It occurred to me long after I NaNo'd this whole thing that after the Fight That Wasn't post-chapter 8, Danny and his parents really needed to have a talk about Important Future Stuff I'd have to do a fair amount of research on. Things like, y'know, how to report a missing child has come home to the appropriate authorities, and also that child is a little bit dead, and also very much killed the guy that kidnapped him, and also was an unwilling participant in any number of international crimes, and also hey Danny, we think we should take you to several doctors to get looked at because oh my god you look so bad and we as your parents are enormously concerned? Add on that Danny super doesn't want any part of any of that, and in fact doesn't want anyone to know he's home/alive that isn't (to him) strictly necessary, and we've got ourselves a super depressing breakfast argument! So while I never went back and wrote a word of that, y'all can imagine that's how Danny's morning went. Basically, Danny continues to realize all this human shit he's been forcibly removed from for three years? Is all an enormous pain in the ass and frankly he'd like to just exit stage left at the first opportunity, but hey! Guilt!

Man. Danny's having such a good time being back home, you guys.


Sam arrives outside of Fenton Works at a quarter past ten Sunday morning. She doesn't get out of her car once she's parked. With the heater off the frigid chill of late winter seeps into the interior and under her skin in no time, but she ignores it.

Frankly, she's not keen on getting out of the car.

Her hands grip the steering wheel of their own volition, squeezing until her knuckles burn white and aching. Guilt and anger wash over her, a sickly heat that burns her face and sours her stomach. Regret too; a belated, gnawing thing that makes her slouch, and slouch, and curl up like a dead spider until her forehead is pressed to her straining wrists.

She really, really doesn't want to get out of the car.

Yesterday had been...

Yesterday shouldn't have been so...

Yesterday had fucking sucked.

It had all turned out awful, every last minute of it. From when she'd frightened Danny into declaring his blindness on the stoop to the horribly silent drive from Tucker's back to Fenton Works, Danny simmering so sullenly actual frost had gathered on the dashboard. He hadn't been able to do that before, before he'd been taken, but...

But things have changed.

Things have changed for the worse, no matter what angle she tries to look at it all. Sure, Danny's alive. Sure Danny's home. Sure they're all relieved and glad he's back. But is Danny still...?

She doesn't know how to finish that. She only knows she doesn't recognize Danny anymore, and neither does Tucker. She can't even imagine how his parents are handling this. However much or little Danny's told the two of them he's told his parents half as much, and he'd practically ordered her and Tucker mum on the whole I murdered the sick bastard who kidnapped and mind controlled me, and I'm glad I did it.

Fuck.

Fuck.

She slaps the steering wheel, wincing when her palm stings, and fumbles her seat belt off. Whatever Danny has said or done, it's in the past. She has to treat it as such or she won't be able to do... to do what she should do. And what she should do right now is get her ass out of her car and march across the street to the house she's lived in more weeks than not ever since Danny went missing. Danny is here, right now, alive, and he needs them all to be here for him. He needs them on his side. He doesn't need judgement. He needs her to be his friend.

Still.

Still, it takes far more effort than it did yesterday to cross the street and climb the half-frozen steps up to the front door of Fenton Works. Today the door doesn't open before she can reach for the handle. Today she stands there, unsure if she's waiting or if she's procrastinating. Either way she stands frozen, watching her breath cloud, a wind whistling down the street that bites her ears and nose raw, the morning too cold to let her stinging eyes water. She's left blinking painfully, gritting her teeth

Danny's eyes are never going to water again. He couldn't cry over what he's done or what's been done to him even if he wanted to.

Fuck.

She squeezes her hands into fists at her sides until her worry-bitten nails dig crescents into her palms. She should've grabbed gloves, but she was too distracted to think of anything half so sensible. Even her parents noticed something was off with her, off enough that her mom barely hesitated at all before asking if she was alright. Her parents have barely bothered to say more than ten words a day to her in... in ages. She doesn't know how long. She doesn't remember when she quit paying them any mind. She doesn't know when their opinions and their punishments and their justified parental worries stopped mattering in the face of the greater good. She doesn't know when the greater good outweighed the grief she once bowed to. She doesn't know when she stopped grieving for her best friend, lost in some alleyway brawl that amounted to nothing more than one grainy two-minute recording and a few glowing splatters of ectoplasm. Danny, gone in the blink of any eye—

Nngh.

