It's a particular kind of ache that Danny feels, floating there in the air just above the grass of the park. It's the kind that can allow someone to remain alone, unmoving, for hours upon days at a time. It's a bone-deep something, an exhaustion incurable. It has been rising in Danny for years and now spills out around him, leaving him motionless in the air despite the slight wind, even his hair frozen still.
It starts to snow. Or, he thinks it does—maybe he makes it snow, his core icy in his chest, seeming to spread out into his arms, his legs, his fingertips. His whole body both is and isn't numb. It's a strange dichotomy; the human in him is freezing, joints slowly locking up. The ghost in him wants to surround itself with ice. Make Amity Park a twin of the Far Frozen.
All his warring instincts feel apart from him, somehow. Rather than let them rise to his conscious attention, he focuses on the soft weight of snow on his lashes, the way it settles in his hair, on his shoulders, in the dip of his collarbones. He has no body heat like this, so it doesn't melt when it makes contact. It builds and builds and he lets it, feeling like a hill on a moor in winter, still as the storm rages on.
Not that this is a storm. The wind has died down, and snow falls around him in utter silence.
After a long while, long enough for the faint green of the park grass to disappear beneath white, Danny moves, just a little. He reaches up to cup his hands, opening them to the snowfall. And he tilts his head just slightly back, raising his gaze to the heavens.
It's night. It has been night as long as he's been out here, which means only a few hours must have passed, no matter how it feels like eternity. His eyes, faintly glowing, are the only source of light, and he catches the snow that falls above his head in their dim spotlight. Past that short threshold, he can see nothing of the sky above him but blackness. He can't see the clouds.
Maybe there aren't clouds. Maybe he conjures every flake from the chilly air around him, instinctual, creating the only source of comfort he can find.
He can't see the stars. Maybe that means there are clouds, really.
He doesn't notice when the ice in his core seems to take on new reality in his chest, a weight, a physical burning. He's too far into his own head, too far into thoughts of ghost and human and boy and freak.
It spreads out from his center, a creeping, chilling thing, and—subconsciously or not—he lets it.
It's that same thing that had eaten him when his ice first manifested: a lack of control, though this time, freely given up. Danny releases the reins, lets go of the wheel. He lets it consume him.
The floating, perfect ice sculpture in the park is, come morning, thought to be an anonymous tribute to their hero for a good few weeks. It's only when it gets warm and the ice doesn't melt (and when Danny Phantom stops showing up to save the day, and when Danny Fenton doesn't come home) that Amity gets the hint.