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theguardiansseries · 1 month

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From the Beginning - Chapter 4: Danny Is Brave Despite His Friends’ Best Efforts (He Also Discovers The Benefits Of Soup)

A/N: When you have your outline squished together so what should have been separated into two chapters is instead one big chapter, but that just makes it read better anyways. Enjoy the "Mystery Meat" episode!

Reminder that updates are (hopefully) every Wednesday and Saturday and that I survive off of comments and kudos!

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Rating: Teen Audiences

Summary:

Dani Fenton (who is sometimes starting to go by Danny Fenton) is a fifteen-year-old almost sophmore who was just going about her normal life when she figured out she sort of liked being seen as a boy. Oh, then he (he had definitely been a he at the time) got shocked by a machine his parents built to view into another world that they believed contained a world of ‘ecotplasmic entities.’

Danny really isn’t sure how to tell them that they were right and that he was in the machine when it turned on and that maybe he isn’t so human anymore. (He might also not be a girl anymore, but that one was a little more difficult to explain than the fact that he ((she?)) might be half-ghost.

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54944266/chapters/139959616

Chapters: <<First>> <Prev || Next>

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Chapter Four: Danny Is Brave Despite His Friends’ Best Efforts (He Also Discovers The Benefits Of Soup)

It was more of an effort to not laugh than it should have been, but Danny figured he was allowed to laugh at his friends’ misery when he was suffering from the same thing.

Sam didn’t seem to think so, glaring up at him and muttering a whisper-soft, “I know where you live.” The words were nearly drowned out over the frenzy that was the cafeteria room, but it still managed to make Danny give in and laugh fully.

“Yeah, you do, but could you even make it up the stairs to kill me? I’m pretty sure you’d collapse before even making it through the front door.” The sad part was, it didn’t seem like much of an exaggeration when all three of them were exhausted, sleep deprived, and trying to figure out how the hell they had been given so much homework when it was only Friday of their first week. “C’mon, guys, at least we have the weekend to look forward to!”

“Yeah, the weekend we’ll be using to do fifty pounds of homework,” Tucker muttered, everything about him dripping with bitterness. “Do you think the teachers hate us? Is that what this is? Or are they trying to weed out the weak?”

“Probably want us all to commit suicide so they don’t have to deal with us,” Sam grumbled, Danny fighting to not laugh again even as Tucker did. “School was not this exhausting last year.”

Danny shrugged, nibbling on a fry, “Dunno. Maybe they’re trying to figure out the smart ones from the dumb ones early.” A glance down at his tray showed that while he had eaten a lot of his lunch already, there was still a good amount left. He was still starving and hungry as hell a lot, but he at least wasn’t scarfing everything down that he could get his hands on like he had in the beginning of the week. “Which means me and Tuck are doomed.”

“Hey,” Tucker frowned. “I’m smart!” Mm… was he, though? Danny figured the thought must have shown up on his face since Tucker looked even more offended. “Hey!”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, Tuck, you’re a genius when it comes to coding and hacking and tech and stuff, but… You kind of suck at everything else.”

There was a long silence, Danny waiting for a response before Tucker looked away and sullenly started sipping on his chocolate milk. It was way more hilarious than it should have been, especially when he saw Sam trying to fight back her own laughs. It was possible all the homework might have caused them to suffer from a little bit of hysteria.

“Okay, okay,” Sam said as soon as she was able, sitting back up. “Whose house is up first for homework duty-”

“Not it!” Danny and Tucker both shouted immediately, which, excellent. That meant a study session at Sam’s who was rich and, therefore, had the best study snacks. Sam didn’t even look surprised, anymore!

“How generous of you boys, truly,” Sam drawled, Danny quickly taking a bite of whatever was closest to hide the stupid grin he could feel forming. It wasn’t his fault being counted as ‘one of the boys’ was starting to become a pretty good feeling. “Speaking of you boys, Danny! Did you finally learn to breathe between bites?”

“Ha ha,” Danny said with as dry a tone as he could muster, not keeping it up long before he was smiling at his friends’ looks. “I dunno, just… I’m still really hungry, but it doesn’t feel like I’m Godzilla waking up from a thousand year long nap, you know?”

Tucker snorted with laughter while Sam shook her head, smiling anyways, “At least there’s that. How’d your check up with the doctors go on Wednesday?”

“Yeah, how’d your escape from the second half of classes go,” Tucker pretended to frown, Danny rolling his eyes and flicking a fry at him. At least, Danny was pretty sure it was a fry.

“It went fine.” Which was something Danny had already told the two, but, God, it would take someone a lot stronger than Danny to get them to stop worrying over him. “I’m still, you know, not the best, but they’re happy that I seem to be stable and don’t have anything that’s, like, really wrong, you know?”

Not to say he was perfectly alright. He was still dropping almost everything he picked up or tried to hold, but he wasn’t shaking or losing his balance as much anymore. His breathing still wasn’t the best, either, and his heart rate was still kind of trashed, but he at least didn’t struggle for air after walking from his house to the end of the block!

“The only thing that sucked was that Jazz spent an hour grilling the doctors about the best way to follow the aftercare instructions,” Danny continued, trying not to think back to the pure embarrassment at Jazz’s motherly concern and craziness. “Not sure if she’s just that worried, or if she was trying to make some kind of point because Mom and Dad weren’t there.” Ah… and there were the shared looks.

Tucker was the first to speak, as the more ‘relaxed’ friend, so him speaking first made it seem less like an interrogation, “Your parents didn’t go to the appointment with you? Or were they waiting in the car or lobby or something?”

Sam was next, pushing in deep and trying to drive the point home and get Danny riled up into confessing what they all already knew, “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course Danny’s parents would go with him to a doctor’s appointment when it comes to something like this.”

“You know,” Danny finally managed after a few seconds. “This was a lot more effective before I broke down your team interrogation techniques. Now it’s just sad.” Ah, the annoyed, upset looks of his best friends. Balance was restored. “They were at home working on the Portal- I mean, I told you guys what happened, right? The whole self-sustaining thing?”

As expected, Tucker was quick to leap onto the subject of self-sustaining energy, “Dude, I still can’t believe your parents might be about to crack into a source of self-sustaining energy that’s actually, you know, self-sustaining.”

“Might,” Sam stressed. “If this really is running off of- Of ectoplasm or whatever it is, then we have no idea what that could do to someone if they’re exposed to it. I mean, we once thought radiation was safe, too.”