If she ever sees Lydia again she's going to take that bitch apart. She doesn't care how grateful Danny seems to be now, that Lydia backtracked, that Lydia felt something approximating guilt enough to blind him so he could be free again. Molecule by molecule, Jack Fenton-style. That's a promise she intends to keep.

Sam shakes her head, steels her shoulders, and rings the bell twice in quick succession followed by a knock of shave-and-a-haircut. It's the usual bit of militia security, nonsensical since she's got a key and clearance with the hyper-aggressive security system, but it's better to warn Mr. and Mrs. Fenton that she's someone they can trust. Better safe than sorry. She's had a few close calls, startling them after a rough night of ghost hunting. Tucker's got a burn on his shoulder, a complete accident, but it's not likely to fade for years, if it ever does. Ghost hunting weapons tend to hurt humans in unexpected ways.

She steps inside after a brief pause, freezing when she finds Mrs. Fenton just inside. "Oh—!"

Mrs. Fenton looks... bad. She looks ten years older than the last time Sam saw her, just last weekend. Her eyes are dull and swallowed up by dark bags badly hidden by makeup, and the smile she musters looks totally, bizarrely wrong. Sam can't figure out why.

"Good morning, Sam," Mrs. Fenton says after a weighty silence. Even her usual mom-brand cheer is worn thin, not that Sam expected anything else. She's just Danny's friend. She can't imagine how Mrs. Fenton feels about the state Danny came home in. She's not sure she wants to try.

"Morning, Missus F," she replies, muscling her own mouth into a grin. The flicker of tension around Mrs. Fenton's eyes is just confirmation that her own acting skills need work. "I, um. I came to pick Danny up."

"Oh. Right. Of course." Mrs. Fenton steps back to give Sam room to come inside and shut the door. "He's upstairs in his old—" Her eyes widen. "—in his room."

Sam pretends not to notice the slip. "Cool. I'll wait for him down here?"

Mrs. Fenton nods stiffly, and they both stand there trying and failing not to notice the tension bearing down on the whole house. It really is a physical weight, for all that nothing's visibly changed in what she can see of the first floor. It just feels... it feels wrong. She doesn't know how.

Well, that's not exactly right. She doesn't know how to phrase how it's wrong, not in a way that won't make guilt settle like a lead weight in her chest. She knows this dread. It's the same cold bite of any hungry ghost haunting someplace it doesn't have any right to call its own.

That hideously uncharitable and unpleasant train of thought is derailed by Mr. Fenton poking his head out of the kitchen, dripping soapy dishwater as he waves. "Heya, Sammy," he says quietly, offering her a wane smile. "Here for Danny?"

"You bet," she replies.

"There's a good friend if I ever saw one." He nods toward the stairs. "S'good for him to get outta the house, I think."

"Don't worry. Tucker and I'll keep him busy." It hurts to smile, but that seems to be enough to assuage Mr. Fenton. Danny must not have mentioned anything to his parents about yesterday. At least that's old, bitterly familiar territory. She'd almost forgotten how the guilty twist of her stomach felt when she had to lie to the nicest, coolest adults she knows.

Behind her Mrs. Fenton says, "Sam," in a carefully neutral voice. Uh oh.

She turns her forced smile on Mrs. Fenton and hopes she's managing something halfway reassuring and carefree. "Yeah?"

"Danny—" Mrs. Fenton pauses, pursing her lips, and that draws attention to just how her face looks off. She'd forgotten to put lipstick on this morning. Sam's known her since middle school and she's never seen Mrs. Fenton without lipstick before. Her mouth looks smaller without that usual pop of red. Her whole face looks older, worn, unfamiliar. "Is... Did Danny talk to you two yesterday? About—about what he went through?"

Fuck, if that's not a loaded question.

Sam's tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth, her throat tight. What's safe to say? Danny had sworn them to secrecy about Freakshow. His parents didn't know yet, didn't know Danny had been the one to kill Freakshow, or what Freakshow had made him and the ghosts he'd collected do. Honestly, she's not sure Danny was that honest about all of—of that stuff with them either. He'd faltered a lot, and backtracked more. Danny's never been any good at lying. He'd been trying to justify to them—to her—why he didn't feel an ounce of regret for killing Freakshow by giving them the grisly details, but he actually hadn't been all that detailed in the telling. Like he'd been trying not to scare them off too.

