Chapter Twenty-one

City Hall
Amity Park

She found him sitting on the front steps of City Hall, just inside the ghost shield. She'd gone to his house first, but when his sister told her he'd stopped by only long enough to check on Dani before taking off again, Sam had guessed this is where he might be, sitting in the shadow of the statue of his own alter ego holding up the world.

He'd started coming here not long after Vlad's return. At first, Sam had given him grief about his ego, but she quickly grew to realize these pilgrimages weren't about self-aggrandizement. They were about self-flagellation.

When Vlad had first come back after nearly being killed by the asteroid, he'd managed to distract them from what he was doing by mucking around in their personal lives. Ever since then, Danny saw the statue as a reminder of his obligation to the world and would come here and just stare at it whenever he thought he'd failed. After Danielle's rescue, he'd started coming here almost daily.

In those few weeks, Sam had learned to hate that statue.

Sighing, she approached the steps from the side of the building. "You know, when my grandma commissioned all these statues, she meant it as a tribute. I don't think she would have done it if she'd have known you would take it as a directive."

He blinked in surprise, obviously so engrossed in his own thoughts, he hadn't even noticed her until she spoke. "Sam? What are you doing here? I thought you'd be grounded." Then, he frowned. "Please tell me you didn't sneak out behind your parents' backs. They're mad enough already."

"Okay. I didn't sneak out behind my parents' backs." Sitting down beside him, she paused just long enough for him to give her a skeptical look before continuing. "I stormed out in front of their faces."

He threw his head back and groaned. "Sam, no..."

"There's a good chance I might finish law school before I'm over being grounded, but I couldn't take it another second. The things they say..."

He rubbed his face with his hand before sitting up straight to face her. "Sam, I do not want you in trouble and fighting with your parents because of me."

"It isn't because of you."

"Right. That whole rant about you being in danger because of me, that had nothing to do with it."

She made a derisive sound at the back of her throat. "Oh, honestly, Danny. I am not in danger because of you. I'm alive because of you. And they know it."

"You've also almost been killed because of me, and you know it. Fighting with them about it—about me—is only going to make things harder for us. They don't need any more reasons to hate me."

"They don't hate you, Danny. They hate me."

He frowned. Unlike her parents, he knew her well enough to know she wasn't one for pity parties, so he took the statement at face value. "They don't hate you, Sam. They love you. They want to protect you. I mean, I know they go overboard, and they don't get you. But they love you."

"Yeah, okay," she conceded. "I know they love me, and they want to protect me and everything. But they don't like me. They haven't for a really long time. Since way before you and I met. You're just the convenient excuse to blame it all on. 'It's all because of the ghosts.'" She snorted. "Because I was such the Disney Princess before you and I met."

That got a wan grin out of Danny. "More like a Brothers Grimm princess."

"I know, right? But when you told them who you really are, you handed them the perfect scapegoat. So long as they're spending so much energy convincing themselves they can't stand you, they don't have to face the fact that it's their own daughter they can't stand."

He let out a long breath. "Listen, Sam, I know you had issues with your parents long before I came along, but I don't want to be the thing that makes it worse. You snuck around behind their backs for almost three years to fight ghosts... with me. You still put yourself in danger to fight ghosts... with me. You storm out... to come see me. This isn't good. It isn't good for you, and it isn't good for us."

"What am I supposed to do, pretend I'm something I'm not just to make them happy?"

"Of course not! But you have to stop fighting with them about me. I don't want to be one more thing between you and them. They're your parents. Your family. And they're not bad people. They're helping fight Vlad, even though they hate ghosts and ghost-fighting and all of it. They're not even stopping us from seeing each other, even though they really want to. They just want what they think is best for you, like any parents. They're wrong about what that is, but still."

"They're wrong about everything, Danny. They're wrong about me, they're wrong about you—"

"That's just it. They're not wrong about me."

"How are they not wrong about you? We just established I was never going to be what they wanted me to be, with or without you."

"But I lied to them. For almost three years, I lied to them about who I am and what I was doing with their daughter. I can't blame them for being mad at me."

"No. I lied to them."

"About me."

"Well, yeah. We were keeping your identity secret. And look at how they reacted when you told them the truth. So yeah, we lied to them. With good reason."