“Damn,” Danny muttered, looking at Tucker. “I think she won that one because that’s… That’s a really good point.”

“But she always wins!” Before Danny could think of a response at Tucker’s loud, dramatic whining, he felt his back bend and his nails dig into his palms at the sudden race of electricity that burned through him like he had shoved a fork into a socket and- “Danny? Hey, whoa, what’s wrong?”

“I-” Danny cut himself off, shuddering as the feeling began to fade, instead turning into something like a low, pouding sense of worry at the back of his mind. “I just- It felt like I was just shocked, just now, but… not. You know?”

His friends both had looks that made it seem like no, they did not know, and Danny wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or grateful when the bell warning them of their next class screeched through the air. Shaking his head and standing up, Danny muttered a quick, “Nevermind. Probably just the normal static shock.” Except it hadn’t felt like it.

It was more like an exposed wire had been pressed to his skin and then pulled away only to linger in the air just behind him, ready to zap him all over again the second he made the wrong move or choice. It was like an ever-evolving anxiety attack and he was half-tempted to ask Jazz if any of her psychology books had anything on something similar because jesus.

Already keyed up even while the three were just dumping their trash from lunch, he wasn’t even surprised when some loud banging from the kitchen sent him jumping into the air and almost knocking both himself and Tucker to the ground. “Whoa, dude, you okay?”

“I-” Danny cut himself off, grateful that he had already thrown his trash into the actual trash can rather than flinging it onto Tucker or some random kid behind them. “You guys heard that too, right? The…” Words running out, Danny gestured vaguely towards the kitchen.

“Sounded like someone back there might have knocked a pot or something over,” Sam said, standing close by on Danny’s other side and hovering like she was about to catch him. It would have been sweet if Danny wasn’t ready to crawl out of his skin from anxiety.

“I- I mean. I know the bell just rang, but would- Would you guys come with me to just check? Real quick?” Danny should not be this close to some kind of anxiety attack. He had a weird feeling and now he was just feeding into his terror or something like that. Jazz would have had the words for it, but Danny knew enough to know that he was just scaring himself and he needed to calm down. Still. What if it was something and not just a bad feeling?

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. We can check it out real quick.” Sam headed for the kitchen doors with a sense of confidence and purpose that meant no one would stop her, Tucker still sort of holding him up as he followed after her and tugged Danny along. (She wasn’t really feeling much like ‘Danny’ anymore.)

“Well, that’s a fun thing to learn,” Dani muttered under her breath, not surprised when Tucker noticed and gave her a questioning look, because Tucker only ever seemed to be observant when she was freaking out. “Not really feeling much like a guy when I’m this… anxious?”

“There’s probably some insanely long lecture on feminism that Sam has memorized to explain it if you want to ask,” Tucker teased, Dani feeling a little better.

She then felt a million times worse when they all got to the kitchen door and pushed it open to see that the lights were flickering and dimming before shutting off entirely. Dani gulped and she felt Tucker go still, whispering a horrified, “We’re in a horror movie.”

“We are not in a horror movie,” Sam snapped, which was a clear enough indicator that she was just as on edge as them. “The lights probably started acting up and caused one of the cooks to drop something.”

“Are lunch ladies really cooks?” Tucker asked, injecting just enough stupid humor into the situation that Dani didn’t feel like she was going to faint in terror as they crept forward into the kitchen. The door swinging shut behind them made her feel like some dramatic death toll should be going off in the background. “Like, genuinely-”

“Yes, they are,” Sam said firmly. “And also because one of the cooks here identifies as a man, and it’d be rude to refer to him as a ‘lunch lady.’” Huh. Dani wouldn’t have really thought about that even a couple months ago, but that was a good point.

“Maybe he likes being referred to as a lunch lady. Maybe he finds it funny.” Ah, Tucker. He was doing his best, but Dani could hear the way his voice was shaking. Not that she was much better, gripping onto Tucker’s arm hard enough that it was probably going numb.

Before the ‘fight’ could continue, there was another clanging sound, like something heavy and metal hitting the floor. It had all three of them poorly stifling their screams as they jumped into each other hard enough to nearly send them to the ground. Dani wasn’t sure how they managed to catch their balance, but all three of them stayed standing.

Dani hadn’t even looked up from making sure her feet weren’t about to trip over each other again when she felt static rolling across her skin, nowhere near as strong as it had been earlier, but enough to make her snap her head up to see that there was some light in the kitchen.

And it was coming from a ghost.

Dani couldn’t tear her gaze away even as she wanted to look at her friends’ faces to see if they were seeing the same thing. Judging by the way Tucker was now gripping her arm tightly enough to bruise, she had to assume they were.

“Oh dear, oh dear… No, no, this is all wrong.” The actual real life ghost in front of them was speaking and mumbling to herself like some fretful old lady who had forgotten something. It was definitely a ghost, though, because Dani could see through her to the wall of pots and pans behind her. She could also see the way she was floating seven inches off the ground. (Seven? Six? It was enough to be noticeable!)

“Oh, hello, dearies.” Ah. The ghost had seen them. The ghost was now talking to them. “Could you tell me who changed the menu?”

Dani opened her mouth to maybe pray to some god she wasn’t sure she actually believed in when Tucker beat her to it. “Do you mean all the salads and junk that Sam added?”

That was enough to get Dani to turn her head to look at him, shocked that one of her best friends was that stupid. He was even pointing at Sam! Who looked just as incredulous! Yeah, okay, there was no accounting for what someone said when they were going through shock and extreme amounts of fear, but still!

“Oh. You changed the menu?” The ghost who looked like a lunch lady straight out of the fifties with a pink uniform and hair net and gloves and everything was looking at Sam now and Dani was really hoping that this was some weird dream she would wake up from after falling asleep at lunch. Or maybe they were mass hallucinating. That was a thing, right? “You changed the menu.” Oh. That wasn’t a question that time.

Before Dani could say anything, she saw some of the pots behind the ghost beginning to float up into the air, wrapped in the same glowing light that came from the ghost — who was looking a lot angrier than she had a second- Holy fucking shit.

Staring with wide eyes at the huge cast iron pot that had slammed into the wall hard enough to dent it after just barely missing Sam’s head, Dani was pretty sure her brain went offline for a couple of seconds in shock. She then decided she could go into shock when she was dead and shoved Tucker hard enough that she might as well have body-checked him before doing the same to Sam and screaming, “Run!”

