An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Angels in Flight
Summary: Angela Foley has known Danny for years by the time the explosion at the Nasty Burger took their families. So there was no way that she was going to sit back and let him, newly orphaned, grieve in his big empty home all alone.
Rating: G
Word: 4,232
Trigger warnings: possible warning for unspecified eating disorder due to grief.
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After days and days of casserole dinners and teary condolences, after the funeral was gone and past, after the Nasty Burger corporation promised to pay for the funeral, the memorial, everything, only then was Angela Foley able to remove herself from her dead child’s bedroom for any longer than an hour.
It was hard. She felt like she shouldn’t do it. Angela wanted to stay here, curled around her baby’s pillow, forever. She pretended it was him, even if Tucker had declared cuddles “too girly” when he was ten.
If she had known, Angela would have demanded a cuddle that morning. Of course, if she had known, she would never have allowed Tucker to go in the first place. Tucker was exceptionally good at sneaking out, which drove Angela and Maurice bonkers, but she supposed that was moot now.
She first extracted herself to the kitchen. Maurice was in the living room, flipping listlessly through television channels like he sought something but couldn’t remember what. They met eyes briefly, but then Maurice looked back to the tv and the endless flipping channels.
“I need to take a walk,” Angela suddenly said, eyeing the fridge with dismay. She didn’t have the energy to cook or even reheat anything. She wasn’t even hungry.
She didn’t remember eating today, but that was a whole other thing.
“Be safe,” Maurice answered.
Angela hummed and grabbed her coat. It wasn’t particularly cold, but the coat had a deep hood she could flip up. She didn’t want to be recognized, she didn’t want her neighbors coming up to her and reminding her that her only baby was dead.
Angela left the house. She liked walks in the past. When Tucker was younger, he’d accompany her. In fact, when Tucker had playdates with the Fentons, Angela would just walk him over. She’d chat with Jack and Maddie, Tucker and Danny would play, and Tucker would happily talk all the way home about how his friend was “the only fun girl in class”. That didn’t end up being entirely true, but they hadn’t known then.
Angela’s line of thought brought her to a place she hadn’t anticipated.
Despite the now deceased family, FentonWorks still stood loud and proud. Its neon lights lit up the sky. The metal deck on top reached for the moon. There were two flags on flagpoles by the front door—the good old American flag (Jack bled red white and blue), and a pink, blue, and white one that Angela didn’t quite recognize. She thought she may have seen it in Tucker’s room before, too, though significantly smaller.
The inner house was dark. All except a light on the second floor. A bedroom.
A boy stood in it, watching the sky. Angela’s heart clenched immediately, painfully. The family was deceased, except one. The house was dark, except for one room.
The Fentons were dead, but Danny still lived.
Angela considered going to the door. She had known Danny since he was a little girl in diapers. Danny and Tucker had been in the same preschool class, and they’d stuck together like glue. Angela had watched Danny grow almost as much as she’d watched Tucker, the two of them practically inseparable. They’d had arguments, of course—all friends did—but at the end of every day, Tucker and Danny had come away from it better and better friends.
And Angela had nearly forgotten him. Freshly orphaned, Danny stood in his huge empty home all alone.
Angela’s fist hovered at the door, her heart aching with a new grief. Angela’s life was a disaster, since her son’s passing, but this… this was control. Control she needed.
She missed momming someone. Maybe she could step in and be a surrogate for a boy who surely missed sonning someone nearly as much.
…Maybe Maurice could stand to dad someone, too. Maybe it’d be good for him.
Angela turned around, hovered on the doorstep. What if something bad happened in the short time she was gone…? She glanced up. Danny still stood in his window, watching the sky. Angela swallowed. She would have to be quick. Luckily, they weren’t far.
Angela breached her front door. Maurice was still flicking through channels, but he no longer watched the television. His face was in his hand. He was deeply in mourning.
He looked at her through wet, stricken eyes. “Ange…?” he said when he noticed the look in her eye.
“Get up,” Angela said, flicking off the kitchen lights. “Get shoes on.”
“What are…?” Maurice started, but didn’t finish. He eventually forced himself to his feet and pressed a tissue into his eyes. At his wife’s prompt, though, Maurice did go to the shoe rack by the door and slip into loafers. “Where are we going?”
