Hey guys, thank you for your encouragement. I'm still continuing this. :)
This chapter draws more on thecommrade's prompts. :)
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Chapter 3
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Wherever Danny was, it was dark and quiet. Or perhaps it was simply empty. Danny didn't know, couldn't tell, and was having some trouble forming coherent thoughts, let alone pondering existential questions, thank you very much.
He was just enjoying the peace, just enjoying the sensation of floating, just enjoying the respite from the pounding on the other side of the veil of his consciousness.
It was quiet here. Like space. He liked space. The infinite and untapped void. He floated.
He wasn't thinking. He was as unmarred as the darkness.
But a question began to press on him, and the pounding grew to a throb that teetered at the edge of pain. He held on to ignorance, to ignorance of ignorance, unwilling to face anything that might bring him closer to that.
How had he gotten here?
"You took a bullet for Vlad, that's how."
The voice, unexpected, novel, and familiar, grounded him. Like with any charged thing being grounded, there was a shock, lightning and frost radiating away from him, describing a framework landscape of shifting green electricity and blue-white traceries of ice imposed on a background blacker than the darkest night.
Danny dropped, dizzy and in pain. He knew this landscape, but he couldn't place it. There were more important things, anyway. He twisted, and came face-to-face with himself.
He was sitting, reclining, really, on a graceful curve of flowering ice, in Phantom form, his legs fading and blurring into a spectral tail. Somehow, this didn't really surprise Danny.
He narrowed his eyes.
"I think I would remember that," he said.
"Normally, yes," said Danny, shrugging. "But you went ahead and caught the bullet with your head, so..." He tilted his head. "You know, you're lucky you have a backup memory, otherwise you'd never remember it at all."
"Why are you saying it like it's all my fault?" asked Danny. "You're me, too, aren't you?"
Danny raised an eyebrow. "Hey, I'll blame myself, too."
Danny groaned, and rubbed his eyes, which wound up being really weird, because he could still see everyone around him.
"Ugh," he said. "Does this mean I'm dead? Is this, like, purgatory or something?"
"Not any more than usual," said Danny.
"So... What happened, exactly?"
"Vlad was being Vlad, trying to get us out of the way by giving us an 'opportunity-'"
"What opportunity?"
"Scholarship to some weird boarding school thing out of state."
"Great." He curled up. He felt oddly delicate and small.
"Yeah. Anyway, he decided to announce it as a giant public speech, we saw a gun sticking out of a window on the other side of the street, we pushed him out of the way, and- oops!- unconsciousness."
"Stupid Obsession," he muttered into his knees.
The other Danny snorted. "Let's be honest. We would have done it anyway, Obsession or no. That's kind of why we have that Obsession. It's why Dash picks on us so much. We'd always get in between him and his victims."
"There's a difference between taking a punch and taking a bullet. And for Vlad? I could see getting shot for Jazz, or Mom and Dad, or Sam and Tuck, or Valerie, or Mr Lancer, or, well, a lot of other people, but Vlad? Gross."
"I guess we'll just have to admit that we don't hate him as much as we think we do."
"I guess," said Danny.
"Or that we actually care about him. Even if he is a jerk, he's still, you know," Danny's voice had grown very soft, "like me."
"We don't have to admit anything," said Danny, sulking. "So, we're what, unconscious? Where?"
"Hospital, I think," he said, serenely, as if a sufficiently attentive and talkative doctor or nurse couldn't doom him to a lifetime of torture disguised as scientific inquiry. "I think we might have just come out of surgery."
"How are you so calm about this?"
"I'm not. I'm you, remember."
Silence.
"Oh. Yeah. So... I didn't really question this earlier, but how is this working?"
"I don't know. Probably has something to do with how our brains and our core work together, and this is some kind of weird bootstrapping, rebooting thing. We definitely have brain damage, after everything."
Danny shivered. "Yeah, it's a good thing we have a brain backup."
"Backups of everything."
"Yep."
Awkward silence.
"We have an eta on, um, consciousness?"
"Nope. Not like we've done this particular injury before."
"True."
"Never had to go to a hospital before, either."
"I think maybe there were a couple of times we should have gone to the hospital."
"Probably."
"Where are we supposed to be, anyway?" asked Danny. "It looks familiar."
"Well, you already know you're in a hospital." A pause. "And this is a dream. I know that's not what you mean, but I'm as in the dark as you are." Danny snickered, and gestured around him. "Literally."
"Yeah, okay." He looked around, trying to find something more solidly familiar, some landmark he could identify. It was hard, when over half of it flickered and glitched like old computer wire work. But something overhead caught the edge of his eye, and he looked up. "Woah."
Danny looked up, too. "Oh. Yeah. Woah."
"You didn't know about this?" he asked.
"Hey, you're surprised, too."
"Surprised might be the wrong word. We must have known this was here, at some level."
"Look at all those stars."
Danny blinked. "We're in Amity Park."
"Of course we are. How could we be anywhere else?"
They had shifted closer to each other as they angled for better views of the stars.
"It's home. It's ours."
A terrible thought lanced through Danny's mind.
"We can't protect it like this," he said. "Unconscious. We need to wake up."
"We can't."
"We don't know how?"
"So what do we do?"
The space wasn't so quiet anymore. It was filled with a chorus of whispers and echos, Danny's worries and anxieties bouncing back to him. His head hurt. His neck ached, his shoulders burned. He could feel bruises.
Then he was buried in the darkness once more, the most distant lightning of his mental landscape flickering and going out.
He gasped, curled on the ground, intertwined with his other half. His other half, Phantom, hissing.
"No good, no good, no good."
He focused on breathing. He couldn't do so much as twitch a finger. He couldn't even come to the surface of his own consciousness. Couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't help, couldn't protect. It hurt, and he knew it hurt his ghost more. He could feel it hurting his ghost more. He was his ghost and this hurt and he was going out of his mind not knowing his mind. Dreams. He couldn't live on dreams. No one could, and he could feel himself slipping deeper. He had reached too far, too quickly, and he hadn't even realized what he was doing.
He hummed. "We'll heal."
He whimpered. "Not fast enough. There has to be something we can do."
A laugh. "And we tried to say we wouldn't have jumped in front of Vlad?"
"This is different."
"Maybe we know that and maybe we don't."
"Something we can do..."
"Maybe there's something we can do."