He looked down, his face scrunching up like he'd just swallowed week-old sludge scraped from the bottom of a coffee pot. "There's always a 'good reason' for me to lie, isn't there? To your parents, to Tucker's parents, to my parents. I lied to Valerie while trying to date her. I lied to Jazz, even though she saw through it. All for a 'good reason.' Lies on top of excuses on top of more lies."

"So, what? It would be better if the whole world knew? Let's just call a press conference and hand you over to the Guys in White, then!"

"Dammit, Sam!" Pounding his knee with his fist, he whipped his head up to look at her. "I'm not talking about the world. I'm talking about the people who matter. It was irresponsible to keep it from our parents for so long."

He paused, the anger draining away as quickly as it had flared up, leaving remorse in its wake. His shoulder sagging under the weight, he looked down once more. "I should have told my parents, back in the beginning."

Sam pressed her lips together, understanding the meaning behind the words. They were back to Dani and how he'd failed her. Again. Sam put her hand on his shoulder. "What happened to Dani is not your fault either."

"Yeah, it pretty much is."

"No, it's Vlad's fault. No one else's."

"Oh, it's his fault all right. No doubt about that. But would he have even gotten near her if I'd have told my parents about her in the beginning? There's a direct line between me ignoring my responsibility toward her and everything that happened to her since."

"You're not Spider-Man, and Dani's not your Uncle Ben, so stop beating yourself up over that. That stuff you said to Dani about focusing on the path you're on instead of all the 'what ifs' and the ways things could have gone if you'd have done it differently? That doesn't just apply to you and me and Valerie, you know."

He narrowed his eyes. "Wait. You heard that? Were you eavesdropping on us?"

"Yeah, I was, okay?" When his expression turned to one of reproach, she crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow at him. "What? It's only okay to listen in on someone when they're talking about you if you have invisibility powers? I'm violating some kind of ghost union rule?" He'd confessed to eavesdropping on her and her grandmother when they'd been talking about him during that whole viral-video-of-her-making-out-with-"the-Ghost-Boy" mess.

He conceded her point with a sigh. "Okay. Pot, kettle. I get it."

"I wasn't trying to spy on you or anything." Not that both of them hadn't ever been guilty of that particular transgression, either. "I just overheard her ask you about Valerie, and I wanted to hear your answer. And I'm glad I did, because it was a good one. Not just because of what you said about us, although I appreciate that. More than you know. But because of what you said about not staying stuck in the past and worrying about the what-ifs."

She put her hand over his. "Maybe it was a mistake to not tell your parents about Dani right away. Or maybe your parents weren't ready to be okay with you being a half ghost or with all the other stuff, and maybe it would've blown up spectacularly in your face. You don't know. And more to the point, you have to stop dwelling on the path you didn't take. We're here. Dani's here—because you saved her life. Again, I might add. And did you even hear what she said to you about love? You were the first person to ever really show her what it means to love somebody else. Don't discount that. She doesn't."

He pulled his hand away. "Yeah, leaving a twelve-year-old kid to fend for herself in the Ghost Zone like she was just another ghost. That's love, all right."

"You didn't leave her. She left you. And you were only fifteen yourself at the time, Danny. Fifteen. You didn't know—"

"I knew enough! I knew she was alone in the world. I knew what Vlad had done to her. I knew she came from my DNA."

"That doesn't make you the boss of her. Don't forget, I was there in Colorado when you first found out about her. She disappeared on us at Vlad's cabin, then took off again pretty quickly after making a brief appearance in Amity Park to get us out of trouble. You couldn't have gotten her to stay with you if you'd have wanted to. So stop blaming yourself for decisions other people make. You're no more responsible for Dani going off to live on her own in the Ghost Zone than you are for me putting on that amulet and turning into a dragon. And you most definitely are not responsible for what Vlad does. To anyone. Ever."

Turning from her, he focused his attention on the statue in the middle of the square. Viewed through the ghost shield, the gray-hued bronze looked to Sam almost like it was glowing an unearthly green, less a manmade statue than something that came from the Ghost Zone. Without taking his eyes off it, he told her, "Just before they made that statue, you were the one who reminded me that I couldn't just sit on the sidelines. That my powers gave me a chance to change things that no one else could. Remember?"

She gripped the edge of the step she was sitting on tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. "I wish I could take back everything I said to you that night. When I said that, you'd completely given up. I was trying to shake you out of doing nothing! But I certainly never meant that you were responsible for everything, all the time! There's a lot of space between nothing and everything, Danny. Your pendulum swings between those two extremes would impress even Clockwork."