It was then Danny who turned back and kept himself between the ghost and his friends.

Let me be brave, Danny thought to himself fiercely, because Danny wasn’t the shy, meek little girl who avoided any sign of confrontation and tried her best to be quiet. Danny was someone who was learning to speak up for himself and was bad at it, but was trying. Danny was the one who was starting to let himself take up space and try to figure out just who he was.

So it was Danny who grabbed the fallen pot off the ground as his friends ran and threw it up into the air at another one that had been flying towards them. Through some miracle of luck it actually managed to hit, the two making a loud clanging sound that hurt his ears and had him hurrying out the door after his friends.

He didn’t bother to waste his breath to tell his friends to keep running, only shoving them forward when he saw they had slowed down to make sure he was behind them. He made sure it was a decently powerful shove considering he heard more pots clanging into the walls and door of the kitchen, the cafeteria now empty with no witnesses which meant no one to see what the hell was going on.

It wasn’t until they were a couple of hallways away, all empty since everyone who didn’t have a deadly sense of curiosity was in class, that Tucker was squeaking out a high-pitched, “What the hell?!”

“Inside, inside, inside,” Sam chanted, jerking open a door into an empty classroom before pushing them all inside and then shutting and locking it. Danny watched as her legs gave out and she slid down to the floor, Tucker not doing much better as he propped himself up against a desk. “That- That was… Was that really-?”

“That was a ghost.” Tucker’s face was paler than Danny had ever seen and enough to spur him into grabbing a chair and dragging it over before pushing him into it. “That was actually- Ghosts can’t do shit like that- Ghosts aren’t real like that!”

Still gasping for breath he didn’t have, and knowing his heart was going way too fast, Danny finally managed a weak, “That wasn’t a ghost.” As soon as his friends looked at him like he was insane, he shook his head. “No, listen, that- That was everything my parents have ever told me about. That was an ectoplasmic entity or whatever it is that they’ve been studying.” Which meant… “Holy shit, they were right.”

“Dani, girl-”

“Boy again. Sorry.”

“Danny, man, I love you, but what the hell does that have to do with what’s going on right now? And the fact that we’re about to die?”

Making a note to beam over Tucker’s casual acceptance of how he was switching between genders like dresses before a party, Danny forced himself to focus and dug out his phone. “It means that we can call my parents and they can come down here and actually do something about it.”

Pulling up his contacts quickly, Danny heard Sam muttering something before her voice pitched up in something between offense, rage, and hurt, “You ratted me out to a ghost?”

“I panicked! I thought-! She looked like my grandma, I didn’t think she’d suddenly start throwing kitchenware at us!” Alright. That was a decent point, actually.

Phone ringing, Danny blew out a breath when it connected and he heard his mom’s voice. “Danielle? Sweetie, what’s wrong? You’re supposed to be in class right now, aren’t you?”

“Mom-” Voice breaking, Danny realized just how tense and terrified he still was, all his energy thrumming under his skin like static before lightning struck. (He really needed to stop focusing on the static and lightning analogies, if only so he could stop remembering how much he had screamed.) “Mom, I need you and Dad to come to the school, right now.”

“Danielle, honey, we’re right in the middle of our work. Something odd is happening with the EMD and we need to figure it out before it can cause any problems. Are you having a bad day? I can call Jazz and she should be able to come and pick you up-”

“You were right!” Danny blurted out, loud enough that Sam and Tucker both jumped and rattled the door and chair they were each leaning against or on. “Everything you ever said about- About ghosts and ectoplasm and all of it, you were right, okay? Everything. You were right and we’re looking at the proof and you need to get down here right now!”

Silent. The other end was silent and Danny felt ready to scream as he pulled his phone away to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. There was nothing but a black screen, Danny clicking the power button to bring up the call. Nothing showed up. He clicked it again, a couple times, and it was like a dawning horror to realize his phone had just died.

“Shit,” Danny muttered, trying a couple more times before giving up and shoving it into his pocket, other hand held out towards Tucker. “Phone. Mine died.”

Tucker nodded and moved to get it, Danny snapping his hand back with a sharp gasp as that same feeling from lunch, that same burning jolt of static, shot through him with enough force to have him stumbling away and looking around the room as if something was about to jump out at him.

He wasn’t wrong.

The ghost from earlier was suddenly in the middle of the room, both his friends jumping to their feet with enough force to send them stumbling back. The look of fear in their eyes had Danny’s skyrocketing, but at the same time it made him feel angry.

“You dare change the menu?! The menu has been the same for fifty years! Fifty years of tradition! Of getting it right! And you would dare change it?!”

Let me be brave, Danny thought once again, watching as one of the desks glowed with that strange energy and light the same as the pots had. Danny saw where it was going to hit as it flung itself through the air on a trajectory right towards Sam.

Before he could even think he was moving, hands outstretched and shoving Sam away and into Tucker, knowing he would catch Sam. He then braced himself to feel a whole lot of pain as the desk flew- Right by him?

Okay. Well. He wasn’t about to question his luck there when the desk was in splinters against the wall and they now had a clear shot to the door, Danny shoving them forward with another command to, “Run! Outside!”

His friends didn’t question it and began running at once, Tucker panting out strained words as they rounded the corner. “Danny, that desk- It went through you!”

“Yeah. I know. Really close miss,” Danny panted out himself, the burn in his lungs starting to remind him really clearly that his doctors had talked about him having problems with breathing at his last check-up. “Talk later.”

“No, man, it went through you!” Okay, they would have time to talk about Tucker’s fear hallucinations later, Danny decided.

“Outside, outside,” Danny said, raising his voice so Sam could hear, who was already making the turn for the front doors. “We need to get out. Lead it to my parents!” If they could get to his house — or more accurately if they could get to ‘Fenton Works,’ his parents would probably have something in the lab that could deal with everything.

“We- We can’t!” Tucker gasped like he was about to stop breathing, Danny slowing just enough to make sure he could keep Tucker ahead of him and catch him if he collapsed as they raced down the stairs and out onto the front lawn of the school. Unlike Danny’s possible likelihood, Tucker did have asthma. “We can’t skip school!”

“Get your priorities straight!” Sam shouted back, enough breath in her lungs to yell at them. It was extremely unfair, in Danny’s opinion. What was more unfair was that the ghost or ectoplasmic entity or demon or whatever it was was right in front of them again, like all their running hadn’t even mattered. It also had grabbed Sam by the wrist and jerked her to a stop harshly enough that Sam let out a short scream.

