"Phanniemay/Dannymay” Day 1: Bruises-PM13 & Hope-DM
a note for my participation is that i’m picking a prompt from past PMs and DM each and combining them in a bizarre attempt to do both lol.
this one’s set in my Raised by Ghosts au bc idk how to do non-au stuff¯\_(ツ)_/¯
spoilers for stuff later in the au, not that that’s stopped me before
Danny knew something wasn’t quite right about him.
Of course, he’s understood for a long time that he’s not like his family; that he’s not a ghost, he’s human, alive, blood courses through his veins, not ectoplasm, all that jazz, but this is more than that. Or rather, it’s becoming less true.
He also knew that Ember and Skulker weren’t the font of information he believed them when he was younger, but he supposes a ghost that had formed from a person who’d died at about the age he is now (he thinks, assumes, because he isn’t even sure how old he is, let alone her) and a weaker ghost with even less memory of his life that powers himself through robotics wouldn’t really know anything about genetic makeup and how it’s affected by long-term exposure to ectoplasmic radiation to an extreme level.
Not that he does either, and he’s scared, but his caretakers are fighters, and when he shows signs of ghostly powers, they decide he should at least know how to use them properly. (Once they get past the freak out of him partially phasing through things or softly hovering in his sleep.) Sadly they overestimated just how far his powers went, which, really, it’d taken this long for them to develop to this point, something below even the lowest level ghosts, what were they expecting?
Of course, that was awhile ago now, and he’s grown since then, able to fly on his own, if only for brief flights, and can even manifest small ecto-balls that his “loving parents” are eager to teach him how to aim and make stronger. By example, especially.
He’s pretty sure they’re forgetting that even if whatever is happening to him, be it forming his own core or simply adapting to ectoplasm, he is still human. Mostly.
He can’t complain to much about it though–he can, and does, technically, because who would appreciate a punch to the sternum only accompanied by a “Gotta think fast, kid.”–because their combined efforts to prepare him for the ghost zone, to allow him to handle himself out there to some degree, has also brought them closer together, allowed him to understand his family in a way he’d never been able to before.
Kitty liked to take him on cruises through the air in the human world when he was a kid, which he’d loved, but it couldn’t compare to the companionship he felt as he flew alongside her, stumbling with her to catch him and all.
Johnny, aloof as he pretended to be, once told him when they were chased out of a convenient human city that sometimes you just have to take things in stride and make the best of the shit fate hands you, and his growing powers were just another example of that, he was sure.
Skulker and Ember always fought off other ghosts with vigor while all he could do was watch, and now he thinks, maybe one day he’ll be able to defend them as they’ve done for him all his life.
So if getting a little beat up now meant all that and more, he’d throw himself into it until he could kick Skulker’s ass.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
for the sake of having it here, here’s the original first two chapters of this AU. i’m redoing them now, mostly because i don’t write like this anymore and i wanna fix characterization.
