Lose Yourself
By JadeRabbyt
II
Danny raced skyward, phasing through the mortar and brick, plumbing and wiring of the old building and into the smoke-blackened sky above Amity Park. His lungs sucked the bitter, gritty taste of hot smoke, and the corner of his eye caught the sharp glare of flame licking at the buildings below. Danny vaulted into the cindered air, putting all his energy into a single effort: flight, velocity, and acceleration into the hazy void that yawned above his head. The wind tore against his face and a few whispy clouds knelt to touch his cheek as he sped upward and onward, hunting the ambivalent predators ahead. They spooled out thick ivory strings of exhaust behind them, flying level and smooth along the currents of the air, piercing the wind with rod-tipped nostrums. They maneuvered with casual indifference at speeds it was taking Danny superhuman effort to even attain.
Danny squinted into the wind, the corner of one lip twitching down. He didn't care how they looked. They'd be caught. And they'd be destroyed.
His conscious mind began to fade out.
The words and the forced actions, the fury and rage and determination and every other product of his conscious mind was purified into the needle-sharp awareness and instantaneous reaction times possible only through desperate instinct. Every current of the air, every explosion that touched his ears and every burning building below was marked and given its true meaning, all objects in his existence reduced to their purest essence and subsequence in the context of this moment. Irrelevancies were obliterated while things with purpose were caught and stored, prized and categorized with meticulous precision to be used in minute trajectory alterations that would close the gap between Danny and the attackers that much sooner.
The wind whipping petulantly at his hair was marked down as inhibiting friction, and Danny straightened his body to reduce it. The icy cold that bit through his suit was merely an inconvenience to be ignored. The aloof planes turned to prey and their fumes to the trail as the crackle of plaster and wood below counted down the time, urging him on. The town and the siren and the burning heat of the chaos below cried rage, and the smoke rose as a plea.
As reality registered again and again Danny Phantom cleaved the air as a bolt of verdant lightning and began to catch up to the planes.
He soared over their white tails, watching the steely little death machines as they cut through the grainy sky. Unbidden, a lime glow began to concentrate about Danny's outstretched fists, thickening the boiling green energy already surrounding him. These new clouds were the familiar progenitors of his plasma beams, but Danny didn't know where he was getting the energy required to produce them. The natural spectral power had been scraped clean from him, collected and converted into speed. This new power had not the soft tingle of his typical ectoplasm but the sharp, poisoned touch of something else, something eternal and unnatural that oozed from twin sources in his heart and brain. The forbidden power surged through his arms to his knuckles, flowing through his mind with the electrical hum of high-voltage lines and leaving in its wake the stinging numbness of electrocution. He was dimly aware that he was charging a plasma beam with more energy than he'd ever concentrated in his short life as a phantom.
Danny was coming up fast on the planes but they were coming up faster on the city. He siphoned off more of that precious power and flew faster, coming into range, being in range. He measured his targets through the sparking green haze around his fists. They were coming up on the suburbs, fingers probably already poised on those buttons that would open the bomb bay doors.
Danny tracked the leftmost plane, catching every twitch of the rudders and flinch of its ailerons. It angled right, nosing closer to tighten the pattern one final time before the three separated to chase their own targets. Danny's plane drifted north, towards the giants of aging brick and modern steel that towered over the once-bustling streets of downtown Amity.
A final great charge of power surged up his arms, blasting the twin spheres of plasma forward and sending a bone-wrenching jerk through Danny as its kickback crushed him against his former momentum.
The two great clouds smeared against the plane's wings and exploded. The fuselage flew naked, wings obliterated but for a few tattered metal ribbons. The plane twitched left sky as the jade energy washed over it, yet it continued on a straight path with preternatural resolution for the fraction of a second it took the sweeping, spitting, sparking emerald energy to whisper against the fuel tank. The plane exploded in an umber detonation, hanging and growing in the air like an orange stain in the blackened sky. The fiery debris lingered for a moment as the booming explosion stretched to its full size, incinerating itself a moment later, leaving behind only a few choice fragments of its origins. Strips of metal drifted to earth and a cloud of smoke added itself to a larger fog of the same.
He'd done it.
Danny watched the explosion peter out, watched the other two planes begin to clover-leaf. His harried eyes flickered across their city, searching for some fresh blossom of fire left by those two, but there was none. He stared dumbly at downtown Amity. The streets had long since emptied, cars abandoned and wads of trash littered across the street from the urgency of the evacuation. An errant minivan had smashed up against a fire hydrant.
The broken fixture spewed a fountain of the clearest, purest water in existence straight up in the sky for thirty feet or more. It reached up and up, tiny droplets falling to speckle the tinted windows and lemon paint of the minivan, the runoff rushing in burbling rivulets across the tarmac. The main spray thickened as it stretched higher, making one last leap to the heavens before curving back to earth in a great wide shower that sparkled up to Danny from the ground.
The exhilaration, the raw taste of victory, was soured by the fires below, still raging with heat and anger. His mind was throbbing from the recent use of that power, the ache of a wound numbed but still pouring precious blood. The planes were coming back to shoot him, he had no idea how to out the fire, and then there was something else. Something he couldn't face that he'd done in blowing up that plane. It numbed him, confused him, and saddened him, none of which could help him save the town. So Danny ignored it.
Through the doubts, Danny could still see that arc of glistening water, the single sign of life in downtown. He had kept it there.
Something else was still down there too, at least partially because of his efforts. Danny could see a feminine figure in a black tank top gazing up at him from a couple blocks over. Even from his great height Danny could see her slim arms crossed and squeezed tight against her chest, waiting for him to come back to her.
Danny heaved a shaky sigh. Sam didn't understand, or perhaps she understood too well. I'm doing this for you, Sam, for me and for us and for everybody below. Look, you have been with me from the beginning, from the very first. I've spent so much work, spent so much time and energy and put up with so much crap just to protect us and everything that's good here. My parents don't trust me. My grades are worse than election results. I'm unpopular and creepy and totally alienated from just about everybody with these powers, and now there's some planes, some little metal triangles in the sky that are telling me that it's for nothing. Sorry Danny, they're saying, Game over. We don't care what you've given of yourself. It doesn't matter. We'll burn you all.
I'm sorry, Sam. I can't give it up to them. You were right. This is probably gonna kill me, but I can't give it up.
A/N: I'm glad you guys like this! (Couldn't make the lyrics clump in this chapter. Let me know if anybody knows how.) Thanks all for your reviews: Mujitsu Yume, soccergurl1990, Angels624, prncssGrl1881, Mrs. Granger-Weasley, Chibi Fluffy Muffin, autumngold, Lightning Streak, and ?. Questions will remain unanswered, not because I am an evil demon-spawn but because I think it really adds more to the story if some things are left for you to determine. Sincere thanks to Lightning Streak for her criticism. (Was the description better this time? If not, can you tell me specifically what could be improved?) More coming soon!