Danny didn’t even think. He didn’t stop, or scream, or gasp, or anything. He just kept running, fear and anger pounding through him at seeing Sam’s terrified face, before he slammed into the ghostly lunch lady that was looking at them with burning red eyes. He was honestly surprised when he made contact, and apparently so was the ghost since he saw her grip on Sam loosen enough that she was able to free herself.

“Danny!” The warning came a second too late, Danny wincing as it was his arm grabbed that time. He heard Sam scream again, and Tucker too, but it was a little hard to be sure when all of his focus was on the searing pain in his arm as he was lifted off the ground higher, and higher, and higher-! Too fast, this was all going too fast, he couldn’t even think-

“Now, dearie, it’s quite rude to interfere,” the ghost chided him like he was a misbehaving child, Danny swinging almost twenty or thirty feet up from the ground and trying to hold back a scream. The pain in his arm was enough to make him think it was dislocated, all of his weight hanging by the grip around his wrist. “This should fix that, and you should be just fine, even. Just a few broken bones, is all, I think!”

Danny looked up at the ghost who smiled at him like she was being genuine and just putting him in some sort of time-out before he realized he was falling through the air.

For a brief second that had to have been controlled by hysteria Danny decided the feeling of falling through the air felt like when he had jumped from a swing as a kid or when coming down after bouncing too high on a trampoline.

The next second had the panic overwhelm him, a voiceless thought that he didn’t want to feel that much pain again, but it was quickly drowned out by fear that Sam and Tucker were next.

He didn’t give a shit if he got hurt along the way, but he was not going to let some insane research of his parents hurt his best friends. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. No matter what it took, he was going to protect them-!

A sudden jerk had him stopping in his descent, Danny braced for the pain. He instead felt a wave of shock at there being none. He then realized there was no pain because instead of hitting the ground, he was floating a few inches above it.

In the seconds before he dropped the last few inches to the ground, Danny looked at Sam and Tucker to see they were stunned, completely still and silent. He also looked at the ghost who looked as scared as he felt.

A part of him wanted to just sit there and just give into the urge to sob in terror, but then he realized what he was looking at. She was scared. That meant there was something that could stop her.

Rolling over and shoving himself up onto his knees, Danny saw the ghost was still up in the air, still too surprised to move yet. Danny, now an expert at pushing his panic attacks away until later, furiously tried to think on what he could do.

A whisper.

A nudge to his back.

A swirl of soft blues and purple that he couldn’t see but somehow knew was there, the faintest, Backpack.

Following the nudge, Danny didn’t stop to think as he ran for Tucker and turned him around before he ripped his backpack open, ignoring Tucker’s sputtering and squirming. Instead he found just what he had been looking for.

He had almost forgotten, but that time at the lab, on the day of the Accident, he had seen Tucker grab something from one of the tables. He had probably been wanting to play around with it and see what it did, but Danny remembered his dad talking about it. It was an old thermos he had converted into a container for ectoplasmic energy.

He had no idea how it worked, absolutely no clue if it would do anything towards the ghost that had almost tried to kill him, but he didn’t let himself hesitate.

Let me be brave, Danny thought as loudly as he could, ripping the cap off the thermos and fumbling to turn it around towards the ghost that was quickly getting over her shock. Let me protect them!

“Soup isn’t on the menu, child.” The ghost was smirking like she was someone who knew they couldn’t be hurt, but Danny forced himself to not believe it. She had been scared, after all.

She had been scared and so, with every scrap of hope he had left inside of him, Danny held up the themors and pressed the bright green button on the side of it.

There was a moment — a second — where nothing happened and Danny felt like his heart was about to throw up. Then he felt the metal in his hands heat up with enough force and speed that it took everything in him to not drop the container, eyes wide as a beam of bright white light or energy or something shot out and hit the ghost directly.

Danny braced himself as he felt the container vibrate in his hands, the ghost screaming as it looked like she was almost being pulled into the thing. He expected her to rip away from it and escape until the last second when both the ghost and the energy coiled back in on itself, Danny capping the thermos without thought.

“Sorry, lady,” Danny said, a laugh of what was definitely hysteria leaving him as he suddenly felt a million pounds heavier, not helped at all when he heard what might have been his parents starting to shout at him. Or maybe it was Sam and Tucker? “But it looks like lunch is over.”

Letting out a breath, Danny tried to figure out just what to do with a container that had a ghost in it like straight out of an old sci-fi movie. He also tried to figure out how he was going to explain this to his parents and maybe even the teachers.

He then realized the black at the edges of his vision hadn’t gone away — had only grown stronger — and that was probably a bad thing.

After that, all he knew was that it was dark and quiet and he was tired.

A nap would be fine, right?

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theguardiansseries · 1 month

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From the Beginning - Chapter 1: Click

Whew. Okay. I believe this is the part where I once said Bonjour, mes chers! A lot of growth and change has happened since I greeted you all like that (like the fact my name is now Andrew! and I was very much not a girl!). Well, if you've read the title of this post then you know what's happening, but... Today is the 20th anniversary of Danny Phantom and I figured there was no better time for a story revival (ha! get it?) to celebrate the show that ended up changing my life and leading me to make the friendships that changed my life. I hope you'll forgive some of my sappiness, but I hope you guys enjoy this story for, what I hope, will be the last and final time!

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Rating: Teen Audiences

Summary:

Danny really isn't sure how to tell them that they were right and that he was in the machine when it turned on and that maybe he isn't so human anymore. (He might also not be a girl anymore, but that one was a little more difficult to explain than the fact that he ((she?)) might be half-ghost.

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54944266

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Chapter 1: Click

Thumbs dragging across the fabric of a worn dress that probably should have been replaced a couple of years ago, Dani sighed and wondered, for the fifth time in the last half hour, what she was doing. Her sigh then turned into a short scream as the partition she was behind rattled enough to give her a heart attack. “Sam!”

“C’mon, it doesn’t take that long to switch from a dress to some shirts and jeans!” Sam called over the partition that she at least caught and fixed before it fell over. “And hey, I could have been Tucker for all you know.”

Dani snorted, dropping the dress onto a chair already filled with clothes and fixing up the jeans that had been shoved into her arms, along with the two shirts that had also been forcibly shoved into her arms. “You actually think I’d believe that you would let Tucker get within five feet of either one of us changing?”

