Danny Fenton walked over to the kitchen sink and exhaled slowly. His fingers softly clutched at the stainless steel edge as he shook the hair out of his cold blue eyes and looked out of the window in front of him.
It was the first day in far too long that the seventeen year old's mind and body were even remotely relaxed. The house was unusually quiet, but for once, this was a good thing; the eldest Fentons were away at a convention, and his sister was working hard away in the peak of her college career. It might have surprised any of Danny's casual acquaintances to see the seemingly inseparable trinity lacking the goth and the cybergeek, but they, too, were busy.
And Danny appreciated the silence.
The boy watched the dying leaves from the ephemeral trees drift in the cool autumn breeze; they spun in invisible hurricanes, pushed by an unstoppable force that did nothing but softly caress the faces of larger beings. The wind had come to fascinate him ever since he gained the ability to take to the skies. It was almost like an independent being, alive in a complex way. It did as it wished, pushed as hard or as soft as it wanted, and changed outcomes in the world around it; but it just as quickly could be tamed by something as simple as a wall. Sometimes Danny liked to fly up above the clouds to where the wind was the strongest, and then turn intangible; it allowed him to feel the natural course of events without interfering with it. But he could never have explained feelings like this to his earthly friends, his need to just watch.
After one or two passings of street walkers, the hands let go of the cool metal surface and the body they connected to turned from the portal to the outside. The steps were inhumanely quiet, but the figure they belonged to moved nonthreateningly. One hand grasped the knob of the front door but the mind was only semi present as the body went for the stroll.
Danny's ghost form was convenient; it was perfect for keeping up the superhero charade. In a fight, it was nearly impossible to keep the concentration required to remain invisible and, were his appearance static, everything would have been that much harder. But Danny had always preferred his original body, especially once he had mastered his powers in his human form. He would often disappear from the visible spectrum in public places just to see what people were like when they didn't think they were being watched. And he was doing so at this time.
The almost human boy walked into the downtown at the height of traffic, as it would have been on any other late Friday afternoon. But even other watchers would not have seen him. The sun was just beginning to caress the tops of the uptown apartment buildings, turning the clouds into calm orange and maroon flames. The clouds in turn were reflected in the windows, and the whole western sky was ablaze, violently contrasting with the deep indigos that swallowed the eastern horizon.
These strolls had become an almost unconscious act in Danny's mind. He sat just on top of this one central wall as he had been on every otherwise empty afternoon for the last few years and would watch. A scene began to unfold in the present that distantly echoed one from the way back when Danny had only recently become semi-removed from the world of the living, and hadn't understood very many things at all. After all, he was only fourteen then.
There had been this boy, about fifteen years old at the time. Danny had been practicing holding his invisibility for long periods of time when he watched the boy pick pocketing and stealing his way all through the downtown. The ghost shadowed the living teenager to confirm the previous, and then continued until the boy was removed from the crowd. Danny hid, turned human (as at the time he wasn't skilled enough to be invisible and control it well without being completely made of ectoplasm), then confronted the thief. The Fenton made a respectable effort, telling the boy off about his poor life choices, when the Thief (who had been cornered at this point, escape was not an option) explained that it was the only way he was able to provide for himself, living on the streets. Danny was a little crestfallen, and embarrassed at having incorrectly assumed that the situation was not as immediately rectifiable as he had previously thought. But it did little to deter him.
Danny took charge of the situation. The ends did not justify the means. He slowly and unconsciously crept into the boy's already small bubble of breathing space, saying there had to be a way that both took care of the boy and kept his fingers out of what belonged to others. A home, that's what the boy needed. Foster care seemed like a great idea.
So Danny got the boy into the foster system after a long argument and more than one threat.
And in less than a year, he read in the paper that the boy killed himself. Abusive foster parents, newbies that went a little too far. The Thief probably had an undiagnosed problem or two, something that the parents wrote off as behavior that needed to be fixed with force.
That was the beginning of Danny's inward turn.
On the outside, Danny remained "the same", so no one ever really noticed. But the high school years of most children are often very transformative, so the stagnancy was a red flag in disguise. He still cracked the witty quips and puns that had characterized his middle school self, and on more than one occasion his friends and family had used the unchanging Danny Fenton as the rock in their coursing lives they had so desperately needed. But inside, he was far too old for his age. Cynical, wary.