Angela collected her purse, her keys, and her husband. Once all three were settled in the car, she started the engine and drove back towards FentonWorks.
“Ange,” Maurice said, firmly this time. Concern was fresh in his voice.
“…Someone else needs our help,” Angela said quietly, thinking of a lost orphan boy, stuck home alone.
Maurice made to ask questions, but when FentonWorks came into sight, he didn’t need to. Guilt was thick in his voice even when he gave just one syllable, “…oh.”
Maurice had known Danny nearly as long as Angela had. Angela did most of the pick up their first year, but when Angela finally really went back to work, Maurice had to pick up Tucker more, and so met the little then-girl who had trailed after Tucker like a lost sheep. Tucker had once insisted, so Maurice sat and waited a full forty-five minutes after pick up time for Jack to show up with a redheaded daughter in tow. Maurice had been unimpressed then, but he’d softened over the years.
They really should have thought of Danny sooner than this. No one would judge them for it, in the wake of their son’s death, but Angela and Maurice had known Danny for far too long for him to just slip their mind.
“Is he still here?” Maurice asked, climbing out.
“I saw him,” Angela hummed, locking the car. Her eyes flickered up. The bedroom light was still on, but no teenaged orphan stood in the window.
“Is he here alone?”
Angela gulped. She didn’t know who else would be here with him. “As far as I know.”
Maurice clicked his tongue, a sign of clear displeasure. Had everyone failed this boy? Had no one stepped up and put him into the system? It would suck—Maurice at least was intimately familiar—but he wouldn’t be alone.
“I know,” Angela agreed. She rang the doorbell and stepped back to wait.
It took a few minutes, not that Angela or Maurice would judge him. They’d stopped answering their door, too. They didn’t need the reminder. Eventually, though, there was metallic clunking, and the door pulled open inward just enough that Danny’s tired, tired face peered through the gap.
He looked bad. He had hit rock bottom, after all. Fourteen years old, and nowhere left to go.
“Hi, sweetie,” Angela said. She tried for a smile, but it wobbled and fell. She’d seen him at the funeral, of course, standing in front of a graying man in his late forties if Angela had to guess. But she hadn’t seen Danny at all, neither hide nor hair, since then. She wondered if he was being taken care of.
Judging by the paleness in his skin, the limp in his hair, the nothingness in his eyes, he really wasn’t.
“Danny,” Maurice greeted, equally as grimly.
“...Hi,” Danny said, shrinking in on himself. A boy as small as Danny could hardly shrink further, but he sure seemed bound and determined.
“We came by to make sure you were doing alright,” Angela said carefully. Doing alright seemed to be doing a lot of work there. How could he be doing alright? They had wanted to make sure he wasn’t dead.
“...I’m… here,” Danny said, even quieter.
Maurice clicked his tongue, and Angela could practically see his chest collapsing in on itself with how hard his heart must have clenched. She could relate. Danny wasn’t particularly forward with things, and never had been, but this was something else. Danny being here was not, in the slightest, reassuring.
“Can we come in?” Angela asked. She glanced at the empty space above Danny’s head, where a once tall and proud Jack may have stood. As far as Angela could tell, everything looked in order, but she was only seeing through the crack of the door above the boy’s head.
Danny seemed to consider her. He really did look tired. Probably about as tired as Maurice and Angela were, and Jeremy and Pamela too.
Danny stepped back and held the door open.
Much to Angela’s surprise, the house was almost eerily in order. There was a blanket tucked back into the couch just perfectly, there was a sheen on the wooden coffee table that suggested it was freshly Pledge’d, there wasn’t a crumb in sight. A glance into the kitchen found no evidence of life or dishes or anything. It was almost too clean. Danny hadn’t been an incredibly neat boy prior, and likely no one had hired a cleaning service, so how…?
“I can’t stop cleaning,” Danny mumbled in answer to a question she hadn’t asked. He put a hand in his hair as his father may have done. “I keep thinking that… man, when Mom gets back, she’s not gonna like this mess.” He choked on a breath and averted his eyes. “But then she… she doesn’t come back, and I… I… I don’t know what else to do.”
Control, Angela thought. Her control was working her helping reflex. Danny’s control was making sure the house was presentable for when his family returned.
“Oh, honey,” was all Angela said, because she didn’t know how to respond. She opened her arms to him just briefly. Danny didn’t move forward, but he didn’t back away either, and Angela took that as permission.
