Author's Note: Cross-posted from AO3. Apocalypse future AU shortfic where everybody died and a lot of 'em came back as ghosts. Title comes from Andrew Bird's "Not a Robot, But a Ghost."
Danny's scrunched up in front of the view feeds again, tattered cloak brushing the floor, ghost tail curled to his chest like he remembers what it's like to have knees. Cameras one through seven are set to events unfolding in current time across Earth and the Ghost Zone. Every time there is an explosion he ages another year until he's brittle-boned and wizened, and then he cycles back to childhood. You don't think he even knows he's doing it.
Camera eight shows Sam. The old Sam, and god, you'd just about forgotten what she used to look like, how small she used to be.
"Nice to see you up and about," Danny says, startling you.
"Sorry," you chuckle. "Didn't mean to creep."
"Sure you did." But there's a smile curling his voice as he pats the empty air next to him. The glass faces of the watches on his forearm reflect the lurid glare of a gasoline fire on camera six. "C'mere, pull up a seat."
You walk to join him, mindful of your cables and wires. You rest the Scepter against the broad control panel, beside his staff, and lightly bounce into the air at his side. "What day is this?" you ask, pointing at camera eight. Sam is laughing just like you remember: a little bit sly, a little bit sarcastic, her teeth bright behind purple lipstick.
"Just a day," Danny replies with a shrug of his broad, strong shoulders. "Just an ordinary day when nothing exciting happened and no one got hurt."
"Well, as ordinary as it got for us, right?" You grin, and he does too.
Camera eight changes angles. Casper High is in the background, still intact, students relaxing on the grounds. Next to Sam are two boys, dark-haired and light-eyed and laughing. Danny-the old Danny-is lanky, hasn't grown into his hands and feet yet, and you-the old you-is round-faced and slouched under the weight of a bag full of tech. Fourteen years old. You haven't been fourteen years old in a long time. You haven't been human in a long time.
"Damn," you say, unable to help speaking in a hushed whisper, "That's really us, isn't it?"
"Yup," Danny says, scratching his chin where the last of his long white beard has just been sucked up. "Crazy, isn't it?"
The old you says something , but Danny's got the cameras muted. The old you points at something off-screen, and the old Danny and the old Sam roll their eyes in unison. Were they dating then? Or was this from before, some earlier school day when things were still as simple and as ordinary as it ever got for the three of them? The three of you?
"Talk about a lifetime ago," Danny jokes, but there's no color to his voice, not even bitterness. The light of his red eyes dims, and he waves his hand again. Camera eight flickers, and when the picture clears the old Sam and the old Danny and the old you are gone, replaced by squirming green vines and razor-edged leaves and black smoke from horizon to horizon. Sam appears, current Sam, the Sam with rose thorns for teeth and an army of carnivorous plants that had taken out everything east of the Mississippi in a week.
Current Sam doesn't laugh much anymore.
"We'll stop her," you say. Pointless, yeah, because he was the one who told you how to do it at all, but you ran out of the good reassuring one-liners awhile back.
"I know. I just wish we could do it faster." His fingers are slotted together loosely, but he can't hide the clench of his jaw from you.
You sigh, and the cold air whistles through your fangs. "I'm working as fast as I can." And it's true; you're working literally and metaphorically around the clock, doing everything you can to pick apart enemy troops and scatter their remains across the battlefields. Even now, silvery bright code blinks across your green skin in skittering lines of circuitry, marching up from your fingers and toes to the heavy cables fused into your spine. Camera two shows your progress live. Your army of ectobots are shredding skeletons, human skeletons, immune to the exorcising properties of the blood blossoms twining through their joints. It's... it's been a stalemate for about six months.
You're working on it.
"I know you are, Tuck. Everybody is." He's a little kid now, his face a mess of green freckles. Danny yanks his cowl off to drag stubby fingers through his hair in a gesture much older than he looks. "But I can see how this whole awful war ends, like it's right in front of me! It already happened, everything's been healed, rebuilt, cleaned up. There are blue skies again, Tucker, blue skies! And it's all right in front of me!" He unfolds and stretches, rocketing through puberty again, through adulthood, until wrinkles thin his face and arthritis crabs his skeletal hands. "It's all right here, but only for me. Everybody else has to take the slower route."
