The hospital staff didn't want them all there for this long- Danny could see it every time an aid or nurse walked past the waiting room and gave them A Look. Well. At this point, they were just giving him The Look since the others were slumped over in their chairs, having fallen asleep a couple hours prior. So maybe they were fine with them hanging around but not as fine with them sleeping there?

Too bad, though. He wasn't leaving the building until Sam did. Which. Having his powers would make that far easier to do. The hospital staff wouldn't even know he wasn't leaving.

There had been a few people to join them in the waiting room here and there throughout the evening, but none of them stayed very long. Probably to not be in the same room as a group of teenagers all wearing bloody clothes. Danny had eventually, after he was able to calm down, gone to wash up in one of the bathrooms and actually looked at himself then. Tucker was right to comment about it; he looked pretty terrible overall.

His bruises and cuts were healing up quickly enough, just like usual. His hands were in rough shape though- apparently the blood on him wasn't just Sam's and His but some of Danny's own as well with how torn up his knuckles were. He had no memory of them hurting at any point during the fight, but it didn't matter. Just another thing to inventory on his ever-increasing list of injuries. He'd be healed in a day and likely wouldn't even scar beyond the damage his hands had already sustained over three years of fighting ghosts. Ultimately, it would be next to nothing.

The complete opposite of Sam.

Sam.

He hadn't stopped thinking about her. How could he? Sure, he knew she was still stable- he would've heard the alarms if she wasn't and he checked on her every half hour. Or less. But this was just...

He'd been hurt before.

He'd been beaten down countless times. He'd been bruised, he'd broken probably every bone. He'd fallen tens of stories to the ground and thrown miles through the air. He'd been tossed and kicked around like a goddamn hacky sack for years now.

But even he hadn't been through something like this-

Something that couldn't be fixed.

The closest he maybe had was the accident on a scale of permanency, but at least he got his ghost powers out of that. There wouldn't be anything like that for Sam in this case. What could she do? She'd wake up when she could and immediately have to hear that she'd lost her fucking arm. Was there anything he could even try to do to help her? With any of it?

He definitely wasn't thinking of anything yet. So instead, he was just stuck in the stupid chair in the stupid waiting room of the stupid hospital being useless to the situation.

Danny waited until one of the others- it ended up being Danielle which wasn't a surprise with the whole half-ghosts-don't-need-much-sleep thing- woke up before he went back to Sam's room, heading to the same bathroom again to morph. He knew he would need to "leave" the building at some point to avoid suspicion, but that was far from his top priority at the moment.

He knew Mr. and Mrs. Manson hadn't left, but he was at least a little surprised to see they were both awake still. It was just past four in the morning- were they just not able to sleep like him?

Danny settled cross-legged in the air above Sam's bed, invisible of course, and watched her parents. Mrs. Manson was doing something on her phone while her husband stared at the floor, seeming more spaced out than thinking. They both looked more of a mess than he'd ever seen either of them, but that was probably to be expected really. It was just. Kind of hard to actually expect it from Pamela and Jeremy Manson.

There were reasons he and Sam had become friends in the first place when she'd earned herself an expulsion from the nearest private school- something she was very proud of even back then as a kid. His parents were weird and her parents were weird. Just different types of weird It was a pretty easy thing to bond over. His parents hunted ghosts and had a tendency towards either neglecting or smothering their children. Her parents were straight out of a nineteen-fifties sitcom and had a tendency towards either neglecting or smothering their child. None of that had changed. Obviously, they'd been getting away with fighting ghosts for years now without getting caught.

Even now, the story everyone was told was a version of the truth. They were hanging out together and were attacked by the Wisconsin Ghost.

It was obvious to anyone who knew them that Sam's parents loved her. And that she loved them despite everything. As they had all learned over the past few years, though, love didn't fix what was wrong. So despite the fact they loved Sam and obviously cared that she was hurt, Danny was still at least a little surprised that they seem to have let their fantasy world go for the moment.

The room stayed quite for a long time aside from the beeps and whirrs and hums of the machines which were actually easing Danny more than expected. Consistency meant stability. Which meant there was no reason to worry any extra about Sam from one moment to the next. He could get by on a baseline level of anxiety for the time being. True, that baseline was incredibly high, but. Eh, he'd take the little victories of keeping himself together for the time being.

Eventually, Mrs. Manson turned off her phone screen, looked over at her husband, and broke the silence. "I knew we needed to leave... " Her voice was quieter than Danny had ever heard it. He wasn't keen on prying in the conversation, but he just didn't have it him to leave Sam again right now. It wasn't news to him either, though.

Mr. Manson lifted his head, but instead of turning it towards his wife, he looked at his daughter instead. Stress aged his face a lot. "You know Mama wouldn't leave and you know I tried to make her. And then Sam is so close to finishing school and took losing her Granny so hard afterwards... She needed something normal."

"Well now our Sammy-kins doesn't get to be normal anymore." That got Mr. Manson to look at her. And Danny had to resist the temptation to turn visible just to tell her off- what the fuck was that supposed to mean?

It seemed he didn't have to step in this time, though. "Pamela, that is one of the most disgusting things you have ever said- We don't even know Sam's going to be okay yet and you're concerned with what's normal? We live in a town of ghosts and you think this isn't what people around here think of as 'normal'? Just go back to your group chat so all the other moms can gossip across town. Might as well tell her whole school before telling her friends." It was satisfying to watch her jaw drop. Even in the low light from just the machines, Danny could tell Mrs. Manson did not like that comment, to put it very lightly. He wasn't sure which of them was more pissed at the other, though. It was also officially in the realm of Conversations He Should Not Be Overhearing. But he still wasn't leaving.

"Our daughter is disabled now, Jeremy- do you not understand what that means? She-"

"I understand very well what that means. In case you'd forgotten, Mama lived with us as a disabled person for twelve years. And she said more than once it was the best she'd been since Dad died so don't you dare conflate disabled into abnormal or unhappy. And at least this one time, don't try to tell Sam how to feel about something you don't understand."

Huh. Wow. Maybe it was a good thing he'd heard the conversation after all. Danny had never seen someone get shut down so hard with just words in a long time. Then again, with his life, basically everyone was always getting stopped with fists and ghost rays so. Not like he had a lot to compare it to in recent history.

Still, it was enough for Mrs. Manson to go silent and back onto her phone again after a while of staring daggers into the ugly-ass wallpaper across the room. This time, though, the new edge to the silence wasn't great for his head. It wasn't long before his mind was racing again and new anxieties about the whole situation crept in.

The thought had vaguely crossed his mind already, but he'd pushed it out by worrying much more about Sam's present than her future. Now that she seemed pretty stable, though... Her dad was completely right, but that didn't mean Sam wouldn't have a rough time of things for the next several years at least while adapting. And that was without getting into the consideration that none of them know what kind of lasting damage this would actually cause, yet.

Danny didn't bother trying to change the subject in his own head until the sun started peeking from the horizon when he figured it was probably time to get at least a little bit of sleep in. He needed to be able to be there as soon as Sam needed him. Rather than returning to the lobby, though, he floated up and- after just enough inspection to be sure he wouldn't fall through the ceiling- settled in the air duct above the room to try and get some rest.