"Uh, yeah. He—I mean, he gave us the gist..."

It had been one thing, when Danny had still been here, to break curfew and drum up lies on the spot about where they'd been and what they'd been doing. They'd been playing at superheroes, after all. It's easy to feel justified when you're saving people from things with teeth like an upended cutlery drawer. This is... this...

Sam doesn't know if she can do this.

"Aw, c'mon, Mom. Don't go grilling Sam for gossip first thing." Danny appears at the top of the stairs—literally, popping into sight without an ounce of awkward guilt on his thin face. Well, he'd said he'd been stuck in ghost mode all that time Freakshow had been controlling him. Using his powers must come as second-nature as breathing to him now. Sam doesn't miss the whole body twitch Mrs. Fenton fails to quell. Mr. Fenton stands in the kitchen doorway, staring up at Danny with his normally jolly face stretched in a rictus grin. They all watch wordlessly as Danny descends the stairs, slow and cautious, his left hand tightly gripping the banister. He's got his sunglasses on again, and he's all in black again too. Sam's starting to feel seriously out-Gothed. Frankly, she's not a fan.

Danny reaches the foot of the stairs and pops his tongue; a startling shock of noise that makes Sam's ears ring. He'd done that yesterday a couple times too, and hadn't said a word about why or what the deal was with that new little habit. With everything else going on she hadn't thought to ask about it. Tucker hadn't either. They'd been... They'd had their hands full.

"Hi, Danny," she says belatedly.

He slings a backpack held together with duct tape and what looks like dirty shoelaces over one shoulder. His grin's practically a threat. Something about it—the crooked curl, the stretch of his scarred mouth over too-pale gums, his stained teeth clenched so tightly his jaw muscles bulge—sets her on edge. She thinks of how a dog might bare its teeth in a mute snarl just before it decides to bite and feels a fresh twist of guilt in her gut over comparing her best friend to an animal. What is wrong with her? "So!" He says brightly. "You all having fun staring at me? Should I go back upstairs and pretend I can't hear you until you've filled each other in on all the freaky gossip?"

Mrs. Fenton looks like she's going to be sick. "Sweetie, no, I didn't mean—"

"It's fine," he interrupts. "I get it. Just don't do it when I'm around, alright? I really wasn't kidding about how good my hearing is."

Sam's eyes skitter between all three Fentons. Mrs. Fenton looks like she's going to be sick. Mr. Fenton looks like he's doing his damnedest not to cry, and like he knows it's a losing battle. Danny looks like—like how he used to look on bad days, their freshman year. Bad grades and too little sleep and the A-listers all being pricks and another midnight ghost beating him black and green and blue; a boy overwhelmed, with no one to turn to but his friends who were even less capable of handling the heap of bullshit he'd been handed than he was. Danny looks pissed, like he's eager for any excuse to take out his anger on anyone or anything that gives him the slightest excuse.

She can't believe she used to think that expression was endearing.

She should say something. Diffuse the miserable tension somehow. Danny's talking like his parents are a couple of irritating strangers he's got to put up with for propriety's sake. Or—no, that's not right. He's talking like he's the irritating stranger his parents have to put up with. Like he knows he's an inconvenience and he doesn't know how to dip out without offending them, never mind the relief his absence would bring.

Fuck. This—this isn't right. None of it is. He should be happy to be home again, shouldn't he? He shouldn't look like he's desperate for the first excuse to bolt and not look back.

Metaphorically speaking.

Nngh.

"D-Danny!" Mr. Fenton stammers from the kitchen doorway. "You on your way out already?"

"Yeah," Danny replies, not bothering to so much as angle his head towards his father. "I doubt I'll be gone long though. Tucker's parents are due back this afternoon and, well." He shrugs. "I'd like to keep a low profile a bit longer."

"You said," Mr. Fenton replies, dropping the rictus grin and looking all the more weary for it. "Wish you'd tell us why though."

"I will," Danny says. The absence of any excuse or apology practically rings through the house.

"Have fun," Mrs. Fenton says after an awkward pause. Her voice cracks and her face twists in a wince like she's honestly doing everything she can not to cry right there in the entryway. "Call if you need a ride home."

"It's okay," Sam says quickly. "I don't mind driving him, really."

