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Danny paced the length of the lab anxiously. The doorway of the portal was empty and dormant but there was still something deep in his core that felt like it was being called to it. He didn’t know if that soft tug was some piece of his soul wanting to go back there because it was where he died or if the Ghost Zone was just calling his other half home. Danny breathed through the distracting pull on his core, his breath fogging in front of him as he unconsciously lowered the temperature in the room.
He fiddled with the cuffs of his bulky leather jacket, the straps and buckles of his black platform boots jangling as he turned to take another circuit of the room. He’d been wearing these things for the past two years, but they were still closer to Sam’s style than his own. When everyone in their grade started shooting up with growth spurts, there was only so much time before people started noticing Danny was as small as he’d ever been. So Sam had come up with a plan and she, Tucker, and Danny had pooled their savings together to execute it. They’d never talked about it, not directly. About why Danny needed boots to make him look taller or a jacket that had openings in the lining for padding so that he looked broader. No one wanted to acknowledge it, and Danny had been fine with that.
But they had graduated high school, and there was no more avoiding it. They had run out of time.
The door burst open and Sam strutted through, trotting down the steps to meet him. She tugged her jacket closer around her as she gave him a kiss. The heat of summer was bearing down on Amity but she still wore a fleece lined jacket. Because of the cold always lingering in his skin, because of the temperature fluctuations he inflicted on the air around him with his emotions. There were hundreds of small concessions like that that she and Tucker had to make over the years, to adapt to his weirdness and the trouble he brought with him.
Danny held back a sigh as that train of thought led to the temperature dropping a little bit lower. Sam was already looking at him with slightly narrowed eyes as she tried to figure out what was wrong. The cold around him was biting.
“Where are your parents?” She asked instead of the obvious question brimming on her tongue.
He huffed a little laugh. She didn’t lead with the ambush of questions that would have him shutting down, trying to lull him into a false sense of security first. “Out ghost hunting. They’re thinking about taking Fenton Works on the road now that their last kid is moving out.”
She hummed, leaning back against the metal table in the middle of the room, “And… is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”
Danny shook his head.
Sam straightened at his grim expression. Suspicion blooming across her face as well as the hoarfrost of unwilling understanding. She asked in a hardening voice, “Danny, what is this about?”
“C’mon Sam,” Danny said softly. “You and I both know what you and Tucker are ignoring.”
“What,” Sam snapped. “What are we ignoring, Danny?”
Danny said nothing, the words knotting in his throat.
She huffed out an abruptly angry breath, “You know what, I’m not listening to this.” She turned, storming forward to make a quick retreat only for Danny to phase through the table between them, blocking her exit.
“No, we’re doing this. Right now. We’ve been putting it off for long enough.”
Sam shook her head, fire lighting up her eyes. Her jaw clenched and lip jutting out stubbornly, “No.” She gritted out.
Danny just kept going. “You’re going to college in the fall and we both know I can’t follow you there.”
Sam scowled, tongue playing with the stud going through the space below her lower lip. It was what she did when she was gearing up for a fight, thinking up arguments, stewing in her righteous anger at the injustices of the world. “Maybe if you’d have showed up to class every once in a while instead of fighting ghosts, you might’ve been able to.” She scoffed, trying and failing to lighten the mood, to brush away the problem with their usual humor. It didn’t work.
Danny stayed silent, looking at her like he was trying to memorize the sight of her here. Her spiky bob and unevenly cut bangs, the piercings accumulated across her ears and nose and eyebrows, the chokers around her neck, the flush in her cheeks from the cold, her eyes heavy with makeup and looking so close to shattering behind the fury etched into her face.
“We could make it work—” She tried, her insistent voice too scraped raw, too close to tears, to be anything but a desperate grab for Danny to listen, to stop this.
Danny was already shaking his head, a sad smile on his face.
Sam hissed savagely, “Yes.”
“Sam, no—”
“I’ve dragged your sorry ass through four years of high school, Fenton. We can bullshit our way through college!”
Danny sighed, “Sam—”
“You deserve to be there too! It’s us, you and me, and the three of us. After everything, you deserve this.”
