Danny never really believed it would kill him. He knew he'd die eventually, some day. Knew that logically people who did these kinds of things died a lot earlier than most people who didn't. Enough of the people he'd worked with and seen around had just stopped coming in that he'd gotten used to the idea really early on. And his parents had been warning him about it all his life, but that was the problem, it was a lot like when he was warned about staying up too late, or eating around his asparagus. He'd been with the CBI, been hearing all those things for as long as he could remember, so long that was hard for him to be scared of them.
He knew them all, he understood them, but that wasn't the same thing as really believing.
The first time he came close, that he got bloody and really had to consider how dangerous it was for him specifically, he'd been with the Titans. Later, much, much later, he'd wonder if that should have tipped him off that his parents idea of him being safer with the Titans than with the CBI was maybe a little off.
The first time Danny heard of a young hero dying in action, someone closer to his age, someone he'd know, and talked to only a week before, he'd had to remind himself, for the first time in a long time, that it was a risk they all took. Wearing costumes and pretending it was a game didn't make it any safer than the CBI, and thinking it did made it even less safe.
So, he tried to treat it the way he would have if it had been a fellow agent, and it turned out the other Titans weren't as used to the idea as he was. It turned out that maybe he wasn't a good fit for their team after all.
He couldn't find his parents right after he left. They were undercover somewhere and, not being an agent anymore Danny wasn't granted access to that information. Faraday assured him that he could always join up again, and after a few months, maybe the organization would consider granting him back the clearance level he'd had before his early retirement.
Danny declined; he knew Mom and Dad had gotten some heat for getting him out, he wasn't going to let all of that be for nothing. He'd be okay on his own for a while, always had been before, and if things got too hard, he always knew how to get hold of his grandfather. It was fine, really, and though he hated to admit it, even in the presumed privacy of his own head, it was kind of nice not having to worry about that stuff for the couple of months it lasted.
Sure, there were a couple of simple altercations he got in the way of; purse snatcher, a grocery store hold-up, pulling some animals out of tricky situations. Easy stuff. Fun stuff where nobody died and there was nobody lecturing him on his manners or protocol. It was nice enough that he even considered…
But no, when it ended, boy did it end. When he got caught up in what was going on with the Wildebeest Society, when Dick asked for his help Danny didn't question it. It was just another mission, and all his life Danny had understood what that meant. Just another undercover mission, the only difference was that this time he was playing the powerful spectre and not the scared little kid who couldn't find Mommy and Daddy.
He hadn't known when it had started the sheer, uncountable numbers of the enemy, hadn't thought that his powers - grounded in science they'd always assured him, always - would prove so effective against the corrupted ghosts of an entire world. Only when it was too late, did he understand that they wouldn't be effective enough. Most surprising of all was that he found he didn't mind that last part so much. This was just how it happened in their world, always had been.
Still, he'd never really believed it would get him killed, and it hadn't, not really.
The Phantasm, after all, lived on, and as it turned out, They would be a lot harder to kill.