Danny's expression sours further, but he doesn't say anything more than a terse, "Later," before striding past Mrs. Fenton and Sam. He'd done this yesterday too; sudden bursts of movement that are so, so convincing he really can see exactly where he's going. But he fumbles at the door, knocking his knuckles on the wood hard enough to crack a couple of them, taking three tries to get it open. Sam can't see his face, but she can hear his breath seething through his clenched teeth.

"Coming, Sam?" He barks out once the door's open. She startles, and hates herself for flinching. She hates herself more for the relief that Danny can't see it.

"Y-yeah. Sorry." She follows after him, pausing on the doormat to look back at Mr. and Mrs. Fenton as Danny plunges down the stoop stairs like there's something after him. There's a shiny streak of soapy water down the wall where Mr. Fenton's large hand crabs tightly. Mrs. Fenton's unpainted mouth is a white, unhappy slash, her hands crawling up to squeeze her upper arms.

She can't leave them like this, brimming over with worries Danny's uninterested in allaying. They're desperate to help their son, but don't have any idea how to start. Where do you start with something like this? "He—Danny's gonna be okay," she falters. The lie is ashes on her tongue, slick and foul. She's gotten out of the habit of lying. She hates that she knows already that it's a lie. "He just... he needs time to adjust."

Mrs. Fenton's pale mouth wobbles in an unconvincing smile. Sam flees after Danny before either of them can say anything.

Danny's stood on the sidewalk outside Fenton Works, tense as piano wire. He holds out his hand without a word as she descends to meet him, and she stares at his scarred hand—at the bits of his fingers missing, and she's still summoning up the courage to ask what the fuck— until her brain catches up with the obvious. He doesn't know where she parked. He needs her to guide him.

She takes his chilly hand in hers and leads him to her car parked parked across the street. It isn't until they've both buckled up—Danny only bothering when she prompts him to—that he speaks. In a quiet, apologetic voice he says, "I'm gonna tell them too."

"When?" Sam turns the car on and puts it into drive with more force than is strictly necessary. She's pissed, alright? She hates this whole stupid, awful situation, but she hates more that there's no obvious way to fix it. At least it's a short drive to Tucker's. She's never been any good at reining in her anger in enclosed spaces. "Your parents are worried sick. You realize that, right? They don't know what to do because you just stand there and talk at them instead of telling them what they need to know!"

She hears the scratch of Danny's nails against his jeans as she waits for a truck to pass before veering into the street. All eight and a half of his nails are cracked and bruised and in need of a trim, unless he managed to find some nail clippers since yesterday. She hasn't asked yet how he hurt his hands so badly. Her throat's closed up every time she tried. Danny scoffs, a scathing growl that makes her feel two feet tall and pisses her off royally even before he retorts, "Oh, because you've been there to listen in and judge me for every conversation we've had since I got back? I haven't told them I killed Freakshow yet because they're already fucking terrified of me already. I don't need to pile anything else on them."

"They're not—"

"Please." She seems him hold up one hand in her peripheral, sees the dark scar eating up his palm. Neon green light spills down his skin like hot wax, thick and pulsing. Sam hastily pinches her nose, the copper-and-citrus reek amplified by the much-abused heater of her car. "You may have told them I was Phantom, but hearing that doesn't compare to seeing the proof. I do this?" The energy flares, stinging her eyes harshly enough to leave afterimages when she blinks. Static gathers between her clenched teeth, makes the hair on her nape raise and goosebumps break out all along her skin. "My parents go full deer in the headlights. They're terrified of what I might do."

"They're not—"

He flaps his other hand at her, counting out fingers as he retorts, "Intangibility, invisibility, flight, even my damn hearing. The slightest show of my powers is enough to make them clam up. They don't have any idea how to handle the fact that their son's a freak."

Sam scowls at the red light, tamping down the urge to smack the steering wheel again. "They don't think that."

He laughs. Gently. Indulgently. Like she's some sticky-fingered kid who's realized two plus two might really equal four. The sickly light in his hand gutters out, leaving a cloying green smoke behind that smells like an electrical fire. She has to swallow the urge to cough. "C'mon Sam, you're smarter than that. I'm as freaky as they come, and I worked for a psycho who thought Freakshow was a good stage name."

Worked for. Worked for. Like he'd just up and decided to run away from home and join the circus all on his own.

"What is wrong with you? I would've figured you'd worked out all your unnecessary fucking hostility out yesterday—"

She freezes.

