Author's Note: Cross-posted from AO3.
He winces when he reforms his legs, landing silently in his bedroom. Two hours before school; that's enough time to assess the damage Skulker did and get a little more sleep. If only every early bird ghost were so considerate!
Fumbling at his throat, he unzips his HAZMAT suit to the waist, slips his arms out of the sleeves and has to grind his teeth to keep from crying out. Limping to his closet, he toes open the door after kicking aside some dubiously clean laundry. He doesn't bother with a light. After all, he's his very own ectoplasmic light source these days.
In the mirror hanging off his closet door, his faintly illuminated eyes give him an almost sinister, if tired, expression. A puffy bruise, the exact shape of Skulker's metal fist, darkens one cheek, explaining the slight difficulty he has blinking with that eye. Naked from the waist up, the Kelly green bruises stretching across his back from shoulder to hip-courtesy a plasma blast that cannonballed him fifty feet into the sidewalk-fills his room with gentle green light. He thinks of National Geographic footage, of deep sea fish with their crackly-looking dark skin brightened by dots and lines of bioluminescence, and he grins at his reflection.
His knuckles are raw too, he notes as he gingerly eases his arms into the suit again. Crusty green scabs crack open and shut when he flexes his fingers, eliciting small but sharp bursts of pain. He'll need to clean up before he goes to bed if he doesn't want to explain ectoplasm stains on his sheets. Again.
Before he changes back, he pads over to the bedroom door, wincing as he legs remind him that they're just as banged up as the rest of him. Invisibly, he phases partway through the door-locked, as always these days-to see if the rest of the Fenton household is still sound asleep. The second floor hallway is dark and silent, and he can't hear anything from the first floor either.
Satisfied, he slips back through his door, opting to hover rather than walk to his rumpled bed. A flash of white light and he's human again, all his bruises hidden away on Phantom's skin. The only evidence that he might have just had an all-out brawl with a ghost three times his size (and powers or not, punching metal still hurt) is the green still crusted on his healed knuckles and a pronounced stiffness as he reaches for the hand wipes he keeps in his nightstand drawer.
That's the nice thing about being a supernatural superhero, he thinks. Sure he's banged up pretty bad just about every week (or every couple of days, or hours, depending on the ghosts of the week...), but Danny Phantom doesn't have bones to break, not really. Just an approximation of a skeleton, an instinctual memory of a skull to protect the ectoplasm functioning as his brain. If his parents ever succeeded in catching the Ghost Kid, they'd have a field day with his physiology.
Not that he planned on letting that happen any time soon, of course.
Crawling stiffly, slowly into bed, he double checks that his alarm is set and then relaxes into his pillow with a sigh. Sure, Danny Phantom takes the punches and keeps the bruises, but Danny Fenton always feels plenty sore the next day too!
As he drifts off, he jokingly hopes that Dash hasn't failed any tests lately.