She squeezed him, so tight, imagining the way that Tucker would fit perfectly in her arms. Tucker had a little height on Danny, belying the height he would have grown into inherited from his grandfather, Angela’s father. Still, Danny did fit so perfectly. Danny really was one of the family, anyway.
Danny didn’t quite hug her back, although she did feel small hands curl in fists in her coat. He breathed against her shoulder, great shuddering breaths that were neither as calm nor as collected as the house suggested. Angela thought again—he was fourteen years old. Fourteen, and grieving everyone, family and friends, living in a horribly empty house.
She curled around him and buried her face in his hair. It was the wrong shade and wrong texture of black, but it was close enough. It was what she had. He wasn’t Tucker, but in that moment he didn’t have to be. He was here, filling her arms, taking up a space that had been sorely empty for two entire weeks.
“Mrs. Foley?” Danny asked after a long, shuddering moment. She’d insisted on Aunt Angela, or at least Angela in the past, but he’d been raised different than that, and that was fine.
She pressed a kiss into his hair anyway. “Yeah, baby?”
“I tried.”
She thought. Of burnt hands and burnt cheeks. Of a boy found near unconscious in the rubble. She didn’t know how, but almost certainly he had tried. To save them, to reach them. Anything he could. She thought of the little girl standing between Tucker and a blond-haired boy, glaring him down. She thought of a young man with a bloody nose, a black eye, and two grinning best friends on either side safe from harm. She thought of Tucker, distracted, walking into a street and Danny, alert, yanking Tucker away from a speeding car by the back of his shirt.
There was no doubt at all. That boy had tried.
“I really,” Danny hiccupped a breath, tucking his face against her. Angela squeezed him tighter. “Really did.”
“I know you did, sweetie,” Angela said quickly, reassuring. Angela didn’t even know, realistically, what he could have done. What he could have tried. She didn’t doubt, at all, that he had. Danny had always, in the past, found a way. “I know you did.”
“Why couldn’t I get there…?” Danny asked, although he didn’t seem to be asking her, instead letting the question drift into the ether, unanswerable. “Why doesn’t anything ever work—“
Even if it had been directed at her, Angela wouldn’t even know what to say.
“Come,” Angela said instead, tugging him around. “Come sit with Auntie.”
They collapsed together into the couch. Angela wrapped her arms tighter around him and tucked him against her, like she had with Tucker in increasing frequency. Tucker had always refused to explain his nightmares or whatever rocked him, and Angela had felt him pulling away more and more from her, but she didn’t press and she didn’t fret. He was a teenager, living in a town wracked by seemingly endless ghost attacks. Even with a hero-adjacent like Phantom around, Angela had seen her increasing share of traumatized children in her office. It was no surprise that Tucker dealt with trauma and pulled away, especially at the ghost hotspot that was Casper High.
“I’m glad,” Angela said quietly, burying yet another kiss in his hair. She’d never been particularly intimate with Danny, even for as long as she’d known and cared for him, but they’d never been in this situation before. He’d always just been the best friend of her son. Now he was the orphan of family friends with no one to turn to. “I am, I’m glad that you couldn’t get there, baby. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything. And what if it had been you, too? What if you were caught in the blast, too? It’s… it hurts, oh baby of course it does, but there are small mercies. I’m just relieved you were far enough from the blast that you weren’t hurt.” His hands and cheeks were still scabbed with pocked burn marks, even two weeks later, and there were some on his arms too that looked like buried debris. He had been so close. He could have been hurt so much more.
Danny didn’t respond to that. A breath hiccupped against her shoulder. She tilted her cheek against him.
“I think…” she said after a long beat. “The only one who could have done anything for them was Phantom. And I think… I think it tried. I like to believe it tried.” Or, would have. No one had seen hide nor hair of Phantom in the two weeks since the explosion. Angela believed, at least to herself, that it had tried to get to them. Maybe it had been injured in the blast. There had been no glowing puddle of green ectoplasm, as far as Angela knew, but would there be if it was completely discorporated?
Angela didn’t always know where to stand with Phantom. Some of her clients looked at it with stars in their eyes, others with fire. Property destruction was rampant wherever it was, but lives were saved. And besides, Tucker had always vehemently supported Phantom, throwing his weight behind it and insisting that it wasn’t just some hero-adjacent, it was a Hero full stop. And that had done plenty to sway Angela in the past.