“Hey!” Laughing again at Tucker’s offended scoff, Dani felt a lot more normal and calm as she put on the shirts next, first a button up and then a regular t-shirt, struggling to not get her hair caught under them like she somehow always managed to do. She should probably think about cutting it, but her mom loved seeing her baby girls with long hair and all of that. “I think you need to be focusing on the important thing here, you two, and that’s the fact that we’ve been cursed.”

Rolling her eyes, Dani listened as Sam groaned while probably doing the same. “Yeah? And how are we cursed this week, Tuck?”

“Are you kidding? How are we not cursed?! Not only is July almost over — our very summer — but now we’re about to enter into the horror that is our sophomore year! We won’t have the grace period that we had as freshmen!”

Dani poked her head out from behind the partition, still not totally sure she wanted to come out from behind the hideous pink and floral thing Sam’s mom had probably bought for her, but needing to make her point. “We had a grace period?” Because as far as she remembered their freshman year had been absolutely miserable.

Tucker, as usual, ignored her and kept talking. “And now, here on what could have been one of the best summer days of the year, is a thunderstorm.” The universe, because she had perfect timing and loved to mock Tucker, had the storm rattling with a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning that sent all three of them jumping — except Tucker. He screamed. “Ugh! This is why no one likes thunderstorms!”

Before Dani could really get into the defense of thunderstorms, Sam was rattling the partition again and looking her dead in the eye before Dani escaped back behind it. “Hey, I saw that! C’mon, you can’t hide behind this thing all day.”

“Watch me,” Dani grumbled, staring down at herself and her layered shirts and faded jeans that probably cost way more than anything Dani owned because Sam had been the one to buy it, and some mismatched socks. “Alright. Fine. I’m coming.”

“Ah! One more thing!” Seeing something tossed over, Dani scrambled to catch it, pausing at seeing it was her NASA logo hat that matched the shirt she had been forced into (and was definitely keeping no matter how this went). “Since you didn’t want to cut your hair.”

“Mom would’ve freaked if I came home with hair as short as you wanted to cut it,” Dani pointed out around the brim she had shoved in her mouth, already working to tie up all of her hair before moving to tuck it under the hat.

Sucking in a deep breath, and reminding herself that it was only Sam and Tucker in the room, Dani stepped out from behind the changing area. If it all went wrong she was at least certain in the knowledge that she could disown Sam and bury Tucker alive at the cemetery. The two wouldn’t even be angry at her for it, either, they would have known that they deserved it.

“Alright,” Dani sighed, shuffling forward and absently scuffing her foot against the floor to kick up the cuff of the jeans on her right leg. They were a lot baggier than the kind she was used to. “Okay. So… how do I look, then?” It honestly wasn’t that bad of an outfit seeing as Sam had picked it out.

It wasn’t what she usually wore, but from the relaxed jeans and scuffed up NASA hat to the black NASA shirt and blue button up, she… She thought she looked pretty okay. A glance up had her shoulders dropping, Tucker grinning and Sam near beaming.

A moment passed and then Sam cleared her throat, putting on her best announcer voice, “Ladies, gentleman, all those in between or outside of, and Tucker, I present to you… Danny with a y Fenton!” Tucker gave a polite audience clap, Dani’s — Danny’s — nervousness starting to be replaced by exasperated fondness for her (his? should she be using he/him/his and all of that instead now?) friends. They were idiots, but they were her idiots. His idiots. (Hm. Weird, but not bad.)

“You guys don’t think it’s too much?” Danny finally asked, picking at the sleeves and re-adjusting the hat even though it rested on his head and covered up his long hair perfectly. “I mean… I’m fine with being a girl, still.”

Danny was only there because Sam had gotten on a new research kick that involved learning about the LGBTQ+ community when questioning some of her own labels. It had ended with her dragging both her and Tucker down into a rabbit hole of queer history and self-help advice and ended with her thinking that maybe being a him for a bit wouldn’t be so bad. (Apparently it wasn’t normal to look at your body some days and hate it. But it was only some days!)

“I mean. You guys know how I always dressed. Skirts and dresses and things. Isn’t this kind of a big change? Like… extreme?” The name was at least the same, which wasn’t that big of a change and made it kind of easier. The outfit, though, made him look- Well. It made him look like a guy. A good sports bra paired with two shirts did a really good job of making him look pretty flat, too. (It probably helped that he hadn’t exactly hit a growth spurt, yet.)

“It is not extreme.” Sam frowned, pointing at the bed with a firm, “Sit.” She then crossed her arms, drew herself up, and made both Danny and Tucker groan in misery.

Danny threw himself onto the bed with a pout, glancing at Tucker with a quiet, “I thought summer meant we were supposed to be done with lectures.” Tucker snorted, only stopping when Sam gave him a sharp glare.

The two settled down, Sam eyeing them closely before nodding and starting to speak, “I know I’ve told you about the term genderfluid before, but I’ll go over it again since you probably didn’t pay attention the first time.” Well. That was mean but true.

Sam launched into her explanation, Danny completely tuned out by the second sentence. It was only Tucker giving him a nudge that kept his brain from turning off completely. A careful glance over at him showed he was smiling — one of his fond smiles that he pretended he didn’t have.

“You know,” Tucker whispered, “You do look pretty good as a guy. And Sam knew what she was doing, making you a walking billboard for NASA.”

Choking down a snort of laughter, Danny nudged Tucker back with a quick, “Thanks, Tuck.” While Sam was one thing considering how she lived and breathed activism, Tucker was always a harder sell on ‘new’ things. To find him so supportive of something even Danny found weird, still? It was nice. It was good. It was- Shit. Sam was glaring at them silently. “Uh… Yes?”

“How did you two even manage to move on to sophomore year,” Sam groaned, rolling her eyes and leaning against a bedroom wall. “Alright, listen up you nerds.” Rude. “Until Dani, or Danny, figures out what they like best, whether that be female, male, or something else, we can just say it’s a new tomboy look he’s trying out.”

Sam paused from her lecture, know-it-all attitude fading for their usual Sam. “By the way, how are the pronouns? I know you said you were worried about getting used to them.”

“Oh, uh…” Trailing off, Danny rubbed at the back of his neck, giving a nervous smile as he looked down at the floor. “It’s weird, really weird, but… good.” It was such a stark contrast, but it felt right - at least for that moment. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel once he left Sam’s bedroom, the most accepting place on earth, but for now… “I like it.”

