the green-eyed hero complex, a danny phantom fanfic

[Time started: Dec 22, 8:46pm; –]

My current obsession is Danny Phantom, and as much as I love the series, the deeper, darker parts of it must be explored.

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Title: the green-eyed hero complex

Summary: He was only fourteen, and still a child. –– Danny. Canon-compliant; takes place before the end of the series.

In the aftermath of his ghost-hunt fighting, Danny is always left bruised, beaten, and tired.

It happens every night. It doesn't matter who the ghost was from the night: it could've been Skulker, dead set on having Danny's skin hanging over his fireplace, it could've been Johnny 13, with his idiot Shadow and his roaring bike, hell, it could even be the Box Ghost, all stupid and wailing and just annoying in general. But at the end of it all, Danny would always be tired, hurting, and in pain all over.

He's broken a few bones, here and there. Bruised his ribs countless of times to count, and gotten his teeth knocked out in several occasions. Gotten himself punched in the face several times too, and the bruises would bloom over his skin like an ugly blue-black flower, curling around his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He'd have to spend extra amounts of time in his ghost form so that it would speed up the healing, and even then sometimes it wasn't enough. He'd have to go to school with Sam's makeup on his face to cover up the bruises, or a limp to his leg, or a useless arm hanging down at his side.

Whilst other kids his age were busy shopping outside and hanging out together in the mall, he was fourteen and playing hero to a town that couldn't even get his name.

"Tucker, no sign of any ghosts?" Danny calls into his phone as he smoothly weaves in between the buildings of Amity Park one night, his ghost form gliding through the dark, the wispy trailing of his route the only indication he had ever been there. The night was thick and quiet, and Danny was alone.

"No sign of them at the north side," Tucker reports, bringing his scooter to a stop in front of a building as he glances up and down the street in confirmation.

Nothing stirs, and everything was silent and still. "It's all quite peaceful up here."

"Nothing at the east side either," Sam interjects, holding the phone to her ear as she grabs the scooter's handles and revves them up. She zooms down the street, and it was the only sound coming from miles around. "Everybody's just asleep."

"Good. Make one last round, and then we'll call it a night and go back home." Danny orders, and Sam and Tucker reply with a resounding yes before Danny shuts his phone and slips it into his pocket.

He continues flying through the night, and his figure was a lone streak of black-and-white against the sky as Danny patrols the area.

He continues on flying, anyway.

–

The next day Danny is tired and sleepy and bruised all over, from fighting the gigantic leopard ghost that had suddenly sprung out of no way near where he was patrolling all vicious and deadly and frothing at the mouth, and it had put up one hell of a fight as Danny wrestled with it to try and get it into the Fenton thermos and back into the Ghost Zone. The scars that it had left on his side from its claws weren't going to fade for weeks.

Danny knew; he'd had those kind of scars, before.

As Danny tries his hardest not to lean against his bad side, he suddenly finds himself unceremoniously grabbed by his shirt collar and slammed against the lockers, right on his aforementioned bad side, but Danny knows better than to yell in pain. He winces as the bruises on his side began to throb angrily under his shirt, before he lifts his eyes to stare at the very furious gaze of quarterback Dash Baxter.

"Hey, Fenturd," he sneers, and he was all crow-ugly delight, mouth twisting into a sneer, "I just got back my Biology quiz last period.

"Guess who is going to get a beat-down?"

Danny fights the urge to roll his eyes; that would just make Dash even angrier, and Danny didn't need any more-than-necessary bruises on his already-aching body. Instead, he squeezes his eyes shut and waits for the onslaughts of fists that he knows would be sure to arrive, and when they did, Danny shuts his mouth and doesn't make a sound. He fists his own scarred hands at his sides to prevent them from lashing out at Dash and giving him a piece of his own mind.

Because it's been nearly a year since Danny had been in this superhero business, and he knows how to take a real fight probably better than anyone. He's got the muscles. He's gotten stronger, faster, and definitely better, and now compared to what he faces everyday Dash's bullying was barely a register on his scale.

But Danny clamps his lips together and takes the punches without a single word, because he knows that if he were to fight back, people would talk. He was still scrawny, still small, still a fourteen-year-old boy lumbering through the awkward stages of puberty, but Danny's heard the whispers. He sees the glances thrown his way in the locker room when he changes for gym class, sees people get taken aback by all the wiry muscle he has hidden under his baggy white T-shirt, all his various marks and scars. He's heard the gossip about it. Family abuse, or secret ghost training, or that he was part of some gang and was involved in turf fights every night. Well, the fighting part of it was certainly dead true, but the rest were all undoubtedly lies.

