Chapter Text
The city is something so terribly alive, like this.
Overlaid atop the neat streets and reaching buildings is a half-there vibrance: thin gold lines that reach and tangle, not a true visual but a felt sensation. Wired electricity is threaded through every boulevard and side-street; it snakes within each home and office. It pulsates, voltage moving. Amity Park, energized, is made to shiver.
Above it, Phantom feels the city, eyes closed. He tracks the power. He notes its normalcy and its anomalies—the record store on main needs to call an electrician—and tries not to get overwhelmed by just how much of it there is. Three years ago, his corpse arced with light, and the light never left.
It was a cruel trick. Even as he shied away from light switches, from the microwave, from hair dryers and his parents’ wretched laboratory, he could not get away from himself. From humanity, who rely on electricity in everything. From his core which shows it all to him—which tells him in such excruciating detail all the many things that could light him up.
So he submitted to it. Phantom let lightning play between his fingers.
Eventually, it stopped terrifying him into detransforming.
Phantom opens his eyes. Below, he sees streets and buildings and nothing more. Thin crowds of people walk along, huddled in coats and scarves. All is as it’s ever been. But, for Phantom, the sixth-sense sensation of Amity Park’s electric web persists, forever-hum held in his cheek. A worse reminder of his death for its eternity.
He endures it. He can only endure it.
Static patters its way up his spine and shocks his hair straight up. Phantom snaps alert, turning his attention back to the web. He sinks into it, parses it, and… there. The south end of town, where a few warehouses are. The web ripples. A disturbance; a ghost.
He sucks in and lets out a useless breath. And then he flies.
For all that death has taken from and cruelly gifted him, Danny isn’t unhappy. He has his friends. He has the comforting normalcy of high school. He has Jazz, and, however distantly, their parents. He has flight. The night sky. He isn’t still falling through floors.
Danny likes things the way they are. It’s stable, and when things fall out of alignment, he can fix them. When he and Sam and Tucker get into petty arguments, he can smooth them over. When his parents invent something new to flay him head to tail, he can sabotage it. When ghosts attack the city, he can defeat them, pack them away in a thermos, return them to the Ghost Zone. He can ignore the reaching, gravelike song of the portal when he does.
It’s winter. He’s been dead for years. It’s old news now; all else is details.
Today is a Saturday in the January of Danny’s senior year of high school, and he’s sure it’s going to be a good one.
“I’m going to kill you!”
Danny gasps with laughter. Tucker, one hand covered in a truly grotesque amount of mayonnaise, is reaching over the back of the couch to faux-strangle Sam. She’s similarly cackling, pushing at his reaching hands, leaning so far away it looks like she’s about to topple over and off the couch entirely. Danny, innocent bystander that he is, watches the chaos with hands clutched to his stomach, laughing hard enough to hurt.
“No, no, not in my hair!” Sam is shriek-laughing, Tucker now halfway over the couch and wiggling his fingers threateningly as she finally slides onto the floor to get away from him.
Between cackles, Danny gets out: “The first red flag you should have noticed was that Sam made you a sandwich at all. The second was that she actually made you a sandwich with roast beef in it—” He’s cut off when Tucker abruptly switches targets, and Danny screams unflatteringly, flailing away from the mayonnaise hand.
While Tucker’s distracted with Danny, Sam manages to sneak away for a napkin, returning to clap it dramatically over Tucker’s hand, neutralizing the threat. Safe from being smeared, she says: “Dad found out he doesn’t actually like roast beef only after buying half a pound of it. So, better to use it than waste it.”
“And you still think I’m going to eat that sandwich after the havoc it just wreaked?” Tucker asks incredulously, wiping his hand with the napkin. It doesn’t do much more than smear the mayo around.
Together, Sam and Danny say: “Yes.”
Tucker glares at them. And then he says: “Yeah, well, you’re right,” licks lingering mayo off his fingers, and walks off to shove more of the sandwich in his mouth. Through bites, he says: “I would never let good meat go to waste.”
