The house glows, sometimes. Most times, if he is honest with himself but Danny has never been good with that.
He should be wearing gloves but Danny never did, not even in the times before. Sometimes he wonders if that is why he survived at all in the first place (why he half-survived, half-dead and he still wakes up with a scream buried in his throat especially when the air is thick with ozone outside, creeping in through a cracked open window).
His hands glow, too, rag green in his palm as he clears up broken glass on the coffee table, scoops tainted ectoplasm into a pail to be purified later. He thinks his mother would be horrified by the level of contamination he is exposing himself to now. The ghost in him preens with the contact, energized and feasting, starving.
Jazz is out at some study event at the library. His parents are out showing off some of their new technology to the city council. Danny is home alone and his hands glow green.
Danny realizes he has been staring at the rag for too long and wrings it out into the pail, green, and pushes up from the floor with a creaking of knees and an ache in his back. He is fourteen years old.
He is hungry but there are chores to do and the fridge is contaminated, like always. It wouldn't hurt him, not as he is now, except he's fairly certain from the rattling it has been making, the chain looped around the handle, that it is the kind of contamination that comes alive and tries to eat his face.
(Danny spends a night in the emergency room when he is seven and needs sixteen stitches along his jaw and up into his ear. There is still a chunk missing from the latter and he laughs when Tucker and Sam worry at him, turns it into a joke. He told the officers in the hospital that it was a stray animal. He regrets it when they bring out the big needles. Danny does his stitches at home, now.)
He knows it is raining because he can feel it in his bones and in his scars and he hopes there is no lightning, tonight. Danny doesn't like storms anymore. Danny used to sit by the window and watch the sky dance and flash, lightning darting through the clouds as if dragons in battle and used to half believe it when he was little. His dad liked storms too and they would chase them, sometimes, when Jazz and mom went to book groups or women in STEM conferences. Danny would be in charge of navigation and radar, a ham radio set too big for him jammed on his head. Fentons never doing anything by halves, he learns young. His father whoops as Danny sits in the muddy dirt along the side of a road in Ohio and there is a loud thump as the van is turned back over from where it was pushed over by the tornado.
Fentons never doing anything by halves, he thinks as he steps down into the lab, flicking on the lights. It is a mess, his parents' experiments and technology haphazardly scattered all over and that is normal, especially when dragged out of their favorite place by obligations. Danny sets to cleaning and organizing the weapons rack, to sweeping all with a metal baking pan as a shield, just in case.
He is upstairs again. Danny doesn't know when that happened, ectoplasm on his cheek. It's been happening more lately, buzzing brain and fog in his head and he is in one place, suddenly, and then another. Jazz would probably know why. He doesn't tell her. Danny hasn't been telling her a lot of things lately even though he knows she knows he's not. There was a journal placed on his bed when he came home three days ago. Danny hasn't touched it, not yet.
There is a cold in his mouth that pushes free and Danny doesn't think before he is Phantom and he is outside, he is outside, the sun is bright on his skin and hot and burning. He fights. Words spill from his mouth, sarcastic and there is a burning in his side and a thermos smoking in his palms and he returns to the lab, releases the ghost into the Zone and Danny is staring into the portal again. Danny stares and stares and stares.
He goes upstairs and only realizes he is still Phantom when he goes to open his bedroom door. He transforms.
Danny is on his bed. Danny is staring at the peeling stars on the ceiling and wondering when the last time he and his father went storm chasing. There is lightning outside. Danny's scars ache.
Danny aches.
It is late and Jazz comes home. Danny pretends to be asleep and maybe he is, maybe this is a dream. It all feels like one, sometimes. Most times. Jazz comes back.
She gently wipes the ectoplasm from his cheek, warm, damp rag brushing. There is a kiss to his hair, a blanket draped over him, his lights flicked off. The door shuts.
Danny settles into his skin again, a little steadier, little calmer with the ghost of Jazz's care easing into the bones of his body. He just needs to make it a little longer, a little further, and he tells himself it will be okay. He will be okay. He is going to make it through this year if it kills him.