AN: Okay, so this won't exactly have a plot. It's mostly going to be fluffy canon with a little bit of my own headcanon mixed in, and parts of it will probably reiterate some of the stuff I've written before. It's going to be one one-shot per episode and each one will be from a different character's insight and thoughts. So basically, this is just what I'm going to work on until I figure out something to actually write about. Oh, and I don't own Danny Phantom. Ennnnjoy!
The Accident
Danny
Everyone has a purpose. A calling in life, the reason they were born. It might be something they're naturally good at, or something that attracts them with such compelling force that they can't help but take action. It can be as simple as a career choice, or it can intrigue one's life until that person's very existence revolves around their passion. Some people realize their purpose when they're very young, before they become jaded and before the world can tell them no. For others, it can take years to sink in. For me, however, it was a little of both.
The day I turned five years old, I became fascinated with astronomy. My dad had taken me on a camping trip in the northern part of the Appalachian Mountains for my birthday. We were miles away from the nearest town by the time the sun began to slip behind the mountains in a myriad of dazzling colors, and we sat in appreciative silence as darkness replaced the fading daylight.
Although my first mountain sunset was beautiful, it was incomparable to my first glimpse of space without the obstructive dull haze of smoke and city lights. Just gazing into the nighttime sky peppered with clusters of stars was enough to instill a desire within me to venture out into the unknown, to explore the universe and all it had to offer. I knew right then and there, I wanted to be an astronaut.
I always took pride in being the only one in my class who was positive about what they wanted to do, the only one whose aspirations literally reached for the stars. When people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer was always straightforward and certain. I was fully aware of the risks, what with the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, but I figured that if just imagining the feeling of shooting past the cerulean atmosphere into the infinite expanses of space filled me with enthrallment, then the real experience would be indescribably better.
Of course, that was all before the accident. After the accident, life became about helping others. Pictures of the Milky Way and NASA articles shared computer space with Ghost Zone information, and late-night ghost battles became more frequent than late-night stargazing. I began to realize that my love of astronomy had been pushed to the background, overshadowed by my new-found desire to help people.
At first, I was upset. I couldn't help but feel that I'd lost my direction in life, that my sense of adventure and curiosity had left me. It was as if I'd lost nearly a decade of shining hopes and dreams to a new desire that I didn't even understand. What I didn't see was that, although space travel seemed exciting and glamorous, the adventure to come was even more so. In setting aside my lifelong dream of walking on the moon, I realized that it wasn't really what I wanted, after all. My dream was to help other people, and even though a journey to the edge of the universe and back would have been awe-inspiring, it could never compare to what I had ahead of me.