“You’re a freak,” Sam says fondly, and collapses backwards over the couch to lay upside-down beside Danny, legs kicked up over the back of the sofa. Danny watches them both with a grin he can’t help.
They’re in Sam’s basement, in a lounge area with an adjoining kitchenette. Over the past year or so, the three of them have been spending a lot more time here than at either of the others’ places. Sam’s parents are, admittedly, a handful—but that’s only when they see them. Avoiding them is child’s play when it’s this easy to disappear in Sam’s house. The Manson estate is a thing that swallows, that keeps secrets—and with Fentonworks growing ever more electric-bright, and Tucker’s house too cloying, something hidden is what they need.
“If any of us here’s a freak, it’s you,” Tucker says, gesturing at Sam.
“I think at this point we’re a gaggle of freaks,” Danny chimes in. “Hacker nerd with no game, rich goth activist, walking corpse.” He points at each of them in turn. At his accusations, Tucker gasps in mock offense, but Sam just laughs.
“Aw, Danny, you’re selling yourself short there,” she says. “Walking corpse, with a thing for the girl trying to double-kill him!”
Danny covers his face with his hands, exasperated. “When are you guys going to let that go?”
“Never.”
His cheeks heat. “That was ages ago! And she was great outside of the suit, thank you very much.”
Tucker whips his head around from where he’d been polishing off the sandwich. “Great outside the suit, you say?”
“Oh my god. You know what I meant!”
Sam snickers. “I’m just saying, Danny, with the amount of longing looks you send across the cafeteria, it seems like you still have a crush on her.”
“I don’t have a crush on her!” Danny’s voice grows high with embarrassment, and when both his friends raise their eyebrows, he forces himself to relax. “Seriously, I don’t. I just, you know, wish we could still be friends.” He picks at one of his nails for something to do with his hands. “We even have a sort-of truce going.”
Sam and Tucker exchange a look at that one.
“She is definitely still hunting you, you know that, right?” Tucker says.
“It’s just play,” Danny protests. “She wouldn’t actually double-kill me.”
“Suuure.”
She really wouldn’t. There’s still some resentment there, and she doesn’t trust him necessarily, but when they clash in the air she doesn’t shoot to destroy anymore. Sometimes they’ll even sit and talk.
He and Valerie—they could be good, you know? Not just as partners—and he doesn’t want that anymore, anyway—but in everything. Danny gets Valerie. She’s all passion, rage, pushing-through; she’s fueled by anger in a way he can empathize with, his obsession heavy in his gut. And it’s… you know, it’s fun, flying with her through the air, even if for a long time she was chasing him with intent to hurt. Now that she isn’t as much—now that it’s different—it’s all the more exhilarating. She’s the only human who can follow him there.
It's been even better, too, the past few months. The usual ghostly suspects have been coming by to cause havoc much less often, which means less property damage, fewer casualties, and more opportunity for him to work the Valerie problem. Not to mention how much less stressed he is overall! Danny doesn’t know what caused the slowing of ghost attacks—it’s not like he’s going to stop in the middle of a fight and ask—but it’s become enough of a trend by now that he thinks this might just be the new normal. It’s been such a weight off of his shoulders.
He's in a better place now than he was in that first terrible year. The ghosts have eased off, Valerie is less trigger-happy, he’s made nice with the looming fact of his death… finally, Amity Park is living up to the billboard at its edge: it is a (relatively) safe place to live. And when it isn’t, Danny knows what to do.
So, now that his concerns aren’t so large-scale as the imminent destruction of his home and loved ones, Danny has room in his head for all the things he should have been thinking about this whole time. That is: he’s moping extensively about his social life.
From the kitchenette, where he’s finally washing his hands, Tucker says: “It’s been a while since you guys dated, and with the ghosts chilled out, she’s probably not as overwhelmed as she was freshman year. Why don’t you reach out again?”
“Yeah, you should. She liked you a lot, Danny. She’d probably want to be friends again too.”
