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The sky is cloudless, this new moon night. It’s a peaceful serenity, a counterpart in the ink dark canvas spread across the heavens that sets itself against the far simpler backdrop of daytime. It’s an ink washed sky, speckled with starlight; a dark painting as far as the eye can see, bejeweled and bedazzled with sweet, glimmering things that no one would consider to be deadly, dangerous balls of gas and power millions of light years away.
It’s Danny’s favorite kind of night, and there’s nowhere he’d rather be than in the sky.
On its own, flying is a kind of freedom he’ll never take for granted. For the second child left in the shadows, for the quiet, unpopular, bullied boy he is was, flying was nothing less than a revelation. An escape from the world that would hold him down, a defiance of gravity that kept him planet-locked - something he’d dreamed about since he was a child.
But flying, on a moon-dark night, while the stars stretched out before him in the infinite heavens he could only dream of touching… there was nothing like it in all the world he’d known.
He tumbles across the sky, letting the wind whistle around him as he takes his time. There’s no foe to fight tonight, no curfew to keep with his parents out of town and his sister away at university, and nothing he needs to study. For once, all his ducks are in a row. For once, he can take a night for himself.
And god, what a night it is.
He’s flying amongst the stars. He, sixteen year old Danny Fenton, who the world seemed to come after with spite, could soar amongst the stars. Soar so high not even gravity could pull him down. Soar so high if he reached out just so he could almost imagine that he could touch -
All his life, Danny’s dreamed of the stars. Of joining the precious few humans who’d defied the call of gravity and ventured beyond the Earth to touch what lay beyond their sky. Of watching the stars stretch off into infinity, an endless stretch of space that cradled him and welcomed him, beckoning him to explore all that it was so that he might finally know -
He thinks of his homework, sitting in his bag, done for the first time in over a week. He thinks of his grades, slowly but surely picking up after he’d finally settled into a rhythm as one of Amity Park’s protectors. He thinks of Mr. Lancer’s quiet, proud smile when he handed back their last essay. He thinks of an open application on his desktop at home for a camp over winter break, of essays he’s worked on for weeks, of references he’s painstakingly acquired, and of the allowance he’s been saving just to send it in. He thinks of everything and doesn’t dare hope, because he worries if he thinks about it too much the universe might interject at just the wrong time.
He thinks of Vlad and the tentative peace they’d made. Of Val who knew the truth about him now, and his parents whose views were shifting slowly. Slow, like the tectonic plates that moved across the Earth, but not stagnant. He thinks of how encounters with ghosts feels more like a game and a challenge instead of a life or death grudge match. And he thinks that maybe, when the time comes for him to leave Amity Park in a year and change, he might be able to do it without the guilt weighing him down like gravity desperately trying to ground him as he reached for the stars.
In his ear, his Fenton phone - the only concession he’d made to his safety when taking off into the night - beeps, and he slips his cell phone from a pocket attached to his belt. He smiles widely, hovering in midair as the wind tumbled around him, and connected the call.
“You’re up late,” he says, thinking of cobblestone streets, a river that shone like spilled ink under the moonlight, and maroon banners lining the streetlights of this particular East Coast city as he smiles.
A thousand miles away, tucked into her college dorm, his sister smiles.
“I’m only an hour ahead of you,” she chides softly, warmly, something gentle and beloved wrapping around his soul at the sound of it. “Running a late patrol?” she guesses, knowing that, of the two of them, Danny was almost always the one up the latest.
Danny grins, tucking away his phone to launch back into his flight with a new verve and his sister’s voice in his ear, “Nope,” he laughs, unaware of how his sister’s smile softens at the sound a thousand miles away, “It’s a quiet night,” he continues, wind whistling around him, “homework’s done, the fruitloop’s cooped up in his lab, and the sky’s clear. Thought I could get in some airtime.”
Jazz laughs, “You and your sky,” she murmurs, nostalgically, and though she’s right, she’s also wrong.
The sky was vast and beautiful and freedom in so many ways now that he could dance with the breeze and wrestle with the gale and steal himself away from the Earth’s grounding to just be. But it would always be the stars that own Danny’s heart.
“Yeah,” he says, instead of going into it, and shifts the subject, “how’s college going? Have you conquered the psych department yet?”
He’ll be kind of let down if she hasn't. Not to mention he’s got money on her restructuring the entire department by Christmas with the stubborn obstinacy and willful obliviousness towards any opposition that Jazz vehemently denied she got from their dad.
