Danny liked to fly. He liked how the wind tousled his hair and pressed against his face and he liked how he couldn't hear anything but the wind in his ears and the occasional faint bird tweet. Most of all, he liked how his thoughts momentarily stopped and let his eyes survey the falling sun and constantly rising moon. It was nice. It was peaceful. It was where Danny felt most at home, up in that expanse of blue sky and underneath those twinkling faraway stars.

But, as time wore on and his mind started back up once more, darkness had a way of covering both the Earth and his brain. It was what happened after flying that made him hesitant to take off into the air once more. It was as if his feet touched his bedroom carpet and someone backstage promptly shouted, "CUE THE ONSLAUGHT OF EXISTENTIAL THOUGHTS."

And so Danny lay upon his bed, staring up at the peeling glow-in-the-dark-stars and contemplating the strangeness of it all. He thought long and hard about the inversion of both appearance and mentality upon summoning those blue-white rings that transformed him into someone that the residents of Amity Park loved yet hated and adored but feared.

Black hair. White hair. White suit. Black suit. Blue eyes. Green eyes.

Light versus dark.

But then comes the query of which side was his light side and which side was his dark side, and if, consequently, the dark side was inherently more evil than the aforementioned light side. He'd always pictured Phantom (Danny referred to "Phantom" as an entirely separate being because, based on the differing characteristics of Phantom and Fenton, it seemed that the two might as well be two different people) as his light side, seeing as he was the bravest, strongest, and most courageous of the two. But that couldn't be right; he, Fenton, was no evil maniac and he could not picture himself becoming one. Even in the alternate time stream that was brought to light by Clockwork, he stayed virtuous until his horrible end.

So did that mean that Phantom was the dark side? He'd certainly seen this demonstrated before, with Freakshow's mind control staff and that harrowing other time stream in which Dan (again, he referred to Dan as another being separate from himself because of the simple fact that he refused to ever, ever become what he had seen) destroyed the entire world with a gruesome smile on his face.

Danny huffed. The whole situation was…befuddling. In all honesty, he neither saw any of his many sides as all good or all bad (except for maybe Dan, whose humanity had been legitimately ripped out of him by Vlad), and rather viewed himself as being in a gray area similar to the area he had stepped foot in upon becoming only half ghost.

Danny supposed that was a conclusive enough answer. He was always hearing Jazz go on about how there's no good without bad and no bad without good, how the two intertwine and tangle together in a mess of confusion that jumbles ones morals and brings two heroic forces against each other. Her ramblings had never really clicked before now, though, and, as he rolled over in bed, he considered that maybe his sister wasn't as crazy as he had previously believed her to be.

Danny was neither light nor dark. He was in a gray area. And, most peculiarly, he was perfectly content with that.

So Danny, with mind now at ease, drifted off into dreamless sleep.

this was really hard to start up. my brain just refused to work and i was like HEY HOW ABOUT WORKING and then somehow or another i managed to spew this word cluster out. hope it's not too ridiculously boring (it's short, anyway, so just hang in there friend).

you know what i'm going to say because i say it every. single. time. REVIEW. PLEASE. I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DAY AND ABOUT THAT NASTY SUNBURN ON YOUR CHEST AND ABOUT YOUR JOB AND ABOUT THIS ONE PHANFIC THAT YOU READ THAT YOU TOTALLY ThiNK I SHOULD CHECK OUT. PLEASE TALK To ME I NEEd VAliDATION.

xx