It was just that… well, why couldn’t it get to her baby and the others? Where had it been? Had it not known? Maybe that was why Angela believed that it was injured, that it tried. Because that was better than assuming it had sat back and watched.
Much to Angela’s surprise, at her mention of Phantom, Danny choked hard and stared at her with massive blue eyes. Despite being around ghosts all his life, Angela knew Danny was terrified of them; it was something Tucker used to poke fun at him for, although that had stopped not long after Danny’s accident. It probably couldn’t help, too, that Jack and Maddie had disparaged Phantom with every possible breath. Was Danny scared of Phantom specifically, or…?
Tears flooded his eyes quickly. A trigger of some sort, and Danny choked again and his face pinched and he leaned down against her and let out the most horrible, most painful sob Angela had ever heard. Angela’s heart clenched, and her hand disappeared in his hair.
“He tried!” Danny gasped loudly, begging and weeping. “H-he tried, he tried s-so hard Mrs. Foley he tried he tried.”
Danny had been there—had been the only one other one there—so he must have seen. Seen Phantom limp off afterward, defeated by the blast? Seen him discorporate before his very eyes? She couldn’t know, but he insisted so hard, and he was the only one who would know.
“I believe you,” Angela said softly, rocking his finally weeping frame. “I believe you, baby. Phantom tried, and isn’t that so good? That it… th-that he tried, for them?”
“He should have tried harder,” Danny spat wetly, accusingly, antithetical to what he had begged previously. Phantom had tried so hard, possibly discorporated, but he should have tried harder? “If he wasn’t so slow and stupid and useless—“
“Danny honey, calm down,” Angela hushed. It was the exact sort of language that would make exactly zero teenagers calm down, and Angela knew that and knew better. She rubbed his back to circumvent a tantrum—although really it was unfair to call it that—and tucked him back beneath her chin. Phantom had tried, and to Angela… well, it hurt that he hadn’t succeeded, but Phantom believing that her child, his friend, and his friend’s family were important enough meant something. The ache was there, but it was… lessened, somehow. “He tried, and that’s what matters.”
“H-he should have tried harder…” Danny wept. Angela sighed and bundled him tighter beneath her. Maybe, though, it was scary to think about Phantom trying but still utterly failing. When your larger-than-life, super-powered ghost hero couldn’t even save the people you cared about, maybe that was scary. To know that they were doomed from the start… Angela cut that line of thought off entirely. “Why didn’t it work why didn’t he try why didn’t I try harder… I tried… oh god, I tried...”
The switch from ‘he’ to ‘I’ startled Angela, who was still trying to catch up with Danny’s thought process as he stumbled into pleas for forgiveness. He wept apologies, kept using ‘I’ statements, claimed that it was his fault as if Danny at fourteen could cause an explosion like that in any way. Angela couldn’t keep up, so she held him tighter and let him babble out what must be the first time being supported through a breakdown, probably since the funeral.
Angela had no answer for him. Rather, she buried kisses in his silky black hair, wrapped him up tight, and held him through it.
When Danny’s desperate weeping and begging for forgiveness finally slowed down, Maurice came around the couch and sat on the coffee table in front of them. Maurice was a social worker and had a social worker’s active mindset, so Angela wasn’t that surprised that he hadn’t joined her in comforting Danny. He’d likely been poking around, making sure FentonWorks was safe and healthy for an admittedly miserable teenager.
“Danny,” Maurice said carefully, leaning forward. “I need you to be honest with me. Are you eating?”
Danny cracked open an eye and lifted his head from Angela’s shoulder. He was suspiciously silent. Angela, unfortunately, wasn’t surprised. Neither she nor Maurice had been eating much, either.
It’s just, it was different when it was Danny. Because he was only fourteen, because Angela loved him nearly as much as she loved Tucker. Because Angela and Maurice were both helpers, and helping rarely went to themselves, just extended beyond.
“Danny, what are you eating?” Maurice pressed. When Danny continued not answering, Maurice continued, “because I saw what’s in that kitchen, Danny, and none of it’s edible anymore. What are you eating?”
Danny’s fingers twirled in Angela’s shirt, but there was still no answer. That was answer enough.