Yes, he’s made plenty of headway on the Valerie problem as Phantom. But not as Danny. Selfishly, he wishes he could be friends with her human, too.
“Won’t it be awkward? It’s been like two years, and right now we barely acknowledge each other in the hallways. And even then, my, you know, everything complicates it.”
“You just said you guys have a truce going.”
“I do! But I’ll still be lying to her.”
“So, what, are you’re planning on telling her you’re Phantom?”
“Well, no, I just… ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t even try.”
“Danny, no, we’re not trying to discourage you. I do think it would be good for you to make friends with her again,” Sam says, turning to look at him. Then she cracks a grin. “But, you know, any kind of normal friendship with her has definitely sailed by now.”
He huffs, rolling his eyes. “Okay, yeah,” Danny says. “Whether or not she ends up finding out, it’s still gonna be weird for me, I get it.” Then he sighs. “I kind of do want her to know, though. Eventually.”
Tucker walks back into the room then. As he does, Sam kicks her feet where they’re thrown up over the back of the couch. Passing by, he grabs them and shakes them around, making her laugh. Danny can’t help but smile at their antics.
“Aw, buddy,” Tucker’s saying as he walks around the couch. He pats Danny’s head as he passes by and slides in to sit next to him. “It’s okay. We know you just want her to be making attempts on your life twenty-four seven.”
“Shove off, thank you,” he bites out, cheeks bright red. “That’s not the point!” His tone, there, is not quite as light as he meant it to be. Sam and Tucker both notice, and their giddy energy subsides. Sam swings her feet around to sit upright again, and both of them lean in to him, their shoulders against his a comforting press.
“What’s up, then?” Sam asks.
For a moment, the words don’t come out of his mouth. Danny isn’t good at this.
“I don’t know, I… don’t you guys feel like we’ve missed out?”
“On what?” Tucker says.
“High school, I guess,” Danny says quietly. “If neither me or Valerie were… you know. Maybe we could have actually dated, or been real friends at least.”
Sam’s mouth quirks up at the edge. “You remember what she was like at the start of freshman year, though, right? If you hadn’t come along, she’d probably still be in with Paulina and them. No chance she’d stoop to befriend the likes of us.”
Danny cringes at the reminder. “I guess you’re right.”
“I get what you mean, though,” Tucker says. “It’s been quiet these past few months, hasn’t it? You’ve actually been passing tests.” He bumps their shoulders together good-naturedly and Danny shoots him a look, though without any significant heat.
“Yeah,” he admits. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had the chance to think about, like, normal teenager stuff, I don’t even know what to do with myself.”
On either side of him, Sam and Tucker both lapse into a considering silence. Danny uses the moment to take in the room around them: Sam’s basement, luxuriously plush and just the right amount of dim and moody, around the corner from all the extravagant amenities her parents had installed. It feels far away from the world—either world, ghost or human.
“You know,” Tucker says quietly, “sometimes Mikey invites me to play chess with him after school on Fridays. I’ve never said yes, ’cause… you know. Everything.”
“You could,” Danny murmurs, and stops himself from saying more.
Tucker makes a noncommittal, but thoughtful, noise. On Danny’s left, Sam leans a little further into his shoulder.
“This isn’t just about Valerie,” she says softly.
Danny is in a better place now than when he first died. But he still died, you know? There was so much axed in that moment. So much burnt away into the yawning pit inside him, that which crackles, that which bites with static like metal, like scrabbling. He is human but ghosthood crowds it out. Three years isn’t time enough to find the real on-off switch—he doesn’t know how to be two things at once, or one thing at all. Of course he’s missing out. Death demands his full attention, and life nips irritatedly at his heels.
Danny wants to be a teenager. He wants to join some club, or do track and field. He wants to have sleepovers and go camping in the summers. He wants it without all this weight.
“Monday,” Sam says definitively.
“What?”
“Monday, at school, you’re going to go talk to her. Invite her to hang out with us over the weekend or something.”
“Wait, isn’t that a little—"
“No, you’re doing this, dude,” Tucker joins in, cutting him off. “We’re making this happen.”