“Hey!” Tucker slapped Danny’s arm, the sting making him yelp and jerk before he was swatting Tucker back. Tucker, the idiot, didn’t even seem to notice as he beamed. “This means I have a brother now!” Yeah, great, but why did he need to be hit for that? “And you know what brothers do…?”

“Wha-” Oh. Oh no. “No- No, no, no, Tuck, there is no way-” Danny didn’t even get to finish before Tucker was pouncing on him and wrapped around his shoulders.

“Brothers sneak other brothers into their parent’s awesome super secret lab.” Why? Why oh why had Danny’s best friend turned out to be a geek obsessed about science labs and ‘mad science.’

“You know it’s not a super secret lab,” Danny groaned, not even trying to wiggle free. He knew when he was beat. “We have open hours to come to the lab some days.”

Tucker nodded, as if he truly understood, and then immediately asked, “Does today have open hours?”

Throwing himself back on the bed, and dragging Tucker with him, Danny whined and called out for Sam. “Sammy, you gotta do something. He’s being obsessive again!”

“Hey, I’ve done my best friend duty for today by giving you a new look.” Evil. His friends were evil. “Plus you know he’s just going to keep asking.”

“I will,” Tucker agreed, wiggling closer to hug him tighter. “I will absolutely keep asking at least fifteen times a day — thirty if it’s a weekend.”

Shoving Tucker off, Danny wiggled and struggled to get to his feet before he was standing up with a loud, dramatic, defeated sigh. “Fine- Fine. We can go check out my parents’ lab-”

The enthusiastic cheer from Tucker and the smug, taunting look from Sam were completely unwarranted. It took a long moment of Danny reminding himself that he loved his idiots and would gladly kill for them if necessary. It took a long, long moment.

As always, though, he caved and hid a smile and walked towards the door, trying to complain through his smile as he called back to them. “C’mon, then. If you wanna go see the lab then you get to go through this storm, first.” Ah. Tucker’s misery. It was a good addition to the day.

⁂

Taking a moment to enjoy the rain and the pounding thunder around him, Danny gave a soft sigh as he finally unlocked his front door, pushed it open, and quickly stepped aside. It was an effort not to laugh as Sam and Tucker nearly shoved each other to the floor in their rush to get inside and out of the rain. Babies.

Glancing back up at the sky, Danny grinned at the bolts of lightning that seared their way across the sky, lighting up the entire world for just a few seconds. He hadn’t had the chance to lecture Tucker back in Sam’s room, but storms were the best. He probably could have stayed out there for another hour, at least, before he felt himself dragged inside where it was dry, Tucker throwing an arm around his shoulder.

“I’m gonna level with you here, dude.” Tucker stared at him seriously, ramping up the dramatics as always. “Our friend group needs balance. I’m the tech obsessed one, right? Sam - she’s the nature obsessed one. You are the normal one that keeps this friend group from falling into chaos and killing each other.”

Danny rolled his eyes, patting at Tucker’s chest. “Trust me, buddy, it wouldn’t be killing each other. It would be Sam killing you.” Slipping away at the offended scoff, Danny adjusted his hat before retrieving the towels that Jazz obsessively kept in the front hall for storms and rainy days. He could never tell her that he found them helpful.

“Here,” Danny said, throwing a towel at each of them before taking one for himself. “Try to dry off before we go down into the lab. Water and exposed wires and papers do not mix — something I’ve found out the hard way.” Age eight was a terrible year to have been born a Fenton, Danny had discovered. “You know, you’re lucky they’re still out at that stupid science convention thing of theirs.”

Tucker grinned, pausing from where he was trying to brush the water off the waterproof yellow hoodie that Danny was pretty sure he never took off. The ridiculous pockets alone made sure that all of his ‘tech babies’ would be safe from the world. Shame it wouldn’t save them from Sam pouring a glass of water into the pockets if Tucker ever got too out of line. (She had done it, once, after making sure he had recently backed everything up and then bought him brand new versions of everything that was lost.) “Dude. Why do you think I asked you to take us to the lab today- Wait. Is your sister home?”

Oh. This was too good an opportunity. “Dunno,” Danny said after a moment of ‘thought.’ “You know what, let me check.” Clearing his throat, Danny raised his voice, “Hey, Jazz! I’m back! I’m also taking Tucker and Sam into the basement which is usually off limits to look at dangerous equipment that still has exposed wires! If you want to stop me then you should say something now!”

Tucker gave a horrified, panicked squeak while Sam smothered laughter into her fist, shoulders shaking. Danny gave Tucker a few seconds to panic before laughing and shaking his head, “Relax. Jazz is at the library doing some work for her college classes or something. She won’t be back until dinner at least.”

“Jesus, give me a heart attack,” Tucker groaned, near collapsing in on himself in his dramatics. Sam, at least, still seemed amused.

“They really left you guys on your own for a week? Didn’t you almost burn your house down one time when they did that?”

“Hey, we were young and impressionable children when that happened,” Danny pouted at her, holding it for a few seconds before laughing. “Besides, we didn’t burn the house, we almost exploded the house. Totally different thing.”

“Totally,” Tucker snorted, shoving at Danny’s shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go already! When else am I ever gonna get a chance to study their tech and poke at it to see how it works? This is the lab of ghost researchers after all!”

“Probably why you shouldn’t get your hopes up,” Danny snorted, even as Tucker raced to the kitchen and the bulky steel door that led down to the lab they kept in their basement. Honestly, Danny was almost completely certain that a basement lab wasn’t technically legal. “You know the code?”

“Same code for your guys’ lock with the extra key outside,” Tucker laughed, the sound of beeping soon followed by the deep, menacing sound of heavy-duty locks being released. Danny took a moment to appreciate the horror/sci-fi movie that was his life before letting Tucker rush down the stairs first, Sam following at a much more calm pace.

Half-following after them, Danny took a moment to look around the near spotless kitchen. The only spot that wasn’t clean and empty of items was a little pile of chips and snack cakes, a note from Jazz resting on top of the pile and dictating that ‘she’ needed to remember to eat. (She should probably tell Jazz about the whole genderfluid ‘trying out being a guy’ thing soon. Maybe once she figured out if it was going to stick around or not.)