Maurice doesn’t press any further about that. He was a smart man, and he worked with teenagers at least sometimes. When a teenager didn’t want to answer, he simply wouldn’t. “Okay,” Maurice said. “Is someone staying with you, Danny? Or are you here alone?”
Danny still didn’t answer. He tucked back against Angela. Angela kissed him again.
“Danny, who is staying with you? Someone is, right?”
There was a tense moment. Then Danny breathed out something freezing cold, and he nodded. Angela sagged with relief.
“I’m so happy to hear that you’re not alone, Danny,” Maurice said. The words would sound fake and rehearsed from any other man, but Maurice was exceptional at putting real emotions behind them. Maurice really was happy to hear it, and not just because he was familiar with Danny. “Who has been staying with you?”
Danny sniffed. He finally picked his head up and backed out of Angela’s arms, wiping at his face. His cheeks were red and chapped. There was a travel tube of facial moisturizer in her purse, but she didn’t dig it out yet. “My… aunt,” Danny finally said, grimacing. “Was here for a few days. She couldn’t stay long. She lives alone, and she had her animals to take care of, and she couldn’t afford me anyway, and…”
Angela honestly couldn’t imagine being able to up and leave this poor thing, but what did she know?
“Who’s staying with you now?” Maurice insisted.
“My godfather has been, mostly. Vlad Masters. He’s been… out. Grieving, I think. I dunno. He comes back… stinking, though.”
“So no one’s here for you when it counts,” Angela concluded easily. She’d heard the name Vlad Masters from Tucker more than once, mostly through frustrated rants. Tucker was endlessly unimpressed with Vlad Masters. Between Tucker’s rants and this display of negligence, Angela was rather unimpressed, too.
“He’s here,” Danny corrected, although it lacked conviction. “He’s… just, he’s grieving.”
“So are you,” Maurice said. He looked at Angela, who looked back at him. The conviction lacking in Danny’s voice was present in their gaze. “Why don’t you go pack a bag.”
“…What?” Danny wondered.
“This place isn't suitable for you,” Angela agreed. “Pack a bag and you’ll come home with us. We have so many casseroles we’ll never be able to get through them. Help us clear them out.”
“I can’t—“
“Let Auntie Angela and Uncle Maurice take care of you, baby,” Angela insisted. “You need it. You deserve it.”
Danny looked between them. He shifted weight from one side of his body to the other. Then, debating. “…Vlad will wonder where I am,” Danny admitted so quietly.
“That’s alright,” Angela assured. “We’ll leave a note for him, with our name, address, and phone number so he can find you. But you need to not be here. You need to be with people who will love you.”
Danny looked at his lap. Adjusted his binder. Picked at his shirt. Finally mumbled, “I don’t want to impose.”
“You’re not. We’re insisting.”
It took a few extra long beats before Danny finally stood, mumbled something, and went upstairs. Angela sighed and slumped against the back of the couch, touching the spot on her shoulder where Danny had bawled. She didn’t know what about Phantom had set Danny off so badly, but that was Danny’s business to share if he so chose, and not Angela’s to press about.
Maurice nodded his head toward the kitchen and showed her what things he’d found. The kitchen was as spotless as the rest of the house, furiously cleaned in a bid for control, but the fridge was mold spore central aside from the few things that actually moved. There were several hot dogs in there, and they were all growling. This sort of mold and decay wasn’t just from two weeks untouched. Had Danny eaten everything edible, or had Jack and Maddie been back to neglecting parenting again? Angela loved Jack and Maddie, really she did, but there was a reason she invited Danny and even Jazz to their house for suppers so frequently.
She sighed. Her heart ached.
Danny came back down with a small purple duffle in hand and his pillow tucked beneath his arm. In the meantime, Angela wrote a note for Vlad and left it someplace prominent: Danny with us. Family friends. And accompanied it with their address and her cell phone number.
Angela and Maurice escorted him out of the house and into their warm car, only pausing to let Danny type his code into the panel and lock the place up tight. Danny looked up at the place, his old house, like he would never see it again. Maybe that was okay. He would stay, safe and warm at the Foleys. He wasn’t Angela’s baby, but he was close. Maybe it would be enough for her. Maybe, one day, it would even be enough for him. He could grieve his old life, but turn back to the new one, with Maurice and Angela supporting him as he needed, as he deserved.
If only.