“Guys,” Danny tries to protest, not sure why he wants to protest, but then they each take one of his shoulders and start shaking him, chanting “do it! do it! do it!” and he can’t help but laugh. He loves them, he really does.
“Okay, okay!” he relents, still laughing. “I’ll talk to her, now stop!” They let him go, twin smug looks on their faces.
“Look at you,” Tucker says. “Halfway to being a normal teenager already. We just need Dash to start shoving you in lockers again.”
“Whoa, let’s not go that far,” Danny says, but he’s smiling too.
Later, just as the sun is setting, Danny statics up the entire couch and shocks both of his friends.
“Ow,” Sam says pointedly.
“Is this because of the overshadowing thing? Because I am not changing my stance on that, dude. It sucks.”
“No, I didn’t do it on purpose! Ghost sense,” Danny explains, grimacing. Sam and Tucker both make appropriate ugh and come on noises.
“So much for the seven-day streak without an incident,” Tucker says.
“Will we ever get there?” Sam wonders wistfully.
“Not in our lives, I fear.”
“Or our deaths!”
“Don’t be dramatic, I think it’s just Johnny and Shadow,” Danny says, tasting the electric lick that taps at the back of his throat. “With any luck, they’re just here to lurk and won’t be any trouble.”
“Luck is a dangerous word to use with him,” Tucker warns. Danny waves him off and sets to extricating himself from the teenager-pile they’ve made.
The three of them have been squished into the couch for the past few hours chatting and relaxing into the cushions, getting tangled up with each other. They’d just put on a movie, too, and Danny was really looking forward to spending the evening here and eventually needling Sam into letting him stay the night. Alas, duty calls.
“I’m telling you, dude, you should look into the scent marking thing,” Tucker says as Phantom transforms, ready to head out.
“Gross, and no.”
“Ghosts have lairs, right? If you just, like, mark your territory—”
“I will not be doing that.”
“It doesn’t have to be literally marking it! I didn’t mean it had to be that!”
“Okay! Going to start a fight and cause property damage now, good-bye!” Phantom shouts over Tucker and darts away. As he goes, behind him, he can just hear Sam’s cackle of a laugh. He smiles.
As he rises through the earth and emerges into air, Phantom turns his attention to the web.
It’s not something he can turn off, as a ghost, and it lingers like aftertaste when he’s human, not wholly there. He could tap into it while human if he tried, he thinks. And it wants to be tapped into. The web forever-pulsates, hums, so overwhelmingly bright.
Amity Park—and, Phantom’s sure, everywhere else, if he’ll ever get out of town—swells with electricity. It’s everywhere, running through everything, and when he lets his other senses fade out, he can feel the shape of the whole city. The web lines it, emphasizes it; Phantom can feel the places where it jerks, stutters, ripples. It’s eternally convenient, given that ghosts disrupt the flow of electricity just by hanging around.
Most ghosts, Phantom’s figured out, can just sense ectoplasm. But Amity Park is teeming with ambient ectoplasm, so much that his natural ghost sense is too muddied with it for Phantom to parse. He can’t figure out how the others do it. So, instead, he uses the web. And Amity Park remains itself, uncomplicatedly liminal.
Through the fog of ectoplasm, he knows this city like the back of his hand, Lichtenberg figure and all.
That said, it’s easy to find them. He was right—it is Johnny and Shadow, set up on a billboard overlooking the highway that leads west out of town. Johnny is throwing crushed aluminum cans down onto the road and watching drivers jerk in surprise, a distant, thinking look visible on his face. Shadow, hiding in Johnny’s, eyes barely visible and completely unreadable, watches.
“Hey,” Phantom calls sharply, catching the latest can before it can fall. Normally, he might not bother, but with the roads all icy and the sky threatening to snow, this makes him uneasy.
“Hey yourself, squirt.” Johnny throws him an easy grin. Shadow seems to ripple in what Phantom will cautiously assume is a greeting.
“Could you not? You could cause a crash doing that.”
