Hope Fades
By Lacey52
.o.O.o.o.O.o.
A note: It's sad. Don't read it if you don't want sad. I've been in a rather dark mood lately…Who ever thought a funny quote could inspire something so somber?
Genre: Angst
Rating: M
.o.O.o.o.O.o.
They knew now.
Everyone knew now, so keeping it secret didn't matter. One mistake, one slip up was all it took for his sister to find out. He should have figured that it could happen again. That it would happen again. The universe seemed to enjoy laughing at his plight.
Why did they all know? Simple. He had to say goodbye, both ways, in both forms. She deserved that, because he had made a mistake.
No, it wasn't Sam, he was saying goodbye to, else wise the world might have been saying goodbye to him as well. It was Jazz.
His sister.
His confidant.
His friend.
His….his….
He couldn't find words to fit all the things Jazz was to him. All the holes in his heart she helped fill. She had been so much to him, and really he had only come to appreciate that such a short time ago. Not near enough time to let her know how much he loved her.
He hoped to God she knew that.
His parents sat in the front row of pews, dry eyed as anyone could be. They'd already spent their tears when they first found her in the lab, Danny huddled over her body, holding it, crying for the sister who wasn't there any longer to wake. The shock had forcibly changed him back into a human.
'Just wake up.'
He'd said those three words for hours, even after they'd taken her cold form from his grasp. Sam had sat by him the entire time, comforting him with soft words and holding him as he'd curled into her. Tucker had barricaded himself in the bathroom, too sick to his stomach to even hope to get five feet from the toilet.
Looking down on her form he thought back over his decision. He'd walked to her coffin, ignoring his parents and his friends. He'd leaned over and kissed her cold cheek, said goodbye as a brother, then nodded to himself and changed in front of nearly the entire town of Amity Park who had turned out for the services.
And said goodbye as the hero who had failed her.
The fight had been nothing, it was normal, impossible for them to loose. He should never have been so confident. For a moment he felt as though he could never consider himself a hero. He had fallen when she had. All heroes fell eventually…
The way his life had been lived for the past two years, ever since he had become a halfa, he should have known something would inevitably have gone wrong. That something would happen and it would be bad. No, not bad, wrong. It went so wrong…Jazz, I'm so sorry…how could it have ever gone so wrong?
He scolded himself over and over, rethinking everything he had done in that battle that could have possibly led to her death. He'd never be able to forget her face or the way she screamed or the blood or the…
Shuddering at the thought, he leaned over one last time, gently kissing her cheek again. He didn't dare turn to face the crowd behind him. The gasp when he had gone ghost had been bad enough.
His mother's whispered, "God, no…" was enough to send him nearly phasing into the floor to hide for the rest of his miserable life.
His life…his life was composed of making the impossible possible. Ghosts were real, there were other dimensions, he'd made it to outer space, he'd become a halfa, he fought supposedly mythological creatures, he'd lost his sister.
There was no 'impossible' in his life, or so he had thought. Now he was faced with one, and only one. He felt there would never be another quite like it. It was death itself.
It was impossible to ever see Jazz again.
To ever see her smile, or laugh, or talk about her beloved psychology, or tease him, or help him out, or tutor him, or wrinkle her nose that certain way when she found something amusing, or….a thousand other things that made his sister.
She wasn't a ghost. He knew that much, was certain she had no unfinished business. She was happy, healthy until her death, had experienced life and loved it. What regret could she have?
Another impossibility. He'd never be able to know. It was impossible to know if she had any regrets.
The world around him was chaotic. People were talking in hushed whispers as he stood, tall and proud….she would have been proud of me…ignoring their inane words.
She was the hero, though, she was the person to measure up to. Jazz Fenton, the brain, the beauty, the fun, she had it all. Or she had it all. She was a hero no more.
They'd know her story, he made sure of it. He turned at her coffin and told them exactly what happened to her, why it happened, how it was all his fault for ever letting his curiosity get the better of him, and how he released the horrors of ghosts upon the town.
Sam stood after he was done, ushered him out when he lost it and started to cry, bore the brunt of his pain, it seemed, as he slammed his fists into the wall behind her and collapsed into her, for the third time in as many days. She was one of the few things he still cared about.
The town was in an uproar for days afterwards, would be in an uproar for so many more. The people at school avoided him, were afraid of him. People on the street would pull away from him, as though they were burnt.
He didn't care, though he still protected them.
His mother and father eventually pulled themselves together enough after the burial to talk with him. It wasn't his fault, they had tried to soothe him, he couldn't have known. They didn't hate him, they wouldn't hunt him, they'd never hurt him. The words he'd been waiting and waiting to hear.
He didn't care, though he still loved them.
The ghosts still came, mercilessly. One was even stupid enough to show his face on the day of Jazz's funeral. He didn't know if there was another afterlife for ghosts to go to when they were no more….but that ghost certainly wasn't ever coming back again.
And Danny didn't care. It was impossible to care about that anymore, but he would still fight. He would do everything in his power to do what was right, what was good, not because he was supposed to, but because of Jazz. He would do it for her.
For the first time in his life, Danny was surrounded by impossibilities, and they hurt all the worse because she hadn't believed in them.
.o.O.o.o.O.o.
"Whoever said 'nothing is impossible' never tried slamming a revolving door."
--Found it surfing the net