Something Drastic

Theme #25: Insomnia | Family/Hurt/Comfort | 2370 words | Danny F., Maddie F.

He's dead; why does he even need to sleep anyway?

-x-

Danny phases through his bedroom window and drifts over to the inert figure beneath the duvet feigning sleep. It's definitely not sleep, though; his chest doesn't rise, the blood in his veins is static and his breaths don't warm the pillow. He's pale, and cold to the touch. Danny peels back the covers, and stares at the figure's dark hair - his hair - and shudders. No matter how many times he does this, he just can't get over the sight of his own corpse.

He wrinkles his nose. Going back, going human, is not nearly as nice an experience as going ghost. Splitting spirit from body is such a euphoric feeling - stepping off the mortal coil, shrugging off the weight of his human body and letting go all of its troubles and urges. Going ghost feels like a sea breeze, fresh and clean and free. By contrast, returning to the land of the living is like wading into a stagnant pond and heading for the deepest part, where the thick and grasping mud envelops your legs, then your torso, your shoulders and head. The weight that's been omnipresent throughout your life, the weight of living, suddenly feels oppressive and claustrophobic. Your body feels too small for you, and you want to expand and expand and expand, but you can't, you're contained, uncomfortable in your own skin.

That's what it feels like to be human now. Oh, the feeling fades the longer Danny remains corporeal, but there's always, always that little itch at the back of his mind that he can't ever scratch. It's why he doesn't like to sit still much anymore, it's why he's always doing something, be it eating, or watching TV or, hell, even doing his homework.

Danny sighs. He needs to get this over and done with; he can't stay ghost forever. Not yet, anyhow. However uncomfortable living may be, he's still far too young to die. He closes his eyes, places a gloved hand on his corpse's shoulder, and he imagines air rushing through his lungs, his heart pumping furiously in his chest, the feel of gravity acting on his limbs- he opens his eyes again and all he can see is darkness. For a moment he panics - oh god, I'm dead, I'm dead, my eyes stopped working - but then he realises he's just face down on his pillow, and he rolls over. If his circulatory system had been working properly yet, he'd have blushed.

Danny lays still for a few minutes, letting his body recalibrate and get all its systems up and running again. He's learnt the hard way that trying to do anything much more physically demanding than moving his foot in those first five minutes is really not a good idea. Once he feels his pulse steady and his breathing rate stabilise, he slowly maneuvers himself into sitting position and does a few stretches to get rid of the cramp in his muscles. There's no way he'll be sleeping any time soon, he knows that. The ache of readjusting to a living body won't become tolerable enough to lie still for an hour or two yet, and until it fades he needs to find some sort of distraction. Usually, Danny would sit on his computer long into the early hours of the morning, but it's been confiscated; his parents firmly believe that it's the reason he 'sleeps' in class and are dead set on correcting the problem. Well, what could he have said? 'Please don't take my computer away, I don't even sleep in class, I just detach my soul from my body so I can fight ghosts?' Yes, a perfect excuse.

Danny sighs. His room has been stripped bare of anything he could use to entertain himself for a few hours, and he'd even done his homework for once. Sure, there're always the books on his bookcase, but he's read them all at least a dozen times and doesn't even need to have one in his hands to quote it. For a moment, he contemplates just lying down and closing his eyes, but his spirit squirms, railing against the constrictive pressure of his flesh, and he makes his decision; surely there'll be something to occupy himself with downstairs.

Silently Danny pads down the hall, avoiding the creaky spots with ease borne of years of experience, and creeps slowly down the stairs. He forces himself to focus on being quiet, so much so that he doesn't notice that the kitchen light is still on until it's too late.

"Danny?"

Danny startles. "Mum?"

"What are you doing up, young man?" she demands. "It's two in the morning." She's sat at the table, a mug of coffee in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The guts of what looks like one of the newer ecto guns are spilled out before her.

"I'm aware," he deadpans, and subsequently fails to stifle a yawn. Genuine or no, it softens Maddie's expression, and Danny can see the beginnings of a lecture die on her lips.

"You've got school tomorrow," she warns instead.

"I'm aware of that too."

She sighs. "Well, if you're not going back to bed, don't just stand there. You're making the place look untidy." Danny raises his eyebrows, and looks pointedly at the junk piled on every level surface - from paperwork and food to blueprints and their matching inventions, there is nowhere left uncovered. "Oh, just come over here and help me fix this. If you're awake enough for sarcasm, you're awake enough for science."

"Can't I get something to drink first?" he asks.

"Not unless you're making me another coffee. This one's gone cold," she says, grimacing at the viscous liquid as if it had personally offended her. Danny rolls his eyes, but puts the kettle on anyway. A cup of coffee wouldn't go amiss.

"What are you working on, anyway?" he asks, trying to locate all the necessary ingredients of two coffees beneath the mess.

"Oh, nothing much, in truth," says Maddie. "Just working on the ecto guns' efficiency. These ones are much improved from our first models - those clunky old things only had an efficiency of six percent, can you believe it? - but I'm convinced that ectoplasm is what will be keeping our lights on in the future. If we figure out how to fully unlock all that energy stored in ectoplasm, everything will change. Forget nuclear power - this is the way to go. Ectoplasm is a freely available, naturally occurring and self-replenishing resource, and the only waste product is the glow. It's the answer to all our energy problems - but only if I can figure out how to improve efficiency beyond fifteen percent…"

"And that's 'nothing much'?" scoffs Danny, returning to the table with two mugs of coffee in hand and perching on the chair next to his mother's. "Solving one of mankind's biggest problems is 'nothing much'?"

"No, not when I'm not seeing any way to actually make that happen," she sighs unhappily, toying with one of the gun's components as she waits for her beverage to cool. She glances sideways at her son, and says, "So. You know why I'm up. Why are you up?"