“Phantom, you’re no fun at all.” Johnny gives him brief, unserious puppy dog eyes.
Johnny 13, Shadow, and Kitty are a weird case. They were never outright enemies to him, and generally only caused trouble for him incidentally. As such, over the past couple of years their relationship has gone from frustrated antagonism to, like… Phantom is a disgruntled, minimum wage grocery store employee shooing away the idiots doing donuts in the parking lot. Or something. It’s complicated.
Johnny and Kitty—who knows about Shadow—have always both looked about nineteen or twenty years old. It’s weird to think he’s catching up to them.
“Comes with the job,” Phantom says. “Come on, if you want to throw shit around, do it at the junkyard. There’ll be plenty of teenagers there for you to terrorize, and it’s already a mess.”
“Not my scene,” Johnny replies, clipped. There’s an edge of irritation to his tone that Phantom hadn’t picked up on before, and he drifts back a foot, reassessing. Behind Johnny, Shadow narrows their eyes.
“So you’re going to cause one down on the highway?” Phantom carefully prods.
Instead of rearing up at the jab, Johnny just looks at him, jaw set. Then he huffs and rolls his eyes. “If I stop throwing the cans, will you scram? Shadow and I were having a discussion.”
Phantom shoots a surprised look at Shadow. He didn’t know it talked. He’s never heard it talk, at least—maybe it and Johnny have a telepathy thing going on?
“Sure. But if you start being a nuisance, I will thermos you.”
Johnny shakes his head. “On my honor, kid, we’re just here to hang out. Not gonna make any new ghosts.”
He seems genuine, which piques Phantom’s curiosity. He never sees Johnny serious about anything. As quickly as it’s piqued, however, he pushes his curiosity aside—whatever it is, it’s not his business. And honestly, with the kind of drama that usually goes on between Johnny, Kitty, and Shadow, he probably doesn’t want to know what a ‘serious discussion’ of theirs entails.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Phantom warns.
“Uh-huh.” Johnny bites the inside of his cheek, worrying it like he’s searching for something else. He seems like the kind of guy to smoke, Phantom thinks fleetingly—and then, are there ghost cigarettes, he wonders?
At his lingering, Johnny makes eye contact with Phantom and reaches out to slide the rest of the cans very deliberately away from himself. “See, look? We’re harmless.”
Phantom huffs a laugh. “Sure. I’ll see you around, Johnny,” he says, deciding to take Johnny at his word. He turns, poised to fly off, before something stops him and makes him look back. “Let me know if you need anything.”
He doesn’t know why he offers it—he certainly never has before—but Johnny’s surprised look, and the amused tilt at the corner of his lips makes Phantom feel like he made a right choice. And hey—Johnny and Kitty and Shadow aren’t so bad.
He leaves without a fight. As he goes, the electric web’s calm pulse tells Phantom that Johnny is sticking to his word.
Phantom flies back toward Sam’s. Gazing at the horizon, that cloudy, wintry dusk with just a hint left of sunset, he thinks: Yeah. Today was a good day.
Of course, it would be that thought that turned his luck. Or maybe it’s Johnny and Shadow’s lingering presence. Take your pick—either way, Danny Phantom has never been known for good luck.
Halfway to Sam’s, he gets called out to by a pedestrian. It’s a girl from Casper High, some sophomore whose name he doesn’t know, though he does recognize her. She’s a member of the—shudder—Phantom Phan Club. Every day he curses that Casper actually allowed them to make the club official.
He tries not to interact with people as Phantom too often. He’s been known to, on occasion, but he usually doesn’t. He could just fly on, leave her behind, and she and the other club-members would continue mooning over him or hero-worshiping him or whatever it is as per usual.
But today he’s in a good mood. And it’s only one person, and sometimes… well, sometimes it’s nice to talk to people like this. Sue him, but he does like the attention a bit. It feels good to be thanked.
Against his better judgement, Phantom slows and changes course, drifting down to greet the girl. Her smile brightens at his acknowledgement.