In an uncommon turn of events, a boy's own death had taken a greater toll on himself than on his friends and family in the years following. But I suppose that happens when no one else thinks you are dead.
Danny wondered about this often. About his own mortality, potential lack thereof. He sometimes felt he was simultaneously the entirety of reality, the literal entity of life and death, while simultaneously not existing at all...
The ghost boy was suddenly jolted back to the present. His invisibility flicked briefly as his anxiety told him to look around, find the danger!
...But nothing was there.
No ghost sense.
No noticeable change in the crowd.
Yet... something wasn't right.
Now this wasn't the first time that he had had feelings like this. But this was the first time that the feeling wasn't accompanied by anything at all. Sometimes there would be a chorus of barking dogs, followed by the inevitable chorus of "SHUT UP" by their owners; sometimes babies would start crying in series, or all of the watchers would start to look around a bit more nervously; and usually the source was revealed within a few minutes.
But not now. Suddenly! Not a god damned thing.
The boy decided it was time to continue his stroll. He jumped off the wall and landed in a perfect crouch, slowly moving his head and eyes to look forward like some sort of action movie; it was a bit over dramatic, to be sure. But it made him feel really cool and even overly cynical teenagers are still teenagers.
The stores were starting to give him the heebie-jeebies and he'd been doing nothing but lounging all day anyways so Danny decided to book it through the crowd.
Literally. It wasn't as though states of matter were any hindrance to him anymore.
Danny ran, halfheartedly trying to see if he could dodge people at the slightly higher than are natural speeds he was achieving; and at least here, if he messed up, his victims felt nothing more than a cold chill on a fall evening.
His old worn out converse took him through the town, past the park, past Sam's mansion, past Tucker's humble house. The cold air had no effect on him anymore, and the foot traffic had died out completely, so Danny shifted back into the visible and solid spectrums to let the breeze lightly whip at his face, hair and clothes. His eyes glowed green from the raw power that he let course through his veins, and anyone who saw him wouldn't have recognized the quiet kid from school in his natural habitat: absolute freedom.
Each foot in front of the other sent a rush of ecstasy rushing through his system, reminding him what it felt like to be alive while the ever present inner death reminded him of the forever stillness that came intermittently. Danny upped the ante, running faster and into more desolate parts of the town as the moon started to rise and most of the population was either at home or in one of the few weekend hotspots in the center of the city. It was possible that he was trying to run from the earlier disturbance, which still sat fresh at the back of his mind. Maybe he was running to something. He didn't know. But running felt good and so he went.
The adjacent city Elmerton wasn't too far, and the was no earthly nightlife that could have been dangerous to the phantom. Nowadays Amity Park had cultivated quite a few amateur ghost hunters besides the Destructive Duo that were the elder Fentons and the slightly-more-(accidentally)-destructive single that was the younger, so Danny decided to slightly loosen the tightly knotted ropes that held his other half in check. Not the ghost half, but his real half. The side he never showed anyone because that was not what they needed him to be.
The Phantom ran down the side of the highway in his almost human body. Sometimes he existed and sometimes he didn't as the hum of his power naturally ebbed and flowed.
But like any living person, he tired out. The ecstasy dissipated and the converse came to a gradual stop as they wandered into the area's industrial sector. His green eyes let him see the empty streets clearly in the darkness that pervaded fabric of the warehouses and chain link, barbed wire fences. Still forward Danny went, passing the boatyard that took goods down the Mississippi, until he came to a public recreational area that led straight to the water's edge.
Again, silence reigned supreme. Only the rushing water broke the quiet of the night. Danny's soft footsteps crushed across the dirt bank and he mentally returned to a relatively "normal" state of being. The moon shone bright over the river, allowing the boy to release the ectoplasm from his irises. Part of him wanted to go ghost and float across the river as he had in the past, dragging his fingers through the very top of the slow moving current... but this time, he felt slightly put off by the idea. So he sat and watched the stars, finding the constellations he knew by heart, until the moon had begun its descent and the boy decided it was time to head home.