Mum, every night I leave my body and stay up fighting ghosts, and I'm afraid I might just be a ghost possessing my own corpse.

"No reason," he lies instead. "I just...woke up and couldn't get back to sleep."

"Mhm, and what's the real reason?" she asks, eyebrow raised.

Danny sighs. "...Nightmare," he mumbles. It's not too far off the truth, if you think about it; where else but in a nightmare would dead people take potshots at you on a regular basis?

"Oh hon, come here," says Maddie, pulling him into an awkward side-hug. "If you tell me what it was about, I can explain how scientifically impossible it is. If you want me to, of course."

Danny slips out of his mother's vice-like grasp with practiced ease; he's a fifteen-year-old boy, and fifteen-year-old boys do not willingly get smothered by their overprotective parents, even ones as...vitally challenged as he. Although, generally speaking, most fifteen-year-old boys don't let their elbows go slightly intangible to help the escape. "I'm fine, Mum," he insists.

"Oh, come off it, Danny. If you were fine, you'd be in bed asleep." Well, she's not wrong.

"...alright," he acquiesces, and in a split second, the decision is made. The time is right, even if that time is two a.m. He takes a deep breath, and begins. "I dreamt I was dead, but also...not dead. I don't know. I was human, but I could leave my body and be a ghost too. And nobody knew except me, Tuck and Sam. I still went to school and everything - but then there were ghosts attacking. So I left my body and fought them off, but nobody knew it was me. I went back to class, and I'd missed the whole lesson and I failed the test. I said I'd do better, but more and more ghosts came and I felt like I needed to stop them. So I did worse and worse and worse at everything, because I was helping people but nobody knew it was me."

"..Danny?" she asks a little nervously. She's catching on, it seems, that his 'dream' isn't entirely fictional.

"All they saw was my human body laying on a desk, a sofa, a bed, and they thought I was lazy and stupid," he continues. "But really I wasn't even there. I was outside, up in the air fighting ghosts, pretending it didn't hurt.

"...Pretending it doesn't hurt. Mum, I..." Danny starts, but is unable to finish. He'd been doing so well, too - made it so far without even a stumble. And right here, right at the most crucial moment, he's suddenly all choked up and struggling not to cry.

"Danny?" she falters. "What...what are you trying to tell me?"

"I-I'm saying," he chokes out, "y-you shouldn't have p-put a button on the inside of the Portal. I-I was curious, I went inside, I t-tripped a-and then-" He cuts himself off, trying to regain control over his breathing and lower his voice, which has been rising in volume and pitch with every word. He fights back the memories of that blinding light, the scream that seemed to last forever - his scream - and the sensation of every molecule of his body being ripped apart, burned up and iced over, all at once. There's a reason he does not talk about the Accident.

Whatever his mother is thinking, the agonised expression on her son's face is enough to spur her into movement and engulf him in a tight hug. He doesn't even struggle in her grip, and that, perhaps, is more telling than anything else. He shakes silently in her arms, and Maddie suddenly notices how thin he is, how cold and pale and fragile. She knew he hadn't been eating much at home, but had always thought he made up for it when he was out with his friends - one of their favourite spots was the local Nasty Burger, after all, and Sam and Tucker would say something if they saw their friend was hurting. Right?

Apparently not.

Danny's shudders seem to ceasing, and he pulls away - but only far enough that they can speak face to face. "Mum, I-I think I'm dead," he says, and Maddie has a hard time not believing him. With his face tearstained and eyes red, so gaunt and pale under the kitchen lights, he looks like a zombie.

She tries to pull him back into her arms, saying, "Oh, my baby, you're not dead-" but he resists and cuts her off.

"But I am. At least a little bit," he insists. "When I turned the Portal on, th-there was this m-massive flash a-and I...I didn't survive that. I know I didn't. But my heart still beats and I'm still breathing, and I don't understand why. At least...at least when I go ghost, I don't feel like such a, such an abomination. I don't know...I don't know what I am, I don't know why I am…"

"When you...when you go...ghost?" his mother inquires, hesitant and faint. She's hoping this is all a horrible nightmare, induced by late nights and ectoplasmic fumes; Danny can see it in her eyes.

"When I...leave. I don't know how, but the bit of me that's me can just...up and go. Whenever. Wherever. I don't understand why, and I'm so scared, every time, because what if I can't get back? What if somebody finds it, and, and thinks I'm dead?" He laughs at that, but there's no humour in it. "More dead than I really am, anyway. But...what if I can't find it? What if it gets destroyed? What then? Am I dead forever? Or am I already dead, and I just pretend I'm alive?"

"...'It'?"

"...Yeah. It," he says, and bites his lip. He's dropped an awful lot of bombshells tonight, and he hasn't even mentioned the biggest one yet. But it's now or never. And he can only hope that she'll take it alright. "When I go ghost - when I leave - I leave my body. And it's horrible. But...but what if I don't, and someone gets hurt, or, or dies, when I could have saved them? How could I live with that? What do my grades matter, what does sleep matter, what does anything matter - if I ignore someone I could've helped, and they, they die as a result?" He'd been getting increasingly agitated as he spoke, but suddenly he deflates, all that passion evaporating into the air to be replaced by a weariness that goes beyond exhaustion. "I just...I...I don't know what to do, Mum," he says at last, and it's his voice that breaks her. He sounds so lost, and alone, and how could she not have noticed? She's his mother. He's her son.

Maddie holds him tightly, and if Danny notices her sobs, then he doesn't mention it. And if she hears him whisper a defeated, "I'm sorry." in her ear, then she doesn't mention that either.

-x-

A/N: For my astral AU on Tumblr, because I did say I'd have to do something drastic if it reached 700 notes. This could be the last one for a while, as I said last time, so savour it, I guess?