AN: Hey guys! I don't normally put my author's note at the beginning, but I just wanted to thank everyone who commented and warned me about the code issue. I never would have seen it other wise. Also it's nice to know you read through the story and were able to enjoy it despite the unfortunate non-story text. So now I fixed it, and I hope you can enjoy my one shot uninterrupted.
Thunder clapped overhead and Danny landed on the street and changed back to human. He just didn't have the motivation right now to patrol. Slowly he walked down the main drag. The theater and the mall were behind him and the park was only about a block away. There were small drops of water hitting the pavement ahead, and they were getting closer and closer. Most people wouldn't have seen the rain coming, but Danny's eyes caught it, even at this time of night he could see clearly. He watched as the vague line of raindrops approached, and stepped into the storm.
Lightning lit up the night as cool pin drops of water hit his face. Danny whispered to himself, "One, two, three, four, fiveā¦, ...twenty one, twenty two-" The sky interrupted him with a growl and another flash of light. Danny started over his slow count and thought, "Twenty two miles isn't that far." The rain grew heavier as Danny's feet hit the pavement. The dripping noise was soothing, and the cool water brought relief that only rain could. The next count ended at thirty four. He wasn't sure if the storm was moving away, or if it just spanned eleven miles, so he waited for the next clap of lightning to give him more information.
The rain was landing in big heavy drops now, and Danny's usually gravity resistant hair was flattened to his head. It didn't matter to him though. He loved the rain. His icy core often made him feel uncomfortably warm, never too too hot, but warm. When he was in the rain though the cold water straight from the sky soaked him through and froze him to the bone. It was such a relief, like when you relax enough to get rid of the headache you didn't know you had.
Danny felt the electricity curl in the air and looked up a second before the plasma formed. Danny's ghostly core thrummed in time with the energy and the sound wave hit only a few seconds after. It wasn't that lightning and thunder scared him. No, it was exactly the opposite. All ghosts, even half ghosts loved adrenaline. Most people didn't understand that fear was just misinterpreted adrenaline, and if you understood that you could harness that feeling to draw more power from yourself. Ghosts understood that, and they lived to seek fear and create fear in others. They did it because it was fun and exciting, but in a thunderstorm they didn't have to do anything. The raw power being displayed by nature gave everyone from the youngest child to the oldest ghost a steady stream of anticipation and adrenaline that was easy to feel.
Danny softly smiled at the feeling as lightning once again flashed directly above him. He was right under the storm and he could feel it. Finding motivation in the storm Danny transformed into his ghostly form and flew to the center of the park. Here, at two in the morning, on a school night, no one was going to bother him. Danny knew it was dangerous, and he was still half human and could potentially die if he was struck by lightning, but he couldn't help the want to fly up higher into the clouds. There weren't even any other ghosts up in the sky. He'd taken care of the last one a few hours ago, and for once he had the sky and the storm to himself.
He couldn't hold himself back anymore. The lure of the icy winds and the raw flashes of pure electricity was too much. Danny hesitated just over the trees for a second, but then he flew straight up into the clouds. Dark grey mist swirled around him on all sides obscuring his vision in every direction. Occasionally if he looked down he could almost make out the shadows of trees, but nothing was defined and the clouds quickly covered his sight again. To his left there was a blinding white light that spread out away from him, and there was almost no pause before the thunder hit.
Lightning was now striking every few seconds, sometimes with as little as a single second between them, and Danny glowed brightly relishing in the power of nature. Where the lightning appeared was chaotic. At some point Danny had unconsciously flown higher, and there was lightning below, above, and to every side of the halfa. A grin plastered itself to Danny's face like a permanent feature, and his eyes were unblinking even when water would sometimes fly sideways and hit him in the eye. Danny's eyes were blue as his core was empowered by the cold, and every drop of water that hit him froze. Most the ice and snow fell off in the wind, but just enough remained to coat his hair which was frozen in upward spikes. As the lightning struck around the halfa it reflected on the ice forming around him making it look as though Danny himself were giving off an electrical charge.