"Ah," Danny says. "Still on that, huh?"

"I—I didn't—"

"You're not the only one, y'know."

"I—what?"

But he doesn't answer. He just sighs quietly, leaning back in the passenger's seat. He pulls his sunglasses off the bridge of his nose so they dangle off his ears and under his chin. He rubs his eyes. The glass prosthetics where his eyes should be. In the gray mid-morning light the shadows under his false eyes look dark enough to be painted on. "Nngh," he says. "I'm being an ass again. Sorry. I'm just... Ha. I haven't slept much since I got back. Can we blame me being an ass on that?"

Well, shit. She wants to pick a fight; not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of proving she's right and Danny's in the wrong. But she knows she can be a holy terror after a rough all-nighter. Just because Danny didn't used to be doesn't mean that's not a natural enough thing to have changed. "It's okay," she says grudgingly. "I've been an ass too."

"Maybe, but I deserved it." He angles a smile her way, his hooded eyes way too dark. It's not that his false eyes look artificial. If she didn't know they were fake she doubts she'd notice anything was up with them. It's just that she knows the color his eyes ought to be, and so the fact that these fake ones aren't that color are jarring to the point of distraction even when she's only glancing at him while she drives. "Plus, I mean—ha ha. I kinda missed hearing you getting up in arms about something. Even if it's me being more casual about the whole 'killed a dude' thing than you'd like me to be."

Nope. No, Sam isn't blushing right now, not even a little bit, because now is a very bad time for feelings she thought she'd long since shelved. "Y-yeah, well..." She clears her throat. Better to change the topic. Definitely better to change the topic. "So, uh. Can't sleep or don't want to sleep?"

Danny allows the rough segue without comment. "Bit of both, if I'm honest. He only let me sleep a couple hours a week, y'know? I got used to that somewhere along the line, so even though I know I need more I'm kinda, I dunno. Out of the habit of sleep, I guess."

She'd known Danny was hardier in ghost mode. No way not to notice, honestly. He could go longer without food, water, and sleep, and he never seemed as roughed up after a difficult patrol as she and Tucker felt, even on nights he'd been put through the wringer. A normal human would've gone to pieces on just a couple hours of sleep a week in no time. A normal human probably would've died on so little sleep over so long a period. She wants to press, ask more questions, learn the real details of just how terribly Freakshow treated him so she can justify—Danny's word, but true enough—his death. His murder.

Freakshow had been an awful human being. A monstrous person. Sam only ever dug up a fraction of the horrible things Frederich Isak Showenhower had gleefully attached his various names to during his lifetime. Even a handful of those crimes ought to be enough to justify what Danny did. But Sam's never been about justification. She's about justice. Comic book vigilantism and action movie revenge plots aren't real life, never mind how satisfying they might feel as simple, fictional power trips. Just because a man was an undeniably terrible person doesn't mean one of his victims had the right to kill him. Even at her most rebellious, anarchy has never sat well with her.

Maybe it's not her place. Danny's right about one thing, if nothing else. She wasn't there. She didn't see. She didn't experience it. She didn't suffer. She's spent the last three years fighting ghosts, sure, but mostly her life's been the same as any other teenager's; school and homework and bickering with her parents and trying to get a good grasp on the abstract future of the rest of her life. Simple worries, simple fears. She's had close calls with death, sure, but that's no different than anybody else in the militia. Danny...

Nobody's been through what Danny's survived. That much she's sure of.

"So," she says neutrally, rolling her jaw to stretch the tension out of it. "That's the 'can't' answer. Why don't you want to sleep?"

In her periphery she watches Danny slip his sunglasses on again, hiding away his false eyes and the dark shadows circling them. It's a moment before he answers, but he surprises her by answering honestly. "Bad dreams."

Well. She really ought to have expected that. "Do... do you want to talk about it?"

"I... maybe. Soon. I dunno." She hears his nails scratch at his jeans again. "They're not so bad, really. I had worse ones, before. About you, actually."

They're not far from Tucker's. She desperately wishes she'd done the smart thing and stewed in another horrible silence all the way there. She wishes she'd waited so Tucker would have to sit through all this too. "I thought you said you'd forgotten everything. That he made you forget."

