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Rogue Shoe
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

Danny sat across the table from his mother, two feet and an eternity apart. He played quietly with his spoon, unwilling to break the uncomfortable silence that had grown in between them. The only sounds were the occasional scrape of the spoon against a bowl as Maddie scooped her breakfast into her mouth, her eyes distant and thoughtful.

He wished he could read minds, just for a moment. He wanted to know what she was thinking more than anything. Or maybe he just wanted to know what the right thing to say was… he didn't know. His mouth opened, words wanting to be said, but he stifled them and closed his mouth again, returning to absently playing with his spoon.

He could apologize again, but he'd already done that. A million times over, he'd apologized. Besides, she had already accepted his apology and had practically ordered him to stop saying 'sorry' nearly a week ago. He could tell her that he loved her, but she knew that and he knew that she loved him back. He could tell her about the ghost that had tried to bring his clothes to life the night before, but then he'd be stuck helping to decontaminate his room all weekend.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

All the words had been spoken, all the explanations given, all the apologies accepted on all sides. There was nothing left to say and everything was back to normal. His parents were lost in their own little worlds of thought, Danny was pretty much ignored by everyone, and the world was still spinning crazily on its axis. Normal.

Only… something wasn't quite right and Danny couldn't always put his finger on it, no matter how hard he tried. There was something in the way his mother hugged him, in the way his father smiled at him, in the all-too-normal silence that invaded the breakfast table. It wasn't anything he could point to and say that that was what was wrong, that his parents weren't acting right. No, his parents were acting perfectly.

And that was the problem. Acting.

Maddie caught him looking at her and she smiled, the gesture not touching her eyes. "You ready for school, sweetheart?"

Danny nodded silently and let his eyes drop down to the bowl downheartedly, knowing that his mother was doing the same on her side of the table, neither of them able to come up with something to say. Normally, they wouldn't have said anything to each other beyond 'goodbye' or something – that was the way his family worked – but today both of them were searching for something to say to fill the painful silence.

"Anything fun planned?" she tried.

"I have a test today in science," Danny said quietly.

She smiled again. "I'm sure you'll do wonderful."

Danny shrugged, twisting his spoon in his bowl like it was a drill that could dig a hole to the other side of the world. Not only would it have gotten him away from the imminent test, but it would have saved him from this stilted breakfast. "Thanks," he muttered.

A few more moments of uncomfortable silence were all Danny could take, getting to his feet and quietly setting his bowl into the sink before leaving to hunt down his backpack. Breakfast was one of the worse times of the day. When Jazz was around to run interference, everyone was a bit more natural. But when it was just him and his parents, it all felt like some sort of production.

Feeling around under his bed for a lost shoe (remembering how it had run under there in the middle of the night to escape the ghost that had brought it to life), Danny sighed. From the outside, everything was perfect and back to normal between Danny and his family.

But underneath, it was far from normal. Deep down, his parents loved and accepted him… but a gulf had opened up between them. The years of lies and evasions and cover-ups had left their toll on their relationship – one that nobody was willing to acknowledge existed. Now they each kept up the mask of normalcy, perfectly aware that it wasn't fooling anyone, but unable to come up with anything better to do.

"OW!" He yanked his hand back, jolted out of his contemplation, and stuck his bleeding finger in his mouth. "What the…" Kneeling a little more, Danny squinted to see into the shadows. He could hear a faint growling sound and see something moving around, but he really couldn't see well enough to figure out what it was.

Taking his finger out of his mouth and noting the tooth marks, Danny put his hand a cautious few inches under the bed and collected a bit of energy around it. His hand started to glow a vague green, illuminating the dusty, forgotten corner and the snarling creature.

It was his shoe, still alive after all that time. The rip in the front had formed a row of sharp-looking teeth, the undone laces held up like twin scorpion tails. It had even managed to grow six battered-looking legs that allowed it to scuttle drunkenly back and forth like some sort of hermit crab on drugs.

"Danny? Are you okay?"

Danny twisted around to see his mother standing in the doorway, the true concerned look in her eyes fading to the mask-like acceptance when she saw his glowing hand. "Yeah," he said, allowing the energy to dissipate. "My shoe bit me."

Blinking, Maddie stepped into his room and knelt down beside his bed. "Say again?"

"A ghost brought it to life last night and it apparently doesn't like me this morning," Danny said, showing her his bleeding finger and falling silent so that his mother could hear the faint growling noises.