Then the sky decided to give Danny a real electrical charge, and he experienced what he'd feared would happen. Lightning struck him dead in the chest. Everything slowed to a hundredth it's speed or less. Every millisecond lasted for a minute, and a full second was an hour. First Danny became blind and deaf. All he could see, hear, smell, taste, or feel was lightning. Then his skin began to sizzle and Danny kicked in his ecto singer on an instinct reaction to the electricity in the air.
It was that one move, activating his weak electric powers, that likely saved Danny's life. Instead of flowing through his core and destabilizing him, as the lightning most likely would have done were he not using his ecto stinger, the energy flowed through his core and fueled his ecto stinger. The ecto ability had not been focused, so instead of shooting out of his hands it shot out from his aura. The electricity surged out in every direction, back into the atmosphere, and Danny's normally glowing aura became so bright it obscured him completely.
The way the ecto stinger usually worked was it took some of the friction or momentum Danny had built up and it channeled that energy into a small stunning charge. Now was different. Now it was drawing energy from the very air, and it didn't stop when the lightning did. The electricity surrounding Danny grew larger and larger as it pulled energy from the air. The light show from below, if anyone had been watching, was amazing, and went on for almost a full minute. It seemed like much longer to Danny, and when it finally stopped so did the storm.
Everything stopped, and Danny slowly lowered himself to the ground, suddenly feeling unsteady in the air. He felt different, he was different. He could feel it in his core, no longer was he just an ice guardian. From his core outward he could feel the energy buzzing. Danny brought a tiny piece of the energy to the surface and watched the spark dance across his fingertips before he shot it into the air. It was different than his ice. His ice felt very graceful and ridged. It was fitting for a guardian. Electricity felt like exhilaration. It was fear, adrenaline, power, speed, and energy, and yet it was just an undercurrent. It was a power to draw on that he would always feel in his subconscious, like his ice.
Daze by his revelation Danny decided it was best if he called it for the night. He flew home and was shocked to find it was past 4:30 in the morning. He'd been out there for two and a half hours in the storm. Danny was glad he grabbed a few hours of sleep before the box ghost woke him up at 1:30. Danny changed back to Fenton and began to get dressed, but he only got his shirt off before his sister walked in.
"Danny?" Jazz asked peaking her red head into the room, and then she saw Danny and she gasped. Danny was standing in the middle of his room in nothing but jeans. His hair was wild in a way that made his usual messy hair seem polished, and it was riddled with snowflakes that stood out clearly in his black hair. Jazz had only seen Danny without a shirt once since she learned he was Phantom, but the scars still shocked her. Right now though, the scars were the least of her problems. Dead center in the middle of Danny's chest was a massive scorch mark. "What happened?" Jazz raced over to her brother fussing.
Danny frowned and pushed Jazz back so he could move to the mirror, and when he got there his reaction was completely different then Jazz expected. He started to laugh. He brought his hand to his mouth to keep himself quiet so he wouldn't wake their parents. Jazz looked him over again and made the assessment, "Jeez. You look like you ran three rounds with a lightning rod and lost." The sentence only made Danny laugh harder, and Jazz wondered if maybe Danny had hit his head. "Um, Danny, are you okay?" She asked.
Danny gasped and got his laughter under control and then said, "Yeah, Jazz. I'm fine. I'm better than fine actually. It's just you're more right then you know about the lightning rod thing."
"What did you do?" Jazz scolded.
Danny just said, "For now I'll give you the short version, because I still have three hours of sleep to do." Jazz waved him to continue, so he did, "I got woken up by Boxy, patrolled a little bit. I was tired so I landed and was going to star gaze for a little bit in my human form, but then I saw a storm coming, so I waited longer. I stayed out in the rain and watched the lightning Then when I couldn't ignore the draw of the storm anymore I flew straight up into the clouds. I stayed there for about an hour or so before I was struck by lightning. Then I drained all the electricity from the air around me, and I gained a new core, and I came home." Danny finished quickly and by the end Jazz's jaw was wide open and her eyes were ready to bug out of her head. "So now I'm really exhausted." Danny yawned, as if to prove his point, and then fell into his bed and said, "Night."
"Night." Jazz responded absentmindedly as she went downstairs to have breakfast. Finally she shook her head and freed herself from her shock and thought to herself, "Having a superpowered brother is weird."
