Thenerdycupcake on Tumblr gave me this prompt.
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I've been percolating an AU where Jack's been a ghost the whole time because Vlad killed him and he didn't know for about a week now; how did you know?
But I'm not quite done percolating that, so you get this instead. Sorry, it's kind of a mess.
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Danny didn't know when he realized it. Maybe he always knew, since he was very small. Maybe it came to him all of a sudden, later, and it just made so much sense that he couldn't truly conceive of not knowing. Maybe he was lying to himself.
His parents weren't normal.
To be fair, neither were he and Jazz, even from a young age, but... His parents weren't normal at all.
When was the last time he saw them eat something other than fudge and cookies?
Jazz took care of the cooking, most days. Their parents stayed in the lab. Working, always working. Money came in from patents, came in suitcases carried by men in crisp black suits. Danny knew what a Geiger counter was before he was five.
He knew to be careful. So did Jazz, but she liked to ignore it, to play it off as nothing. Someday, he knew, if things kept going the way they were, Jazz would convince herself that all the little things were fantasy. Imagination.
She'd move away and burn so brightly with light and passion that she'd blind herself to the shadows she once lived in. She'd go to an Ivy League school and become a psychologist, or a neurologist, or a psychiatrist, or a brain surgeon. She would be great. She would shift paradigms.
She would never forget him. Danny wasn't afraid of that. But unless he shone just as brightly, unless he burned the memories from his mind just the same, she would never see him anymore.
He wanted to become an astronaut.
Dad laughed when he heard that. He sewed Danny a custom suit- not like Jazz's, which was just a smaller version of Mom's- the next day. White, like an astronaut, he'd said.
Black for good luck. And something else that skittered in the back of Danny's brain.
Danny loved them, their parents. But they weren't normal.
He looked up silver allergies online, once. They weren't like that. And normal people didn't shy away from the sun on their skin.
Normal people didn't talk about wars that weren't in any history book, or about the best way to butcher a horse. They didn't have dozens of blue glass eyes in the bottom drawer of every cabinet they owned. Their holiday dinners didn't come to life and menace the neighborhood.
Once, when he was ten, he thought they might be vampires. But looking up the folklore and going deep, deep, touching the past, he saw that all the monsters that went bump in the night- and no few benevolent things too- borrowed traits, powers, and weaknesses from one another.
Once, on the first day of spring, a ring of mushrooms rose up to circle Fentonworks completely. Mom harvested them and fried them in butter. Jazz refused to eat them, saying they might be poisonous. Dad ate a plate of fudge. Mom smiled as Danny ate every last one. It was the most normal meal Danny had for years before or after.
The portal was a project of passion. Of something like desperation. Of hope.
For all that they professed to hate ghosts, sometimes Danny wondered if they weren't trying to get back home.
Mom and Dad weren't normal. What did that make Danny and Jazz?
(Once upon a time he cut his hands open to see if he bled red and he doesn't remember what he found out but after Dash he's sure he bleeds red now.)
Danny wanted to see it. He wanted to let them see it, bring back their life and spirit. Let them know that it didn't matter that Dad was a mountain of a man that looked even taller and broader out of the corner of his eye, or that he hadn't seen Mom's eyes in a year and didn't remember their color, or that whatever they used for bath salts made Danny dizzy. He wanted to show them that he loved them and he wanted to help.
The portal beckoned. He put on his astronaut-white and death-black jumpsuit and walked in. This felt right, down to the electric tension in the air and the faint chill of the wall through his glove.
It wasn't normal, to put the on button for something like this on the inside.
(Danny's parents weren't normal.)
Danny wasn't normal.
No one normal fought the undead in back alleys, or laid awake at night trying to hold onto life hard enough to keep from falling through their bed. No one normal could taste emotions on the air and drink them in. No one normal could walk through a blizzard with bare feet and think how lovely the day was, or feel electricity brewing in their bones as the lightning storm raged.
But that was later.
He woke in his parents' arms, to gentle crooning. He woke to the flavor of joy that wasn't his and colors too vivid to be real. He woke.
Had Mom's eyes always been purple? He couldn't remember. But the shape was familiar, and they crinkled happily at the corners. He couldn't help but smile back.
Danny wasn't normal. Neither were his parents. They weren't the same kind of not-normal, and that made Danny's teeth hurt, sometimes, especially after his fangs grew in, but-
But.
Who could divide a fairy, from a ghost, from a revenant, from a lich? Who marked out the boundaries between dwarves, goblins, trolls, giants? How did an elf differ from any of these things, when elf might be tall or short, spiritual or just shy of human? The roots of the stories were tangled, no matter how neatly the gardeners trimmed the plants.
Danny's story was that of a hero of a monster. But the first hero was Gilgamesh, and no one would call him that, now.
And for his parents-
For his sister-
For his family-
A normal story simply didn't suit them at all.