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spinwrites · 4 years

Text

in limbo

Danny Phantom drabble for DannyMay. Warning for dead body. I have finally... caught up... asjoasdnlsds. Edit: Special thanks to Rhiannon for catching my grammar mistakes!

“Do you want to see the body?”

Her tone lacked inflection, her demeanor professional, but Danny had lived under adults for fourteen years. The faint furrow of her forehead, the minute clench of her jaw, her unfaltering gaze on his face – he recognized variations of these tells in his parents, in Jazz, even in Mr. Lancer on Danny’s worst days.

I can’t believe I still look like a kid in ghost form.

He steeled his shoulders and plastered a grim smile. Floating inches above the tarmac leveled them, eye to eye. “Ghost-related problems are my specialty, ma’am,” he replied, earnest. “I wanna help if I can.”

The police officer relented. She led him into the heart of the scene, cordoned off by yellow-black tape and officers who warded away nosy cameras and curious eyes. A hint of gratification coiled in his gut at being granted special treatment, before shame soured and consumed it.

Fenton, that’s unheroic, he told himself, until he floated before the body.

The officer had briefed him: a suicide, from the window of a middle-aged man’s sixth-floor apartment. The police department wouldn’t have approached the local ghost if not for the vials of ectoplasm raided from his kitchen, alongside notebooks scrawled with diagrams and incomprehensible writing. The Fentons were to come by later to decode them, but that wasn’t what the police needed him for.

Draped in a white tarp, the man lay prostrate on the pavement.

Dead, the thought came, visceral and curdling, and Danny stopped in his tracks.

The smell hit him. Metallic and festering, as though blood had pooled on his tongue and clogged his nostrils. There were dark splatters unconcealed by the tarp, and slumps of the body were sloping inwards in places a human could not.

“Phantom?”

“R-right.” He forced his eyes to her own.

They scrutinized him, and sweat broke out beneath his jumpsuit. “Are you getting anything from him?” the officer asked. Then quietly, “You don’t need to look to do this, is that right?”

I can handle it.

He couldn’t get the words out; they were a thick cloth in his throat. His ghost sense did not go off, so he drifted closer, heart thudding from his desire to shy away. He shut his eyes instead, and steadied his breaths - ignore the blood, ignore her stare - to clear his mind. Tendrils of his consciousness extended, flicked against entities in his proximity.

A dog whined from its mangled throat and trampled lungs. A bald, bony child peered at them with curious eyes. The way these ghosts passed were etched on their spiritual forms the way leathery scars marred his left palm and right foot, but never had he been there for their deaths, their reformation into ghosts, apart from his own.

Would this man be his first?

He gave it time, stretching his senses as far as he could, uncertain if he was hoping for a ghost to form. Time dragged by and he could not tell if it were minutes or seconds, but he came to the uneasy realization that there would be no new ghost today. Weighed down by the officer’s gaze, Danny opened his eyes.

“I’m not sensing anything from him,” he admitted.

The officer heaved a sigh. “So the Fentons were right.”

At Danny’s jerk of his head, she smiled with apology, but her steady expression showed little repentance. “It’s nothing personal,” she said. “We wanted to corroborate their findings, but we didn’t want to cloud your conclusions. The Fentons came by earlier, and they suspected he” – she inclined her head at the angel-white tarp – “was running experiments at home.”

“Experiments?”

“With the ectoplasm. From all the writing he’s left behind, we think he’s hoping he could become a ghost when he died. Looks like it didn’t work.”

I get it, Danny wanted to say, but he didn’t, not fully. Was it a good thing the man had failed?

The officer thanked him for his service, before escorting him away from the scene. Danny tried to picture it, but he could not imagine what sort of life the man had lived, nor could he imagine where the man was now.

Written: 18 May 2020 | DannyMay 2020 Day 18, Horror

#dannymay2020 #danny phantom #fanfiction #drabble #dp danny

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