“This isn’t going to just make me normal! Going to college with you guys won’t fix me!”
“You deserve this break!”
“I’m not going to get a break, I’m half ghost!” Danny yelled, roughly tugging his hands through his hair, trying to stop the spread of frost along the metal walls. “I will never be normal. But you, you deserve the break, you could have that break.”
Sam wasn’t listening, fidgeting with the rings on her fingers and muttering to herself, “—we just need to figure out how to alter your appearance a bit more to help you fit in—”
“Sam!” Danny said loudly.
Sam looked up at him, mouth snapping shut. Her eyes were big and red rimmed, pleading with him. Desperate. Begging him not to say what needed to be said.
“I’m fourteen. I haven’t aged a day in years. And we can put me in edgy platform boots and padded jackets and contouring makeup to make me look older all we want. But I haven’t changed since the day I died.” Danny ignored Sam’s flinch, because if he didn’t he’d never finish this. “You and Tucker are going off to college. And I can’t—” He broke off, swallowing thickly.
A beat of silence pressed in around them before he announced, “I’m leaving. To spend some time in the Ghost Zone.”
Sam’s brows knitted together, knowing that wasn’t the whole of it. “...And when are you going to be back?” The silence was deafening. She reiterated, “Danny. When will you be back to visit us?”
“Sam, I can’t,” His voice broke.
Her anger surged back tenfold, voice shaking with emotion, “Why.”
Danny, whose eyes had been drilling a hole into the ice covered ground at his feet, snapped back to meet hers. Grief and anger and despair burned in them as they flashed a ghostly green. “Because you’re starting your lives! And I refuse to be the thing to hold you back. Alright? I refuse!”
Sam hated how small her voice sounded as she asked, “But what about us?”
He smiled, an ugly, bittersweet tugging of the corners of his mouth. “Sam, you deserve the world. Someone who you can live, and grow, and burn down the government with. Grow up and get old with.”
Danny stepped back, stepped away from her, sucking in a breath that was edged with tears, fresh ice forming at his feet. Regret and pain in every stricken line of his youthful face. “That can’t be me.”
Sam grit her teeth against the spiteful tears lashing at her eyes, “Well maybe I don’t want any of that. Maybe I just want you.”
“Sam, we can’t. You know we can’t.”
“Danny—”
He turned to the side as his face twisted with pain, mouth contorting around a sob as his cheeks sliced open, his teeth sharp and filling his mouth, the split edges tinged green and almost glowing with the hint of frost. A green crown of ice coated fire appeared above his head. His voice, still sounding so chillingly himself, rose to a scream, desperate to get her to understand, “There’s no future with me! You deserve better than someone who can’t experience life with you!” His body warped, hands turning black and his fingers sharpening into talons, his torso lengthening and shoulders hunching in on himself. “And one day, you’ll only be with me out of pity, and you’ll resent me, and I will just be a kid you used to love.” He was gasping, shaking, trying and failing to keep his tears at bay. “And I can’t bear to see that happen to us…”
To anyone else, that grotesque shift in his appearance would’ve been terrifying. But Sam knew him, knew him down to the icy core of his being. And all she saw was the pain he was in.
Sam reached out, cupping his face, running a hand through the dark hair that was just faintly shifting in an invisible wind. She shook her head obstinately, “No. No.” Her voice was tight with tears. “You’re not listening. You’re not listening to me. I choose you.” When her words had no effect on him, she reiterated, each word deliberate and forceful, “I choose you, Daniel Fenton.”
His deadly hands folded over hers. Sam felt hope shift in her chest, before he pulled her hands away and stepped back. Her palms were wet with his teartracks. Her lips trembled.
Danny’s brows furrowed as he forced his essence back into a human-like shape. His face was resolute, set with determination even as the tears streaked down his face. “I won’t let you.”
A sob spilled past her lips.
“I won’t let you waste your life on me, Sam.”
She scowled at him, “Fuck you. Fuck you.” Her face twisted in pain as he took another step back. “Don’t you dare…”
He looked away, whispering, “I’m sorry, Sam.”
Danny turned away and went invisible, leaving her alone in the room she saw her best friend die in three years ago, leaving her again.