Man, you really need to figure out how to get him off his melodramatic horse before he gets going like this. "Danny-"
"But that's the thing, isn't it?" He laughs, and then sighs. "There's peace coming, but no matter what I do we still have to crawl through shit first."
"Yeah," you say, because you're dead and held together by an Ancient Egyptian curse and Technus' last gift. No point holding Danny's hand when his guts have been replaced with gears. "But without you we woulda lost right at the start, and now we know what to do."
He looks at you, smiling fondly. The jagged scar over one eye still creeps you out, to be honest, but he can't help it. You're both happy he at least got to keep his hair. "I know," he says. "It's just-it gets frustrating, sometimes."
"Don't I know it, buddy."
On camera eight, Sam is red-haired and green-veined, dressed for battle in brambles and tree bark, and she's commanding her squirming army from above, held up by vines curled around her arms and legs. She's talking, not to Undergrowth (he got absorbed long ago by her, back when he was more parasite than demigod) but to him. Phantom. Even now, just the sight of him makes you furious, makes you blind with rage and obsessive hate, reminds you horribly of the wet mess he left of your parents-
"Hey." Danny settles his hand on your shoulder. The clock in his chest beats just like a human heart, and the old familiar sensation is calming. You come back, you calm down. You're dead now, and you have bigger things to focus on than the past. That stuff's for Danny to worry about.
"I'm okay," you mutter, and shrug him off.
"I'm sorry," he says. Not for the first time.
"I know. It's okay." It's an automatic reply, because you want to blame him. Stupid to, but your ghost was quick to anger even when it had just been Desiree's shade.
"Still." He folds up again, makes himself smaller as the muscles thicken on his bones. "Clockwork knew. He should have done something."
You tug at your plaited beard. "And if he had, this timeline woulda been screwed. Same as if he'd cheated to save a lot of us."
"I know," he spits out between clenched teeth. His mouth twists, and he looks back at camera eight. Phantom has flown to the head of Sam's army, hands full of red fire, flickering between columns of greasy black smoke. The Ring of Rage and the Crown of Fire are bright green beacons of power, outshining the burning freeways. Below him, tiny human dots flee towards ghost-shielded bunkers. You don't know how many will make it, but a look at Danny says enough.
You step down to the floor and punch him lightly in the arm. "C'mon man, don't you think it's time you got in there?"
He doesn't move, so you punch him harder. "Ow! What was that for?"
With a roll of your eyes you say, "You're reaching critical levels of Batman brooding, dude."
He scowls. "For the millionth time, the cape came with the job!"
"Still no excuse for the brooding." You reach over and grab his staff, swallowing the shudder touching it always gives you. "No go kick some ass for me, and that is an order."
Danny blinks, somewhere in his thirties and getting younger, then grins and takes his staff from you. "Can do, Your Highness."
You strike a regal pose and hope your nemes isn't crooked. "Begone, servant."
He salutes you indulgently and disappears in a perfect circle of blue light. Chuckling, you pick up your Scepter and walk back to your throne. Your cables and wires hiss along the floor, retracting back into the central core you and Technus put together before Phantom had melted him down to slag. It's a relief to sit on something solid; your cables are Real World Items, fused to your core, and it's hard to support them on your own. A flick of your bejeweled hand brings back the scrolling text. This is the only place you can work, the only place you can fight from. This is the only place you've been for a long time. You try not to think about time though. That's Danny's deal.
You? You're still the slouching technogeek you used to be, just a little bit deader and a lot more powerful, and even though Danny worries it's all almost over. He's said it himself a hundred times. Humanity makes it through this, the Ghost Zone survives, Earth rebuilds. All thanks to you and him and all the other ghosts and humans fighting out there, even now.
It could be a lot worse, you think to yourself. It could always be a lot worse.