He shook his head. "You were right, though. My powers do give me a chance no one else has. That makes everything Vlad does my responsibility. Because I'm the only one who can fight him."

"Excuse me? The rest of us there in the mall were just window dressing? What are you, the Lone Ranger all of a sudden?"

"No, I don't mean that. I know I can't fight him by myself. But ultimately, whether we succeed or fail all falls on me because of who he is and who I am. He's my responsibility, period. And I can't ever forget that, because when I do, that's when people get hurt."

She studied him a moment. "Yes, you can do things the rest of us can't. And that's a really great thing, to have something you can give to the world that no one else can. But that doesn't mean it all falls on you. Let the people who love you share the load. And I don't mean just helping fight." Reaching a tentative hand toward him, she traced a gentle line with the back of her finger from his temple down his jawline, hoping to relieve some of the tension she could see there. "Let us really share the load, Danny."

"You can't. My burden is my burden. No one else's." With a slight but deliberate move of his head, he pulled away from her touch.

Sighing, she dropped her hand and turned toward the bronze sculpture that forever damned him to propping up the world with a single, upraised arm, and a thought occurred to her. "You know what that statue reminds me of? The Torah reading I did for my Bat Mitzvah."

He tilted his head and gave her a puzzled look. "How on Earth does a statue of me remind you of a Torah reading?"

"It's kind of a strange story, actually. Torah readings are done on specific dates, and when I first heard the story I'd be reading on the day of my Bat Mitzvah, I hated it, because it's all about war and destruction, but my grandma said that everything in the Torah has a purpose, and that someday I'd understand what this story meant. And now I finally do."

"And it has something to do with that statue." It wasn't a question so much as a statement of skepticism.

"Sort of, yeah. It's from Exodus, after the Israelites left Egypt and passed through the Red Sea. They got into this war with some other group, and Moses went up onto the top of this hill overlooking the battle. So long as he held up his arms with the staff God had given him, the Israelites were winning the battle. But any time he put his arms down, their enemies would start winning.

"The problem was, he was the only person who could hold the staff of God and without him, the Israelites were doomed. But he couldn't possibly hold it up forever, so his brother Aaron and some other guy went up the hill with him, and when his arms got tired, they stood on either side of him and held his arms up for him. Moses was the only one who could do what he did, but it wasn't all on him. He had his family, his friends to help hold his arms up."

She made another attempt to reach out to him, taking his chin in her hand and gently turning his face towards her. "I know you can do things the rest of us can't. But you don't have to hold up the whole world by yourself, Danny. You can rest. The people who love you, we can help you hold your arms up when you're tired. But you have to let us." She leaned closer, her voice becoming a whisper. "Let us help you, Danny."

She kissed him and, at first he responded, kissing her with a need that wasn't so much passionate as it was... desolate, like the parched desert ground soaking up a few drops of rain.

But then, he pulled back, his forehead resting against hers. "She needed me, and I wasn't there." His voice was ragged, and it broke Sam's heart.

"You were there. That's what she was trying to tell you back in the Far Frozen. She needed someone to care, someone she mattered to. You gave her that. You gave her a family. You can't always protect the people you love from getting hurt, but the fact that you want to means everything. So please, give yourself a break."

He jerked away from her again. "Like I took a break when my parents sold FentonWorks to the Guys in White and they almost destroyed the Ghost Zone and our world along with it? Like I took a break when I got rid of my powers because I didn't like the way Vlad was bruising my ego? Like I took a break while Aragon was tearing up Dora's kingdom and handing Danielle over to Vlad to torture?"

She couldn't help but sigh once more. "Danny, you weren't taking a break when Dora's kingdom fell. You didn't know, that's all. You're not omniscient! And those other things? That's the other extreme. It's not all or nothing!"

"It is, though." Abruptly, he stood up and looked down at her. "When I take a break, people get hurt. No more breaks. Not until Vlad can't hurt anyone ever again." He started down the steps and through the shield surrounding City Hall.

Sam jumped up behind him. "Danny, please—"

"Go home, Sam. Go home and make things right with your parents. Don't give them any more reason to hate me. That's what you can do for me." And before she could say anything else, he transformed into ghost form and took off into the night sky.

Author's Note: The Torah reading that Sam referenced is from Exodus 17:8-13.