him. The cop speaks slowly, gently, asking if he can touch Danny.
Danny nods, syrupy thoughts still stuck trying to comprehend what’s happening. The Thing stays in his mind, its hooks in buried deep and dragging his focus away from reality even as a mere memory. As a result, Danny doesn’t think of what might happen if the cop were to touch his cold hands, stiff with nails turning blue, and notice there’s no pulse before giving his consent. Danny’s heart, instinctively shut down at first sight of the Mass, has yet to start up again. Danny can’t help but wonder, with a morbid curiosity, if it stopped to keep itself from bursting—
The cop, thankfully, instead sets a heavy hand on Danny’s shoulder, thumb moving in steady circles. It’s grounding, physical in a way that Thing could never be.
“Good, you’re doing good.”
Danny blinks, his eyes suddenly feeling very dry. He had stopped blinking all together, and his chest is so still he must’ve not been breathing either.
The cop must assume his breathing is just unnoticeable under Danny’s baggy shirt, because he—for now Danny can register that they are a he—continues talking slowly and calmly to what Danny knows could be effectively classified as a corpse. Danny’s corpse.
“I’m sorry you had to see this, no kid should ever…” the cop trails off, his long hair falling into his face as he shakes his head before continuing. “I promise you that my partners and I will do everything we can to stop this from happening again—“
“Partners?” Danny immediately latches onto the plurality, remembering how there were only two humans and the Mass beyond the caution tape when he rounded the corner. “You’re partners with it?!”
Oh good, he’s breathing again.
Oh crap, he is breathing way too fast.
“It?” The cop frowns, but doesn’t react to Danny’s now very prominent panic, clearly caught off guard.
“You know something, kiddo?” A new voice interrupts, gruff and ragged, but in a way that sounds false. A tone built from habit, not natural development.
If Danny were feeling better he might point that out, make some fun of the new cop trying to sound tough next to his far taller partner, but as it is Danny just wants to run. Unfortunately for Danny, his feet refuse to budge, and without going ghost, his tail is of no use either.
Raising a shaky hand, because of course those can still move, he points behind the first cop to where the Mass once hovered, his finger brushing the right side of the guy’s police uniform. Danny doesn’t move to see around the guy and check if It’s still there.
Please be gone, please be gone, please be gone—
Both cops are frowning now, and they exchange a meaningful glance before looking back down the hall. As the crouching cop does so, his body twisting to look, Danny catches another glimpse of the still-there Thing. Including a nearly luminescence-obscured flap of beige fabric he didn’t see the first time.
“Why…is it in a trench coat?” Danny says faintly, the surreality of seeing such a mundane item amongst It nearly sending him into shock.
Or is he already in shock…?
But then the creature turns away from the viscera on the floor—or at least, Danny assumes it turned away, because he still can’t wrap his mind around it. He still can’t locate anything resembling a face, or any other comprehensible features in the borderline-impossible shapes it consists of, that could indicate movement. What Danny can understand though, is that he feels, carved deep inside his soul, the very moment it sees him.
“Are you talking about Cas—?”
Danny is gone before gruff cop can finish speaking, a friend in each hand as he drags them through the floor in broad daylight, right in front of two cops that could very much hand him over to the GIW and a monster that might not even be escapable in the first place.
His friends yell at him, scared by his behaviour, but they don’t fight his grip and that’s all he needs to know. They trust him to protect them, and protect them he will.
titsay
2087
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
