A/N: This is a chapter a day story for DannyMay 2019, each chapter will be based on a daily prompt to create a 31 chapter story, cross-posted on Ao3. I'm hoping that this will really help me get back into writing fanfiction so that I can start working on the Survivalists again, because I know that's the story you all really want to see. I'm only aiming for 2000-word chapters for this fic, or at least that's the minimum.

Permanence

Chapter 1: Crossing

Danny feels empty. Not his normal kind of empty, from those nights when he looks up at the stars and that spark of excitement is missing, and in its place is something that isn't quite disinterest and is hardly hatred but is more like the stars don't matter because, well, what does?

He isn't sure if this is a bad empty or a good one. Is there even a good empty? Either way, this is a different kind. It's the kind of empty you might feel walking through a school after hours, once everyone has gone home and all the lights are off. Except instead of walking through a hallway you're lying on the ground, and it's very cold, and it's raining, and you're pretty sure there's mud in your hair and is that blood under your fingernails or just more mud? You hope it's mud.

That's how Danny feels.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, wrinkling his nose. Underneath the smell of the rain—he thinks Sam called it petrichor once—there's something sharp. It stings his nose and throat when he breathes in and makes his headache flare.

Danny tries to sit up, but the whole world rebels against him as it tilts and spins, and he ends up face down in the mud. Slowly, he pushes himself up to his hands and knees and tries to get a good look at his surroundings. Everything is blurry and dark and his head is pounding, making it hard for him to focus. Looking around just makes him dizzier so he looks down instead, at his hands. He's not wearing gloves, his skin is human. Pale, but lacking the bluish tint of his ghost form.

His knuckles are bruised, the skin split. It's a minor injury he's intimately familiar with. He pats his chest, arms, legs. No other injuries. His clothes are rumpled, not torn, but his jacket is gone.

Damn. He really liked that jacket.

Focusing his gaze on one spot on the ground, Danny tries to lurch to his feet. Tries. He's about halfway up when his stomach twists and then he's on his knees again, vomiting. Nothing but bile and stomach acid comes out. After what feels like a solid ten minutes of dry heaving Danny gives up and collapses onto his side.

If he squints and focuses really hard, pushing through his headache and all the blurriness, he can see something tall, or at least taller than him when he's lying on the ground, and yellow. There's a lot of it, like a wall, but it's bending under the rain and wind. A field of... something. He struggles for a minute to remember what is tall, and yellow, and comes in a field, doing his best to ignore the throbbing headache.

Wheat. It's a wheat field. There aren't any wheat fields near Amity Park.

Danny groans. The cold must have been numbing the pain while he was unconscious, but now that his awareness is returning, he can feel every bruise across his aching body. He won't be surprised if, when he strips down to get changed later, his skin is painted blue and purple and that ugly yellow-brown from fresh bruises.

Curling up against the cold, Danny furrows his brow as he tries to remember what the hell just happened, but it keeps slipping through his fingers.

He blows on his hands, trying to warm them up, rubbing them together and tucking them under his arms. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to remember something vital.

Cryokinesis. Duh.

Danny's breath hitches, his headache flaring as he activates his ice powers. His vision sharpens and gets colder. That's really the only way he can describe it, as if he's staring through a thin veil of ice that almost looks like it isn't there, but it is, and everything is just a little bit bluer. If things could look cold, this would be it.

With his cryokinesis on the cold rain doesn't bother him as much, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword. It protects him, for now, but if he uses it too long then he'll really start freezing. But it gives him a couple hours, just long enough to rest his eyes. Maybe his headache will go away by then. Yeah, sleep sounds good. He can figure everything out afterward.

(-｡- ) z z z

Danny only heard the phrase "crossing over" twice in his life. His parents may study ghosts but they always preferred the more scientific ectology rather than the metaphysical contemplation of life and the afterlife. It is more than a little ironic they dedicated their lives to studying the dead but never once considered what happens to the people who don't become ghosts.

Danny is more than a little thankful for this. If his parents can throw themselves so wholeheartedly into a twenty-year argument about the existence of Santa Claus that it ruins every Christmas for his entire life, he can hardly imagine what would happen if they started fighting over beings much greater than any ghost or human.

The first time he heard someone refer to death as "crossing over" he was four years old and his grandmother had just passed away. The memory isn't perfect, he was four after all, but it's one of his earliest. Unlike other children Danny grew up with a deep understanding of the concept of death and its permanence—or impermanence in the case of ghosts—thanks to his parents. But this had been his first real experience with death and, naturally, he had questions.