"He did. Those dreams were... ha ha. Abstract, I s'pose." Scratch, scratch, scratch. She doesn't remember him doing that before. Fidgeting so much. "I used to dream of reaching for something really important to me, but I didn't know what it was, or why it was in danger, or why I was so scared. I picked out details over time. Maybe the repetition of the dreams helped me remember. I dunno. I realized it wasn't an it I was worried about, it was a human, and they were falling. Or it was an it, and it was a staff with a red orb. Both of them were so incredibly important to me. I didn't know what I'd do if I didn't save them. Either of them. Both. I dunno."

When she glances over at him his fingers are all tangled together, a wavering grin on his face as his knuckles pop one by one. "After awhile," he goes on, "I knew it was a girl that was falling, but nothing about her. Who she was to me. And I could remember a boy I cared about just as much too. I realized that I'd belonged to Freakshow more than once, but I couldn't remember how I'd gotten free the first time. There wasn't anything I could do. About getting free, or for those humans I remembered, or that staff that wasn't there with us then. I didn't know if I'd caught either of them, or if any of it had been real, or..."

His jaw clamps shut so quick his teeth click together. He doesn't finish that train of thought, or start up another. Sam wants to push, wants to ask, wants all the details he's skimming over out of some misplaced sense of protectiveness. She doesn't want to be protected. She wants to know the truth. But... no. No, not without Tucker. It wouldn't be right to push without Tucker here. Danny's made it clear he hates repeating himself.

"It was real," she says softly. "The first time. I fell off a train while we were going over a canyon. You were holding the staff he was using to control you, but you dropped it to save me."

"Yeah," he says. "I know. I remember now."

"Oh. Right." Of course he remembers that now. The needles Lydia had buried into and burned out of his eyes don't have any effect on his memory now. Is that why he killed Freakshow? To guarantee he'll stay free this time?

She's starting to realize that why isn't a question she shouldn't be asking him. Not if her knee-jerk reaction is to think circles around every word he says in petty attempts to justify his justifications.

"What was it like?" She asks instead of the first half dozen questions she thinks of and dismisses. As soon as she says them she wants to snatch the words out of the air and swallow them down again, pretend she hadn't said anything at all. Why the fuck can't she stop pushing him?

"What was what like?" There's no edge to his voice at least, no subtle warning that he wants to change the topic or shut up altogether. That has to mean something good, right?

Tucker's house at last. She's not great at parallel parking, so she holds off speaking until she's got it more sorted than not. "Remembering. Remembering all the stuff he'd taken from you. I mean—"

"I know what you mean." No ire to that either. No lashing out. Just interrupting her before she can put her foot in it again. He takes a deep breath, lets it out in a drawn-out sigh through his nose. "it was like... like that first breath after being underwater for a long time. For so long your lungs feel like they're on fire and your eyesight gets spotty. It was like I'd been underwater so long I'd... like I'd forgotten what it felt like to breathe. Forgotten I needed to breathe. Like I'd forgotten the point of breathing at all." He laughs that same little Freakshow-ish laugh. Chills run up and down Sam's spine."Shit. I spent that whole time thinking I was dead. Forget breathing. It was like coming back to life."

Sam's tongue is a dried, dead thing in her mouth, her hands gripping her seat belt so tightly her hands hurt up to her wrists. What do you even say to something like that? She pries one hand free to kill the engine instead of speaking.

"Oh," Danny says. "Are we there already?"

"...Yeah."

"Well, what are we sitting around for?" He doesn't bother unbuckling his seat belt, or opening the passenger door for that matter. With a chilling of the air she feels even with her overworked heater he phases through both, bag in tow. Once upon a time he'd look both ways and triple-check with her and Tucker before doing anything half as overt as that. Now, he can't even see if anybody's around to witness his weirdness and he doesn't seem to care at all. Sam watches him through the passenger window as he slings his bag back on, tapping out a rhythm on the duct-taped shoulder strap.

Three years spent thinking he was dead. Of course his powers feel normal to him now. He doesn't feel like a freak for being half-ghost anymore. He feels like a freak for being half-human. What must have it been like, to come back from the dead? To realize he'd never been dead at all? How many kinds of fucked up must he feel after all that? How much must he resent her for focusing on the one actual fucking thing he could choose to do after all that?

Fuck. Fuck, but she's such a shitheel.

She gets out of the car, barely remembering to lock it. She takes Danny's hand in hers again and pretends it doesn't feel like holding an icicle. It's the least she can do for him.