I own nothing!
Sketchbook
Danny has always kept his sketchbook close by. He got it from a friend, and eventually got a ghostly one to replace it. This one could store all of his drawings he would ever make. He tells it, more than anyone or anything else, about his life. When he's been depressed, he's drawn inside it. In its pages are inscribed his emotions. Not that he ever lied to Jazz, not 'till the accident, he thinks as he flips the pages, but he almost never tells, or told, her the whole truth. Not everything. He's lied to Sam, and to Tucker, hoping they never catch him doing it, and he remembers that if they ever see his sketchbook, they'll know…everything. They don't know that he's always had powers.
This idea forms a hard, cold pit in his stomach, and he hopes they never find it. If they did, if even Jazz saw everything he's seen and done, they would never think of him the same way again. They thought of him as their friend, their sibling, someone who is unexperienced in the world, who doesn't hear the screams of dying people every night in his sleep, and sometimes wakes up screaming with them.
Danny is someone who has murdered people, or as good as done it, because he remembers every moment. The people whom he'd killed are inside his head, crowding out thoughts of his own. He knows about everything during those ten years that no one else will ever experience, and he can, will only ever tell it to his sketchbook. If he tells anyone else what he remembers, they'll be angry. They never realize how much he hurts on the inside, and he'll never tell them, not if he can avoid it.
He looks into his sketchbook to help him remember, because even a glance at one of his pages can trigger memories. Sometimes he isn't sure he wants these memories, but they shaped him. He knows that not even Jazz knows everything, not about his scars, because not all of them were caused by the fights. No, he's the reason for at least some of them, and he can still recall every detail. No, not all of them were even caused by Danny, but they were still his fault.
Dad doesn't know about all of the scars, and Mom doesn't know either. Jazz wasn't told the reasons for the worst ones. She doesn't know about the ones that crisscross his wrists, like pale webs. The reason he wears long sleeves is something only his Dad and Mom thought they knew, but they don't know it all. They never will, and neither will anyone.
He hopes he can hold on, and he wants to, because he feels like his sanity is knife-edge balanced. A tip a little too far will destroy the precious equilibrium he's built for himself, to keep himself safe from the world, and remain a part of it all the same. He's made walls around his heart, and he's glad Valerie left him, because she was getting too close. Far too close to the truth. If she had stayed, his life would have unraveled, and she doesn't even know it.
He likes to pretend she didn't ask him why he wore long sleeves, or the way she spotted the thin lines on his wrists during the conversation on the Ferris wheel. The way she'd tried to break the news that she way going to break up with him, watching him as if he'd scream, cry, curl up in a ball, or dissolve in a hysterical laughing fit. The relief, and the anger he'd felt, because she wasn't going to pry anymore, but she wasn't going to date him because she thought he was too easy to hurt. She didn't know that he felt that way, and he would never tell her.
He won't tell anyone but the sketchbook in his hands. He knows that as well as he knows that 1+1=2.
One Shot Time!Read, review, and make my day!
-MiaulinK