His parents weren't much help. Danny can remember, barely, going up to his father and asking where Grandma was now that she was dead. He knew she would never come back but, young as he was, he couldn't really grasp the idea that she might just not exist anymore. She had to be somewhere, just not anywhere Danny himself could go.

"That's a complicated question, son," Jack said. "Your mother and I have been trying to find where ghosts go for years."

What followed was a two-hour lecture on the Nightingale Theory of Ecto-Habitation that left Danny more confused and with more questions than ever. The Old English didn't help.

What did help was his talk with Angela Foley, his best friend Tucker's mom, two days after the funeral. Danny always saw her, and her husband Maurice, as something like second parents to him. Or third, Jazz was his second if he really thought about it. So when he had a question his own parents couldn't help him with the Foley's were his next best choice.

"What happens to people when they die?" Danny asked.

Angela took Danny's hand and guided him over to the living room. She sat him down in the big, plush chair that Maurice always liked to sit in, and knelt in front of him.

"Your parents believe ghosts exist," she said, "but not everyone does."

Danny nodded. There was a mean boy in his preschool class who liked to tease him because his parents believed in ghosts. The boy said it was stupid and ghosts weren't real.

"Well, this is kind of like that."

Danny stared at Angela with wide eyes. "Not everyone knows people die?"

Angela held back a laugh. "No, that's not it. But just like people believe different things about ghosts, they also believe different things about what happens to people when they die."

"What do you believe?"

"I believe that death is like a crossing," Angela said. She grabbed Danny's tiny hands and rubbed his knuckles in a comforting manner. Danny saw her do this with Tucker whenever he was hurt. "When people die, they leave this world for another, a place where they can be happy forever."

"But... where?" Danny frowned. That sounded like what his parents said about ghosts, but ghosts could come back. He wanted to know why other people, his grandma, couldn't.

Angela smiled, but it was sad. "I wish I could tell you where, I wish I knew. Some people think they do and maybe they're right. But I don't think that's something we get to know until it's our own time to cross over."

Danny looked down at his knees, plucking at his shorts and fighting back tears. "So, Grandma..."

"Wherever she is, she's happy. Okay?"

Danny still thinks about what Angela said sometimes, especially now that he knows ghosts are real, that he's one of them. It's hard not to think of that other place when he was almost there himself.

(-︿ - )

Danny remembers everything about the night it all began. The feel of the switch giving under his hand, the low hum of the portal that quickly built into a piercing shriek as it came to life. The warning sparks over his head before everything went white. Pain radiated through his body. And then nothing.

That was the first time Danny ever felt empty, his empty. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't feel. He could hardly think. It wasn't like he was floating in a vast emptiness, more like he was the emptiness.

In that moment nothing mattered. He didn't forget about his life, his friends that had just watched him die, or his parents that would come home and find him dead, but they didn't matter. Because he was dead and that's just how things work when you're dead.

Even meeting them hadn't shaken Danny at the time. It should have, they were terrifying. But it wasn't until later that night, when Sam and Tucker were gone and his family was asleep, that Danny felt the fear hit him. The mind-numbing uncontrollable anxiety. The sight of that person. The knowledge that Danny shouldn't have, was never meant to have, but did.

It felt like he was in the void for hours before they found him. Danny couldn't see his own body, but he could see them. And they looked normal.

Brown hair down to their shoulder, eyes the colour of tarnished nickels. Jeans, a jacket, a plain shirt.

They smiled at Danny. "Are you ready?"

"For what?"

Their smile widened. "To cross over."

If Danny could look away he would have. He would have looked down, like he always does when he's deep in thought, shoved his hands in his pockets so they couldn't see him fidgeting, and considered the statement. But he couldn't. Not because he was frozen, but because he had no body, no eyes. He was nothing, emptiness, and they had invaded this emptiness in a way that meant he would never be able to look away from them again.

"I don't have to?" Danny asked.

"No, not this time. It's up to you." They folded their arms behind their head and shrugged. "It could go either way, you know? It doesn't really matter."

"I guess not."

"So?"

"I think... I'll stay."

They tilted their head and Danny suddenly felt heavier.

His form returned first, closing in around the emptiness. It was a vague silhouette of a boy, skeletal in its design, slowly filling up as his body was built again. Flesh and bone, blood and sinew. With it came the little things, like emotions, and caring. "You're not going to stop me?" he asked.

"No." They laughed. "There's no point. You all come to me eventually."

(X_ X )

Not everything was returned to Danny that night. Even as the last hair on his head was formed, he could feel it. A cavity in the middle of his chest, one last bit of emptiness that can never be filled.

One last place they can touch whenever they please.

Danny met Death once in his life and he never wants to meet them again. But some things are inevitable.