Swiping the note and a bag of chips, she (he! it was he right now) shoved the note in his pocket and headed down the stairs after his friends as he got ready to munch on his new snack. As always, the clean kitchen tile and wooden walls faded abruptly in favor of strong metal stairs and former wood walls made of the same metal as the stairs.

It had once been cool to learn that they had their own lab in the basement and the entire lab had been built to contain radiation and prevent any possible spreading. Jazz had then taught him that having a place to contain radiation meant that there was radiation to contain. He hadn’t grown extra fingers or heads yet, though, so it was probably okay for the most part - especially since his parents hadn’t been down in the lab for almost two weeks.

Getting to the bottom of the stairs, Danny didn’t even get to open his bag of chips before almost running into Sam. He pouted, giving her a nudge, “Hey, there’s more than just the entryway here, you know.”

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any part in that,” Sam said, gesturing straight ahead. Danny peeked out around her and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan as he saw Tucker being, well… Tucker.

His idiot best friend since preschool was just about buried in half-finished inventions and exposed wires that were already twisted around him. They were probably ready to strangle him out of pure spite, especially since everytime Danny came near the lab he was shocked by them.

The wires did nothing to slow Tucker down, though, his friend a swirl of yellow and green as he moved around the lab and tried to put his hands on every shiny thing that he could. Sam probably had the right idea in staying back.

“You know, there’s some cool research stuff about ancient ghosts or something on that table way over there out of the line of fire, usually. You wanna-” Danny paused, blinking as Sam was already halfway across the room. Normally she would look menacing crossing a room with such a determined expression, especially with her outfits usually equating to little more than a black hole, but, well. A dripping teenage girl with a white fluffy towel draped around her shoulders did little to scare people.

Shaking his head and dropping his chips and own towel on the stairs, Danny headed over to make sure Tucker wasn’t about to die. He was almost positive that, as he got closer, he could hear Tucker muttering engineering and coding type things under his breath. It was as funny as it was worrying.

“Remember you promised to not try and hack into government files until you’re eighteen.” Danny threw an arm around Tucker’s shoulders, dragging him back from a table of slightly sparking parts. “Also, while you’re at it, maybe try not to electrocute yourself while you’re down here.”

“I’m not gonna electrocute myself,” Tucker snorted, batting him away before turning to beam at him. “But c’mon. I mean — look at all this stuff! They’re making technology that shouldn’t exist!”

“Uh huh.” Danny didn’t have the heart to tell him that none of it worked. “Just, uh… be cautious of anything that looks like it could kill you, okay? Half of this stuff isn’t even complete, yet. Just focus on stuff like- Here! Focus on stuff like- Fuck!”

Tucker barked out a wheezy laugh as Danny jumped back from the stupid fucking device that had zapped him enough to hurt. Tucker’s laugh was doing little to raise Danny’s spirits, too. “Sorry, Danny, but if anyone’s getting electrocuted today it’s probably gonna be you.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Danny grumbled, shaking his hand out and moving away from anything that even so much as looked like it could hurt him. “I’m telling you guys, this lab is out to get me.”

“You think the world is out to get you,” Sam laughed, walking back over to them and looking at all the other papers scattered around. “Okay, so… how does all of this work? Like, okay, secret lab, crazy inventions, and all of it… leads to ghosts? How?”

“Jeez, Sammy, ask the hard questions,” Danny whined, moving to pull himself up on a table and sit. Sam did the same thing on the table across from him and Tucker went back to rifling through tech like the trash goblin he was. “Okay, so… it’s kind of complicated? If you want to be really proper about it and junk, they take part in biological studies to research the development and recreation of ectoplasm and the theorized existence of ectoplasmic entities.”

“Hang on.” Tucker paused, arms full as he looked back at them. “Ectoplasm is that slimy junk that ghosts throw up on people, isn’t it?”

“No- And stop shoving stuff into your pockets! You’re enough of a walking fire hazard as it is!” Honestly, Danny wouldn’t be surprised if Tucker one day pulled out an actual laptop from those pockets. “Ectoplasm as in, like, an actual element that they’re working on proving to the scientific community at large.”

“They get funding for something like that?” Sam looked down at the papers she had been looking at, expression flat. “This all looks like absolute gibberish — and that’s without counting all the scientific terms.”

“I mean, it is basically gibberish until they get the proof they need,” Danny shrugged, looking over his shoulder. “That’s why I told you that me and Jazz were outright banned from being in the lab the last couple months. It’s because they were building that.”

Danny pointed over towards the way he had been looking, turning back to see his friends’ shocked expressions. In their defense, it really was something unnoticed until attention was called to it. It was, as his parents like to call it, their ‘life’s work.’

While his parents really were trying to prove that ectoplasm was an actual element, their true focus was to study the entities that were supposedly made of it. There were sometimes months at a time where his parents disappeared into the lab and Danny had been chased out with stern lectures and disappointed looks. After their last spree of inventing, Danny made sure to only come down to the lab and look at what they were doing when he was sure they were asleep.

Their latest project wasn’t technically their ‘latest,’ either. It was something that they had been working on since Danny was in second or third grade, but it was only in the last few months they had started making progress on ‘their greatest invention.’

“Dude… what is that?” Tucker looked like he wanted to run over and pick it apart with nothing but his teeth and nails. Danny made sure to slide off the table he was sitting on and shuffle to stand in front of him so he could at least try to block him when he snapped and went feral.

“I mean, me and Jazz started calling it a portal, but I think the real term they gave it was the EMD or, uh…” Shit, he had just been thinking about it last night, too. What- Oh, right. “The Ectoplasmic Monitoring Device. It’s basically supposed to use radiation and electricity to form a sort of mirror that they can use to study ectoplasm which, so far as they’ve been able to tell, doesn’t naturally occur in our world.”

“The living world?” Sam crossed her arms and had on her skeptical look that she usually had when dealing with cheerleaders and kids who got caught cheating. “Meaning there’s another world?”

Sighing dramatically, Danny wandered over to the device and gave it a fond pat to the side, expertly avoiding the exposed wires. “If what my parents say is true, then there’s supposed to be another world parallel to our own that is made of ectoplasm. This device was supposed to make it so they’d be able to study that world.”

“Supposed to? What happened?” Tucker frowned as he started looking at all the data banks the portal was hooked up to, Danny leaving him to it. While Danny wasn’t a slouch himself when it came to math and science, he’d leave the actual inventing part up to Tucker, who was much better at it.

