The Bag
Danny woke up, looked out of his window where the birds were singing, and knew that he would die today.
Nothing to be done about it. He went through the motions: brushed his teeth, took a shower, pulled on clothes he hoped smelled clean, and in no time at all he was standing before his backpack, looking down at the contents within.
Did I leave anything behind? What even is the point of checking?
He decided to anyway, and went to his desk.
It did not look like a teenager's desk. A stationery holder sat in a forlorn corner, containing one (1) obligatory pencil. Leaning against the wall were textbooks bought at the beginning of freshman year, though if Danny opened them, he knew their margins would be paper-white and its paragraphs devoid of highlight. The remainder of his desk was clean, as if its owner had never existed.
With nothing to take with him, he hefted the backpack over his shoulder. It weighed him down, and he imagined there were fresh corpses trapped within, but no corpse could sustain the ruse of merely sleeping; all would eventually fall into rot and grow into stench. Their discovery was inevitable, and it was inevitability that Danny feared.
As he walked down the stairs, every creak of the floorboards resounded, like the echoing toll of his funeral.
At the kitchen table, his father wielded an ecto-gun. The man pulled the trigger, and frowned at the weapon, but he bid a good morning to his son, who lingered at the doorway.
"Breakfast, Danno?" asked Jack, gesturing to a plate of toast before him. He fiddled with the gun, which Danny sensed was uncharged, and muttered, "Why's this stuck?"
Danny wasn't hungry – hadn't been since he collapsed into slumber at four with bruises painted over his back. The toast was browned, charred at the corners. Butter oozed like yellow pus from its edges, pooling onto the silver plate.
He took a seat and picked up a slice. The clock on the wall ticked, loud over the lack of explosions from the lab below.
"Where's Mom?" he asked.
"Out for some errands," answered his father. "She'll be back."
"Oh. Okay." He ate his toast, and tried not to think about the day. When his fingers were sticky but empty, he scrubbed them at the sink. "Dad," he said.
"Yeah, bud?"
"It's time."
His father pocketed the gun. "Alright." His smile was bright, antithetical to the thudding of Danny's heart. "Let's go."
His father's chatter filled the RV.
If Danny listened to it, the burn of the bag against his back dimmed to a simmer, and the inevitability retreated into an old nightmare. But the American flag soon came into sight, whipping from its pole, followed by the red bricks of Casper High, stark against the backdrop of a pale gray sky.
The RV slowed, and rolled to a stop before the courtyard. It led to a set of front steps, which ended at a pair of bright red doors.
From the window of the passenger seat, Danny watched the students pass by; youth after youth heading up these steps, their bags slung over their backs, walking into the jaws of the den.
"Danny?" asked his father, tone light. "You going?"
"I..."
Danny's knuckles were white over the straps of his bag. He had no excuses, no get-out-of-jail cards.
"I– I don't–"
He choked then, and hunched into a coughing fit that tore at his throat – he had swallowed his saliva wrong – but his father pounded his back, and when air returned to his lungs, he saw the wisp of cool condensation manifest before his eyes.
His ears caught it before his brain did.
"I AM THE BOX GHOST!"
Both Fentons launched into action. Jack shouted and whipped out his ecto-gun, then remembered the morning and pulled out the Jack o' Nine Tails; Danny pressed his lips together and fumbled for his bag, grasping for the thermos.
His fingers brushed against other things, but these things– they no longer occupied the forefront of his mind.
"Danny, stay here! That ghost's not going to get away from Jack Fenton!" The man disappeared with a slam of the door, which rocked the RV. He left the gun on the driver's seat, Danny registered distantly, as his eyes tracked the blue menace speeding past the red doors of Casper High.
Half a year ago, the screaming would've begun. Today, students went about their day and gave the ghost a wide berth. But there was a pounding in Danny's chest and a dizziness in his head, because in the vestiges of his mind, a flitting thought was warping into an idea, and the idea...
The idea... it was turning into a plan.
He grabbed the gun, unbuckled his seatbelt, then wrenched open the door and leapt out of the RV. He left the thermos propped against his bag on the passenger seat – two innocuous items that disappeared from his line of sight when the door swung shut.