But if all they saw was Dash beating on him everyday, the jock superstar picking on the stupid little nerd, the gossip falls apart. People dismiss rumours; they don't believe that Danny could "ever be really much of anything", and the students would go on their separate ways, convinced that gossip was honestly just gossip. Danny falls under the radar this way, and this was how he intended to keep it.

Under the raining of the punches, Danny hears an indignant shout from the other end of the hallway, and before long Sam and Tucker were at his side, pulling him to his feet, checking to see if he was okay, yelling at Dash for being a jerk. Dash snorts once, condescendingly, and Danny keeps his face impassively meek as Dash gazes at him like he was the dirt underneath his shoes.

"Looks like Fentoenail can't even speak for himself without his stupid little nerd buddies at his side," Dash mocks, pulling the stupidest face he could think of in an ugly caricature of Danny. He chortles at himself, before he punches Danny one last time and shoves him into the lockers.

"See you later, loser." Dash grins mad like the whole sun, before he turns around and walks away.

He doesn't notice how Danny walks to class with a limp to his side.

–

It's patrol night again, and Danny is bleeding, he is bleeding, he is bleeding, he is bleeding.

The blow that Skulker did to him was severe; stupid cyber punk had gotten quite a few upgrades in the time that he was away. This time his steel blade had sliced neatly across the span of Danny's abdomen, and now he was bleeding out all over Sam's bedroom floor as Tucker and Sam were pacing up down frantic with worry and distress.

Skulker was safely sucked into the Fenton thermos, and he wasn't going to be a threat to the town for at least another night.

"Guys, relax," Danny managed to get out from between gasps of pain, "its not that bad; I'm really fine."

"Fine?! Danny, you don't even have the energy to breathe!" Sam bursts out, staring down in alarm and panic as Danny struggled to hoist himself up on his elbows, his white hair gleaming fluorescent in the light. The light slicked off like water on his hair, snow-white into the shadows, and as Sam watched Danny managed to flip himself over to face towards the ceiling, his mouth gasping for breath. The gash on his stomach was harsher and redder than ever in Sam's eyes.

"Tucker!" Sam bellowed.

Tucker comes running in with an armful of bandages and anti-septic and tissue and god-knows-what else, and Sam grabs a handful of them from him and drops down to her knees to sit next to Danny on the floor. She gets to work.

Sam knows that her job was lessened; already Sam could see the ghost side of Danny working on the wound to close it, to stitch back the skin, to knit the muscles back together. But Danny didn't have time to wait for the entire process; he still has school tomorrow, and ghosts didn't stop coming just because he needed a few days to recover from a wound, and at the way the wound was bleeding not even Danny's ghostly healing would save him from fainting from blood loss.

It was sometimes so hard to remember that he was only fourteen, that they were all only fourteen, they were all fourteen and running all over the place trying to save the world.

But at this current moment when Danny was gasping for breath and his white-gloved hands clutching his stomach veining with the trails of his blood and his eyes flashing green in an effort to get rid of the pain, Danny has never looked so young.

So Sam snaps on the gloves, and works to bandage and wrap and help the wound around Danny's stomach to stop bleeding everywhere all over her bedroom carpet. When Sam sprays on the stinging antiseptic, Danny doesn't make a sound.

Danny passes out when his abdomen was all bandaged up, and doesn't wake up once until it was time to go to school.

(They'll think up an excuse later to explain to the Fenton family how Danny had managed to sneak out of the house into Sam's bedroom in the middle of the night.)

–

Dash picks on Danny again in school today, and even as Danny's lips goes white from the pain and he can feel the blood from his wound soaking through his bandages, Danny still doesn't say a word.

–

(Later on when Vlad reveals his true self and Danny saves the world from total asteroid annihilation and death, Danny would be proclaimed as a hero in all countries far and wide, and only then would Danny think it might have all been worth it.

But for now, he was just the boy with the too-big dreams and the too-kind heart with the hero complex too big for himself, sometimes, who's given up so much to protect this town from itself and to save the day that he's nearly got nothing left. He doesn't know.

He doesn't know.

He doesn't know.)

Okay the ending was so totally not planned.

I hadn't intended for this piece to be so – character analyse-ey? But that seems to be how it turned out – and I'm not sure if the ending really expressed well what I wanted to say about Danny Phantom being the world's great savior and superhero at age fifteen. Actually what's going with this piece at all.

Please leave a review and tell me you guys think! Do you think it was analysis-ey? The ending kind of cheesy? Honestly I'll probably revisit this and edit it when I have time.

Please rate and review!

[Time completed: Dec 24, 3:25pm; –]

(OH, and Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!)