Inspired by a tumblr ask, idk...
.
.
.
Impossible Causes
.
Danny can feel it, the moment his feet hit the pavement of Saint Rita Avenue, and casts a blessing at whoever picked the name for this road. He makes it to the median, and turns, facing back the way he came. The washed-out yellow street lights prick at his eyes, reminding him that, as always, he has more in common with what he's been running from than anything else.
Darkness splashes against the barrier between street and sidewalk. On both sides.
He hates it when spirits work together.
In Danny's pockets, paper rustles. Prayers and charms from half a dozen different cultures, East and West, copied as best three untrained teenagers could. Some of them had done good. None of them had done enough.
He's glad it's late enough that there are no cars. The street is quiet, except for whispers only he can hear. It is cold, except for the almost-comforting burning under his feet, promising him safety, for now.
But this is a road with the name of someone holy, not hallowed ground. The barrier at its edges is not strong, and the thought of approaching an intersection, a crossroads, carries with it a frisson of risk that Danny is loath to ignore. Sometimes the labyrinthine Old Law that governed crossroads was helpful, but not tonight. Not this close to midnight with the shadows practically boiling with malice.
He needs a church. Or a temple. Or a mosque. Or a neopagan's working space. He'll even take a backyard where a bunch of kids are going through an Egypt phase and play at worshiping Osiris and Horus-Re. It's worked before. Barely. Any place that's had faith and its motions poured out on it often enough and recently enough for it to matter.
Otherwise Danny will have to draw on his own power, and that's never turned out well.
But this section of Saint Rita Avenue isn't the kind of place a church is built, and even with the spirit-thing swamping his senses with its hate, Danny can't feel enough of a spark to justify breaking in.
He used the last of his blessed salt to get this far. He's been out of holy water for days.
The first tendrils of other have broken through the avenue's barrier. The whispers become razor sharp and crystal clear against Danny's mind. What are you what are you what are you and not here not there you don't belong and we know you and pain and fear and give up give up give up. They're singsong and saccharine and far from the worst he's endured so far tonight.
He's out of time. He's out of ideas.
Danny takes a step backwards and stops being Danny.
Phantom is different than Danny. He is made of pain and fear and all the things Danny thought were more important than his own life. He is a wild and contradictory spirit, his anchor to this word both inviolable and tenuous. He walks the narrow path between the sacred and the unspeakably profane.
The spirits reaching for him know this. They use it as their weapon, and it hurts more than anything.
(He is a thing that should not be and every second he does he degrades the souls of everyone around him he is a parasite does he not see-)
Phantom knows he cannot win this fight. But if he runs, these spirits will continue to hunt, to prey-
No.
He can see the spirits more clearly now than when he was clad in flesh. He can see them one, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen times and more, spread across the layers of reality that they are allowed. When he is Danny again, he will remember a shapeshifter and a woman made of black flames.
(He does not know what he looks like in these places. He is afraid to find out.)
He fights.
He loses. Badly.
Not so badly that he cannot run home to the maze of light his parents built blind and he added to with averted eyes. This could be seen as a kind of victory, to live to fight again, protect again, come up with a new strategy, but Phantom has been injured too badly. A wound to the spirit is still a wound, never mind that when he wakes up as Danny all he feels is a heart-deep ache.
His covers are tangled around him when he wakes, the protective signs Tucker had embroidered into the cloth pressed against his bare skin. He does not know what happened to the clothes he was wearing. If he is lucky, he dropped them in the wash in a post-transformation haze. If not, they're lying in the middle of Saint Rita Avenue. Or just. Gone. Which is also an option.
As he frees himself, he notices more marks on his skin. They match the low-grade fog of depression in his brain. Both are souvenirs from fighting with his soul outside his body.
(Or whatever his soul had become.)
Getting dressed is a chore. A painful chore. He makes it downstairs eventually, although he wishes he hadn't when he sees Jazz's spirit week poster on the kitchen counter. Spirit. It seems like a cruel universal jest.
A warm hand touches his shoulder, and Danny looked up into his sister's eyes.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
"Yeah," says Danny, even as he thinks no.
She smiles, just a little bit. "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?"
Danny shrugs. He can't, really, and he doesn't want to lie to her face.
"Just- I know you're going through some stuff, but, I have faith in you, okay? I believe in you. So, try to believe in yourself, too, okay?"
"Okay," says Danny. Something feels... different, about the way Jazz says that. It isn't her normal pep talk, and she doesn't mention psychology at all.
She gives him a slightly large smile and a pat and walks away.
Mine, whispers the part of him that was always Phantom, sounding both surprised and pleased.
Of course she's ours, Danny thinks back, she's our sister.
But he feels fuller, now. Healed, in some small way, from what had been done to him the previous night.
It takes longer than it should for him to put the pieces together.