Facing the courtyard, he took a deep breath and screamed, "Hey, Box Ghost!"
The courtyard stilled. Conversations fell silent and eyes turned to him, students blinking out of the stupors of their mornings.
The ghost spun to him, pale eyes aglow. Cardboard boxes and scraps of wrapping whirled in an inexplicable wind. "Phanto–" he began.
"How 'bout you take on someone your own size?"
"Get away from my son!" boomed his father from a distance. With a bellow, he rushed at the ghost. A bang resounded; his Jack o' Nine Tails fired, its net swelling into a web of cables that crackled with electricity. It missed the target by a mile.
Box Ghost ignored the man and whizzed towards where Danny stood, boxes trailing his back in a streak of blue light. Danny gritted his teeth, tightened his fingers over the gun, and whipped it out before him.
"Danny, wait–"
"Eat dirt!" shouted the teen, taking aim, squinting his eyes and then– "Ah! This weapon! It doesn't work! Oh, God!"
Box Ghost threw his head back and laughed, his voice echoing. "Your puny weapons are no match against my wrath of all things square!" He raised a hand, and cast a palm out. Three cardboard boxes detached from its fellow squares and slammed into Danny's face with consecutive thwacks.
Danny fell over and clutched his head. "Gah, it hurts!"
"Danny-boy," his father gasped, horrified.
"Wait," said Box Ghost. He had stopped advancing. "Seriously?"
Clambering to his feet, Danny trembled his arms, and the gun shook. He ignored everyone's gaping – the students, his dad, the teachers – for there were grander things at stake than his rep. "Get- get away!" he said, then sent a pulse of ecto-energy into the gun and fired.
The shot went wide. Birds squawked from a nearby tree, and he heard fluttering in the sky.
But it worked. Box Ghost's eyes glazed over in madness and he raised his arms. "You will PAY! You will experience the full force of my POWER!"
Bubble wrap slapped into Danny and wrapped around his arms. The static from the plastic made his hair stand, but the bubbles were unpopped; it felt like laying in an airy waterbed. An airbed. Danny felt the consequence of sleeping at 4AM hit him like a full-body slam, and was overcome with an overwhelming desire to take a nap.
Then he thought about the bag in the RV.
"Oh, God," he sobbed, not trying very hard to break out. He popped a few bubbles though, because it was bubble wrap. "It hurts! Please, Box Ghost, n-no more!"
Tupperwares headed straight for him in a blaze of blue. He braced for impact, feeling the first one clip his shoulder, the second bounce off his shin, and the last– his eyes widened; this wasn't part of the plan but he was also trapped in bubble wrap and was supposed to be immobile and–
Nuts, he thought, before the container smacked into his forehead with the force of a train.
By the time she had rushed to the school and brought Danny home, her boy – unconscious after defending his schoolmates from a ghost, oh my brave, brave child – had gained a canvas of bruises. There was a spread of it across his back, blue-black and yellow-green, and looking down at him, sleeping so soundly in his bed, Maddie Fenton experienced fear she had not felt in years.
"My son needs to stay at home," she hissed into the phone by her ear. "For as long as he needs! He needs rest, so he can recover from the ghost attack in your school!"
Voices squawked at the end of the line.
"This has nothing to do with my family! With all due respect, why didn't your staff activate the ecto-defensive system we installed for you–"
As she spoke, she set Danny's school bag on the chair at his desk. Did he clean his table? she wondered, but the thought dissipated as she snapped a response, "And that includes an extension for his deadlines. I don't care if anything important was due today, my boy's health comes first!"
Despite her lowered volume, it began to rouse the teen from his slumber, and the tail end of his mother's conversation registered faintly in his head.
Danny woke up, looked at the bag where all his untouched work lay, and with a shit-eating grin, knew that he would live another day.
A/N: I felt like I was on crack while writing this rofl. It's in response to this prompt by danphanwritingprompts on Tumblr, discoverable by 183803277707:
"Danny, you can't just pretend to be beat up by the Box Ghost in front of your parents so you can skip school!" / "Well it worked, didn't it?"
Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed! Please let me know through a comment if you did, it would mean a lot. 3