“ Danny,” she groans, “I’m not conquering the psych department. I’m making a concerted effort at demonstrating that their existing practices in organizing students and coordinating staff office hours in the social sciences relies on a student understanding of long term planning and interdepartmental politics, which is inefficient. Not to mention that their mental health resources could use some serious revamping, and the three thousand signatures I’ve already gotten on my petition agree with me - ,”
Jazz goes on, voice increasing in both pitch and frustration as she vented all the issues she’d noted and was coordinating her, so far, tiny army of like-minded fellows in order to fix, and it was all Danny could do not to laugh. The stars twinkle above him, and he supposes he’s reading too much into things when he imagines the edge of mischief in their gleaming.
It’s only when Jazz is finally winding down - losing steam, at least, for now - that Danny speaks up again, “It’s gotta be a riot over there,” he says, thinking of the peaceful but orderly campus they’d visited last year, and then again a month or so ago when they’d dropped Jazz off for her first semester. He thinks of gleaming crimson and maroon banners, of rich history and tradition etched in each building, and the expectant welcome that would’ve felt oppressive to him, but had been more of a challenge to his sister the moment she’d entered the iron wrought gates. He rather thinks they’ll deserve whatever havoc she wreaks, if only because when she pulls things back together, they’ll be better than they ever were before.
“You should come down one weekend and see,” she says, jumping on it like she’d been thinking about this for a while, “My roommate’s all kinds of wild, she wouldn’t mind sneaking you in to sleep on a futon on the floor.”
He laughs, “Is she Riya’s kind of wild?” he asks, trying to picture it.
Jazz snorts in return, “Is there anyone who’s Riya’s kind of wild?” she demands instead, and Danny snickers. Their neighbor was a bundle of chaotic energy, for all that she’d reprised Eeyore to the nth degree during her and Jazz’s senior year.
Riya was off terrorizing her professors with her partner in crime, Damian Sanchez, at Columbia University, but no one who knew her well enough would ever forget her.
A looming shadow diverts his attention, and he lets the tension that had threaded through him at the sight dissolve easily enough when he recognizes the Ops Center coming into his peripheral view. He hadn’t realized he’d gotten so close to home.
He let himself bank, twisting to land on the Ops Center without making a sound. Sliding to splay himself out on one of the even levels of the massive construction, he crossed one arm behind his head, sheltering against cool steel that didn’t quite register as cold as it should be by this time of year.
“ - you’ll think about it?” Jazz says as he tunes back into their conversation, and he smiles, stars stretching out above him, reflected in the soft pools of his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says, voice gone soft as he let himself settle, “yeah, definitely. Let’s talk about it in the daylight hours though,” he adds, and Jazz laughs.
“Of course, little brother,” she says, and there’s a warmth that flows down to his ice-cold core. He misses her something fierce, something he hadn’t realized would happen when she’d taken that step and left for college, leaving him alone at home. He’ll never begrudge her the path she’s chosen, and Sam and Tucker don’t let him stay lonely for long, but Jazz and Danny are brother and sister and there’s something special and warm there, always had been, even if they hadn’t always known how to quantify it.
There’s a pause, a warm silence they don’t try to fill. They’ve both grown from where they were, two years ago, with Danny’s secret a new and charged thing between them.
Jazz sighs after the long moment, “It’s getting late,” she says, and there’s a hint of regret in her tone. “Are you going to head home anytime soon, Danny?”
“I’m on top of the Ops Center,” he say, catching Jazz’s huff of laughter at the dry response, “but yeah, I’ll head inside in a bit.” He should probably catch up on some sleep since he had the chance. He had it so rarely, though it was more common now than it had been even this time last year.
“Do that,” she orders, the big sister voice he’d learned and dreaded in equal measure shining through, even a thousand miles away, “I’ve got morning classes so I have to hop off. Good night, little brother.”
“G’night Jazz,” he says, smiles really, and lets the call disconnect.
He lingers on the Ops Center, secure within the Ghost Shield only he could get through, for a long while. Stargazing in a more literal sense, laid splayed out on cold steel rather than dancing on the wind, so close he could nearly touch.
It’s only when he feels his eyes sliding closed that he allows his intangibility to ripple through him, and he sinks down towards his room. The ripple of his transformation overtakes him only a split second later, leaving him in his pajamas, ready for bed once more.
The stars gleam into his room, sparkling secretively, and he smiles as he settles into his bed, the dreams of the future melding with the ache of exhaustion that’s plagued him since the accident whisking him off to sleep as the stars watch over him.
It had been a good night.