Last chapter, I think, and then an epilogue. We'll see how this all turns out in the end…
Final disclaimer for the epilogue so I don't ruin it: I got the idea for the chapter title from Yu Yu Hakusho.
Fourteen: Lifeless to Humanity
It had been almost two weeks since the incident in the park and Danny, Sam, and Tucker were back into real life. Well, Tucker and Sam were back into real life. Danny looked as though he'd rather be jumping off rooftops and not in his ghost form either.
Once the police had picked them up from the park and taken them to the station, they'd called everyone's parents (Sam wanted to die right there when she heard her parents screaming over the phone), and promptly dragged the hiccupping, red eyed, Danny into an interrogation room for almost and hour and a half. When Sam, Tucker, and Jazz had later asked him about it, he had responded that all he'd told them was what had happened at the school (leaving out his ghost half bits) and vaguely what he could remember about the area where the warehouse was.
And he hadn't said a word since. Danny Fenton had locked himself up inside with grief; even Dash was scared of the silent teen with the dead look in his blue eyes. He didn't talk to anyone, he didn't look at anyone unless it required his immediate attention, and he hadn't 'gone ghost' once since the thing in the park. It was like he'd sworn off it, even when Skulker came after him, all he did was whip out the thermos and suck him in.
And it was scaring Sam. She wanted the Danny back who had kissed her that night, the Danny who laughed at himself when he fell down, the Danny who was constantly going on about NASA, the Danny whose brilliant eyes; whether blue or green; were always alight, the Danny who had stepped into the Fenton Portal almost a year ago and taken on the responsibility of protecting Amity Park from the ghost attacks.
Danny was dead. As dead as ZeE. As dead as the other ten kids in that park. Dead.
Sam wanted to smack him, to tell him he was being an idiot and that he needed to get over it. But she didn't have the heart. He looked so broken, beaten, and pathetic that she just couldn't do it, convincing herself instead that by not doing so he would get out of his self-hating slump on his own.