Danny's got his arms wrapped around his knees as he sits curled up against a great, eerie tree. He's on a floating island almost small enough he could touch both ends if he laid down, somewhere out in the Ghost Zone, and Wulf is curled up near him, asleep.
He's been Phantom for almost two years now and it's still a little hard to understand that that's him when he looks in the mirror. That spectre, that phantom image. He's the dead boy in the reflection. Danny Fenton pressed a button, and this is the consequence.
At first, Phantom had been almost a game. He'd been playing at being a hero, fourteen and immature, "superhero" the only way he could possibly rationalize what had happened. Spiderman was bit by a spider and became a hero. Danny Fenton was electrocuted and became Danny Phantom.
It was the only logic he could come to terms with, and after months of just… moving forward, it had all crashed down at once: that he was dead, and Danny Phantom wasn't an alter ego.
It was just him.
Jazz and Sam and Tucker know parts of it, but it was only him who was privy to that private destruction, the moment in which he'd realized his own identity had split down its seam, and he had no idea how to reconcile the two pieces of himself.
Over a year later and he's… okay. Not perfect, but the thought of being dead no longer makes him sick to his stomach. Still hard to look at white and green in the mirror, still too easy to mentally replace it with black and blue, but better.
It was Jazz who'd suggested he spend more time in the Zone, and with other ghosts, when he'd hinted to her what was bothering him. That maybe it would be better for him, to see what the other half of his identity was like when it wasn't actively attacking all he held dear.
So here he is, in the Zone, on a tiny island, supposed to be taking a nap with Wulf, except his mind is churning with everything he'd repressed in the beginning.
As if sensing his distress—and maybe he does, considering he's a dog, sort of—Wulf looks up, making eye contact with Danny.
"Amiko?" Wulf says. "Vi ne dormas."
"No, I'm not sleeping," Danny agrees, sighing. "Don't worry about it, buddy. Estas bone."
Wulf frowns, and as Danny watches, he uncurls himself, stretches, and moves over to where Danny is sitting.
"Moviĝi," he says, motioning for Danny to scoot away from the tree. Confused, he does so, and to his surprise, Wulf moves into the space he'd vacated, laying down to curl around Danny like a mother cat around her kitten.
Danny sits there stiffly for a moment, confused, before Wulf reaches out with one arm to tug Danny back so that he's leaning against Wulf's flank. Wulf is… not warm, but warmer than Danny is, and he's solid. And soft.
"Dormu," Wulf says insistently, nuzzling his face against Danny's leg.
Danny feels almost struck dumb, there, leaning against Wulf. Wulf is his friend. He knows this logically, knows he has plenty of other friends and allies among the ghosts, but somehow it doesn't… connect. The fact that compassion exists here, too, in this place of death, so purely.
Phantom preaches to the Fentons, when he gets the chance, about how not all ghosts are bad. Jazz does too. Danny Fenton tries to avoid the topic of ghosts entirely, but when they do come up, sometimes he can't help himself.
Still, it's easy for the poisonous things his parents say to creep in, sometimes. It's hard not to think of ghosts as bad when the only time he sees them is when they're laying waste to his home. Hard not to think of himself as bad.
Danny relaxes against Wulf, and his friend grunts in satisfaction.
The Zone is cold, and so foreign, so eerie compared to Amity Park, but the dead part of Danny feels it welcome him in the same way his human self is welcomed by Earth. Here, that feeling of homecoming, that you are one of us, is real to him in a way it has never quite been. Wulf, curled around him, speaks of belonging, and he relishes in it.
The tears that slip from Danny's eyes are entirely involuntary, but he doesn't try to stem their flow. Instead, he wipes them with a shaking hand, smiling.
"Dankon, amiko," he whispers, and presses his face into Wulf's fur.
Esperanto translations, in order of appearance:
"Friend?" "You aren't sleeping."
"It's okay."
"Move."
"Sleep."
"Thanks, friend."