“Hi,” he says softly when he gets within a few feet of her, toning down the ghostly crackle to his voice, the bright gravity of his glow. “Did you need something?”
She looks up at him with that shining kind of admiration he doesn’t know how to take. At least it’s without any extra adoration. Not one of the girls madly in love with him, then.
“Oh no, I didn’t need—I mean, I’m sorry to interrupt you, I’m sure you have more important—uh—!” She trips over her words, clearly not having planned this far.
He really doesn’t know how to respond to these kinds of people. Phantom smiles at her blandly and prompts: “Just wanted to say hello?”
“That—uh, yes.” She suddenly adopts a shifty look, and glances over her shoulder. “Would it be okay if I—? I mean, can the others…”
The girl stands on the corner of Main and Frogwood. She’s bundled in a fuzzy-looking pink coat, a hand-knit scarf around her neck, and warming her hands is some sort of hot drink, clearly from the coffee shop at her left. The shop itself is lit warmly, abuzz with young-sounding voices. Up until now, Phantom hadn’t taken notice of it.
But, no sooner than “others” has left her mouth, and Phantom realizes that shit, she’s not alone, does a crowd of teenage girls appear from around the corner. Each of them have coffees or hot chocolates or teas in hand.
And absolutely all of them are from his stupid, stupid fan club.
“Guys!” Phantom’s assailant chirps excitedly. “Look, it’s him!”
The burst of yelling that follows startles Phantom so badly that he drops the last few feet toward the pavement. A stupid move—in an instant, the small mob surrounds him. Grounded as he is, it’s easy for them to crowd him up against the wall of the coffee shop, dozens of over-the-moon-excited faces and voices filling Phantom’s vision and sending him completely off-balance. He presses himself back against the bricks, the rough texture keeping him sane amongst the noise and claustrophobia. It’s late evening. There aren’t many people out and about anymore, especially with the weather, and certainly no one to chide the girls off except Phantom himself.
Hah. Three years, and he still doesn’t know how the hell to deal with fans.
Papers are being shoved toward him—are they seriously asking for his autograph?—and invitations are being shouted, questions being asked, reaching hands stretching, looking to grab onto him and hold. There are so many of them, and his body is locking up, unsure who to look at, who to answer, what to do. Phantom feels electricity rising in his throat, the zap-terror of being looked at too closely, thought about too hard. They just keep crowding him, and crowding him, and talking, and yelling, and crowding him—
“Won’t you come hang out with us for the night?”
“Sign my notebook!”
“Who were you out dealing with tonight? Was it the Box Ghost again?”
“You’re so cool, Phantom!”
“Hey, stop shoving, let me in—”
“Phantom, will you—”
“Phantom, I—”
“Phantom.”
“Phantom!”
“Phantom.”
“Phan—”
He can’t do it, he’s not made for this, he wants them to get away from him, stop touching him, stop looking at him, stop, stop, stop, stop—
The voltage jerks up and bursts from his throat.
“Get back!” Phantom shouts, a tumble of voice laced with electricity. Now that the panic’s bubbled up, he’s already moving to shout again, holding back the instinct to shove—maybe he’ll just bolt directly upward—he sucks in a breath, opens his mouth to speak, but—
They all, in unison, take a few steps backward.
Phantom freezes in place. The fans are all still squealing and shoving each other, but they don’t get any closer. They don’t even seem to notice anything has changed.
Eyes wide, Phantom says: “Go away,” his voice dry and thin with lightning. It’s half-plea, half-experiment. He thinks, suddenly, very clearly, that humans are nothing more than electric meat.
The fan club members turn and leave, their frantic shouts seamlessly becoming chatter amongst themselves, moment apparently entirely forgotten.
The immediate crackle in Phantom’s throat subsides, but it does not entirely leave. A light snow begins to fall. As the fans walk away, their hair stands straight up, as though Phantom had rubbed them all down with balloons.
He swallows. And closes his mouth.
And thinks about how the brain tastes. So many new tiny, complicated pieces of his electric web.