“We don’t really know. They’ve been working on this since I was in second or third grade, I think.” The Portal, which came about after having a bit of a gaming marathon, was aptly named in Danny’s opinion. The thing was huge, created in the style of a hexagon just for structural stability, and had an eight foot long tunnel. It was definitely a portal. It was also off and silent as it always seemed to be. “They said they made a breakthrough a while ago, but I guess it wasn’t enough of one.”

Danny had to admit that they had done a lot of good work on it, though. Whereas before there had been nothing except a multitude of wires and a wireframe structure, now it looked like something more befitting a proper sci-fi movie. There were only a few panels that seemed to be missing and showed the wires and cables that held the portal together, but otherwise it looked like it should have been at least somewhat functional.

“Danny, you know that this looks like the start of a horror movie,” Sam said, sounding like she was both scoffing and laughing. It probably would have been even funnier if she didn’t sound so right about it. Still, though…

Unable to resist climbing over the foot-wide gap and into the portal itself, Danny let himself pretend for just a moment that he really was about to enter some grand new world where anything could happen. What would another world even be like? What would a ghostly world be like?

His parents could claim ectoplasmic entities all they wanted when it came to their studies and research, but what they were basically studying was ghosts. Maybe not the horror-comedy cult classic stuff that was around, but real, actual ghosts. What would a world like that really look like?

Would it be full of dead people and just that? Maybe there was old technology that no one used anymore and books no one ever read? Or maybe it was just an echo of Earth, but all twisted and flipped around. Whatever was out there, Danny had little doubt that it would be amazing.

“You know, it’s kind of weird.” Tucker’s voice brought his attention back to the present, Danny glancing back to see the other was still at the data banks and looking through everything. “Everything’s plugged in, all the readings look good from what I’m seeing, and just… it should be working, but it’s like it just decided not to bother.”

Danny couldn’t stop his laugh at that, waving around at the room at large. “Dude, they can say ectoplasmic entities all they want, but they’re basically chasing after ghosts.”

“Tilting at windmills,” Sam put in, grinning at the looks Danny and Tucker both shot her. “It means chasing what isn’t there. It was on our English final-”

“Is that what it means?” Tucker’s eyes widened and then he dropped his shoulders and groaned. “Got that one wrong, then.”

Danny snorted and rolled his eyes before stepping further into the Portal, catching a glimpse of Tucker messing with the screens and control area while Sam slipped over to fiddle with dials and levers that, pressed against the wall, fed into the machine itself. Not too worried about it, Danny looked around, absently hearing Tucker mutter about the unworking Portal being a bummer.

“Gotta agree with you there,” Sam called back to him, voice hard to hear from where Danny was standing. It almost reminded him of being inside a wind tunnel when he had been on a field trip with his class. “Could you imagine how cool it would be to explore an entire new world?”

Danny kept silent, but honestly he couldn’t agree more. It would have been amazing if his parents had been right for once and the Portal could one day work. They’d basically be able to explore a new planet.

Now far enough inside to be in the middle of it all, Danny almost continued forward before stopping dead in his tracks as something happened. It felt like being shocked without the pain of it all, breath knocked out of him and some sort of sharp sensation crawling down his spine and prickling at his skin. It was, to borrow his mom’s paranoid words, as if someone had stepped over his grave.

His friends were still talking outside — he knew they were talking just outside the edge of the Portal — but from where he was standing it felt like he couldn’t hear anything except maybe his imagined heartbeat and quiet breaths. It was quiet enough that he was pretty sure his brain was trying to trick him into thinking someone was talking just so he had something to focus on.

It felt like an eternity of feeling like something was going to happen before the feeling faded away, Danny left confused and standing there before he heard his name called by what sounded like Tucker. Slowly taking a step back, Danny shook his head as he turned around. He was just walking around some scrap metal, as far as he was concerned. He was fine. In fact- Okay. Now Sam was loudly calling for him.

“Hang on, hang on, I’m coming!” Quickly turning around, and immediately tripping over some exposed metal, Danny stumbled and swore before catching himself on the wall. It may have been scrap metal, but it was still a death trap, Danny supposed.

Pushing himself off the wall, Danny stumbled again and paused as he felt something under his hand give, like whatever it was was being pressed inwards, a quiet click noise echoing softly throughout the Portal. Frowning in confusion, Danny turned to look at his hand before carefully twitching his fingers apart to form a gap he could look through.

There, just barely visible through the light spilling in from the lab, was the plastic sheen of a green button. An imprinted word above it read ON.

“Danny? You okay?” Sam’s voice, sounding worried, had Danny freezing in place even more as he turned to properly look at her. She had a small frown on her face, the beginnings of concern in her eyes and the lines around her mouth. “Hey, what’s wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost-”

The word cut off in the wake of a high pitched whine not unlike what he heard once before when a power generator had started turning on. It was a sound that made Sam’s eyes widen the same way Danny (no, this was definitely Dani, now, who was scared out of her mind) was sure her own had, trying not to laugh hysterically as the whine grew louder around them. She had no doubt that she really did look like she had seen a ghost.

“Hey, guys?” Dani finally managed through the fear that felt like it was choking her, “I think I figured out why the portal wasn’t working.”

The whine was loud enough that it seemed to deafen the entire world, Dani unable to hear Sam screaming what was probably her name. She couldn’t hear Tucker, either, the other coming into view and looking to be shouting something before he was wrapping around Sam and keeping her from running into the portal after her.

It looked like the two were telling her to run, to get out, but Dani just… stood. It felt like she was frozen in place and unable to move no matter how much she tried or wanted it. She was stuck.

And then it felt like everything happened in one second.

The screams of her friends faded, instead replaced with the sound an MRI machine would make; loud and heartstopping and terrifying.

Rings of bright white light shone from the small gaps between the metal floor, walls, and ceiling, spreading across the Portal similar to a row of lights in a movie theater.

The thought of running couldn’t seem to connect with her body, which was rigid straight and locked into place with all her weight still on the button.

An imagined voice that, for just a moment, sounded like someone was telling Dani to take a deep breath. She didn’t bother fighting off the illusion, merely doing as told because was she about to die-?

A second passed and the thunderstorm was no longer outside but instead it was with her and directly above her and Dani only sucked in another deep breath as she felt the feeling that came right before a static shock only multiplied by a million-

A deep breath, two screaming voices, and Dani braced herself as the storm broke and lightning hit.

—

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