She stared at him for a long moment before peering under his bed. "You know, I thought you grew out of the monster-under-my-bed stage years ago." Squinting, she shook her head. "I can't see it."

Danny lay on his stomach, pointing to the far corner. "It's back there, see?" When she shook her head again, Danny bit his lip. He could go get a flashlight from the kitchen – in fact, that's what his stomach was telling him to do – but there was a much quicker solution to the lack of light. With one last glance at his mother, Danny willed the energy around his hand back to life.

Maddie tensed a little, her gaze drawn irresistibly to her son's glowing hand, before dragging her eyes away to survey the snarling shoe. "That is a shoe," she said quietly.

"Got any ideas?" Danny asked, his breath catching a little in his chest. He wasn't comfortable using his ghost powers around his parents, even though they knew about them. Maddie and Jack's acting became even more stilted when Danny wasn't being 'normal'.

"Yes, actually." She studied the shoe for a moment longer, watching it haphazardly move around the dusty floor. "You need to clean better." There was a devilish sparkle in her eye and she shot him a grin that was, just for a moment, completely real.

"Mom," Danny groaned, allowing the energy around his hand to die.

She seemed to relax a little as Danny became more human, sitting up and wrinkling her forehead. "If we could catch it, I'm sure the Fenton Weasel could pull the energy out of it."

Danny picked up one of the long rods he was using for his history project and arched an eyebrow. "I'll chase it out from under there, you catch it?" At her nod, he added, "Watch out for the teeth."

He dropped back to his stomach and poked the wooden rod under the bed, sweeping it back and forth. A startled hiss and the sound of shoelaces hitting the end of the rod signaled that he had found it. Danny jerked the rod sideways, sending the shoe tumbling out from under the bed.

The shoe quickly regained its footing and, even as Maddie reached down to grab it, it was shuffling across the room. "Hey!" Danny shouted as it headed for the door, clamoring to his feet and barely managing to slam the door shut before the shoe made it into the hallway. It hissed at him, the shoelaces swiping towards his feet and forcing him to dance backwards. "Knock it off."

"I got-" Maddie started, but the shoe must have seen her coming, since it twisted around to snap at her fingers while skittering sideways out of her reach. She jerked her hand out the way of its sharp teeth, a bemused grin growing on her face.

Danny pounced on it, hoping to catch it beneath him, but the shoe proved to be surprisingly fast when it wanted to be. It whipped out from under him with milliseconds to spare, snarling angrily as it raced drunkenly around the room. He scrambled after it, trying to grab onto a shoelace.

When the shoe made a break for the relatively safety of the bed once more, Maddie got in its path, reaching out to try to grab it. The shoe rapped her hands with a quick slap of a shoelace before twisting around and trying to head for the desk. "Danny, the desk!"

Danny skidded along the floor on his knees, only barely coming between the darkness under the desk and the rouge shoe. "Got ya!" he exclaimed, but the shoe dodged his hands again, slipping over to the wall and racing along the baseboard. Danny was on his feet, chasing after it, but his feet caught on a discarded shirt and he collapsed to his hands and knees.

"You okay?" Maddie asked, a giggle in her voice as she watched the possessed shoe scuttle back under the bed.

Danny nodded, dropping the rest of the way to the ground and chuckling softly. "I give up," he confessed as his mother knelt down next to him, both of them smiling at the idiocy of the situation. "I've been defeated by a shoe."

"You'll have to wear your gym shoes today," Maddie agreed, her grin unable to fade. "And you're going to be late for school, kiddo."

"Yup." Danny levered himself off the ground and snagged his backpack. He glanced back at her as she pulled herself up, the smile still on his face unfettered by the emotions of the past few weeks. It's okay, he was dying to say, I know. You don't have to try to pretend. The words would never escape his mouth, but in this brief moment when both of them had pulled away their masks, the sentences were dancing in his eyes.

As he turned to leave, Maddie pulled him into a sudden hug. "I love you, sweetie," she whispered fiercely. "No matter what. Don't forget that."

"I know, Mom," he said. "I love you to."

And, as the façade of normalcy slammed back into place, Danny twisted out of his mother's grasp and headed for the front door. He hesitated with his hand on the doorknob to leave, knowing that he wouldn't normally yell goodbye to his parents (they wouldn't listen anyways), and then silently let himself out and onto the street, a small smile still on his face.

It hadn't been much, but maybe a rogue shoe was the start to a bridge to cross that chasm between them.

Uploaded April 1, 2009
And this is when the backpack starts to growl...
Thanks for reading!