#Bruce is always quiet and this was such a small snapshot that he doesn't actually say anything. whoops lol

[detectivedarling]

As with all things in life, one fact builds on the other, and a lot stands behind the current situation. First, Danny counts in his head, ghost fights are hard to capture on video. Second, the few videos taken of Phantom not in a fight are carefully kept secret. Third, sending those videos over any form of internet seems more dangerous than it's worth.

It's why Bruce, two years after Danny told him about his previous vigilante life, still has only seen Phantom in the mostly low quality videos he could scrounge up from the internet. Which was, admittedly, a lot. Bruce is pretty good when it comes to that. Danny doesn't think Tucker would have been able to find everything Bruce has, and Danny knows for sure he himself wouldn't have found half. If even a third. Not that he was ever much interested in finding videos of himself, seeing his ass get kicked from a different perspective never sounded particularly fun.

But here he sits, next to Bruce, with a high priority, carefully cushioned post package. A simple USB and film card sits inside the many layers of bubble wrap.

Tucker jumped on new technology the second he was able, curious for all things digital, while Sam more often stuck to the old and 'better' looking devices. The film card is hers, from the years after she got a ridiculously expensive and old fashioned camera for her birthday and used it with dedication. It was nearly all aesthetic shots and poetic, environmental moments, but she had some special film cards for filming her life, her friends. She had an even more special card for filming when Phantom was involved.

She rarely did. The film needed to be hidden carefully, so no one sniffing through her stuff could find any hints to Danny's identity. Tucker's occasional digital photo or video were always copied to an equally hidden USB and scrubbed from whatever he used to film on. Danny, for all that his family had never once snooped in his stuff, didn't dare save anything.

Bruce starts with the film card because Danny asks him to. He sets up something compatible, and the film starts with a scratch and a laugh, Danny's breath stolen away as he looks at Sam's bedroom, from before she hung up the goth-ified star string lights Danny and Tucker had gifted her on her thirteenth birthday. Her TV is colorful, the image of a scoreboard for Mario Kart with flashing images of racers. Danny leans in to read. Sam is in first, he's in seventh, and Tucker just barely managed to claim eleven.

Which is why she recorded the video. Tucker covers the scoreboard with his body, just a little too late. I was distracted, okay?! His voice carries through the speakers as he yells at her, eyes pointed behind the camera. Sam as laughing, that fun middle ground of mocking and friendly.

"I'm injured," Danny mumbles, barely speaking over Tuckers ranting. He can't bear to cover the sound up. "Just- just a warning."

Bruce rubs a thumb over Danny's hand. He doesn't look away.

Sam almost giggles. Distracted, uh-huh, she teases and the camera turns to look at Danny beside her. At Phantom beside her.

It's a funny first video for Bruce to watch. Of all the (admittedly not very many) videos Danny's friends have taken of him as Phantom, the first Bruce sees is from the same day as the video Bruce was watching when Danny told him about being Phantom. It's the aftermath of a ghost fight.

Phantom is bleeding. He's sitting on a mess of towels, under and behind him to prevent any ectoplasm from getting on Sam's chair. His right eye is shut, the mess of blood splattered over his face during the fight cleaned away, but a thin trail of it still drops from under it. His left arm is sluggishly dripping blood and sucking it back up. It's cut off at the mid point of his forearm, grown from his elbow. It would take a few more hours before the hand comes back fully formed. His eye shouldn't take much more than one, at the time of the video.

His shoulders are shaking. Phantom is bleeding, injured and dismembered, but his shoulders are shaking from the laugh he can barely hold in.

Our seventh placer, everybody, Sam speaks to an audience that was never meant to include any more than the three of them. Danny can't imagine Bruce not watching alongside him. Not distracted like our dear Tuck.

Sometimes Danny would come out of a rough ghost fight wishing for nothing more than to grieve in peace. To lay and be in pain, to be alone or comforted quietly by his friends. Sometimes Danny wanted the room to be as somber as he felt. Other times he needed to be alive, even as he couldn't transform back before he finished healing, he needed to be present and distracted, he needed to be pulled away from the pain of being pulled apart. This was one of those times.

Phantom falls back against the cushion, laughing. It hiccups with the blood in his lungs, but it's happy and free.

Tucker groans. I wanna play Doomed

The camera turns down as Sam prepares to stop her filming. Build Danny a setup for playing one handed instead of whining next time. Until then, it's Mario Kart.

The video ends.

im dedicating this to @detectivedarling. i felt inspired after seeing their little ficlet yesterday sadhjfl 🫶

-

Danny's grip on his cane tightens.

"What—"

His voice cracks. He stops, clears it, then tries again in spite of the nausea twisting in his gut. "What are — you, uh, watching, Bruce?" He sounds horribly far away.

Bruce doesn't look at him, his attention laser-focused on the screen. Which is— fine. It's usually not a problem, Bruce gets like that when he hyper-focuses on a case, and unless it's urgent — or he's been at it for hours — Danny sees no need to pull him away from it. He likes the quiet camaraderie they have, it's companionable and unique to the two of them.

He wishes he was right now though. Looking at him, that is.

That way he wasn't watching what was clearly one of Danny's ghost fights. One of the nastier ones, if the collateral damage and rubble on the street is of any indication.

Danny tries to remember which one that is. He shuffles a little closer to the desk, ignoring the rock in his stomach or the ugly weightlessness in his arms. It's not the blood blossoms, that much he knows. He just recently had an injection so it shouldn't be bothering him this soon—

So it's just nerves. Perfect.

Most footage of his fights are— messy, at best. Unusable at worst. Amity Park was obsessed with appearing 'normal' when they first started happening, and typical news stations censor the worst of the fights anyways for publishing, since they can get pretty gory at times. And ghosts move too fast to be caught on regular standard cameras, not including distance and light and—

That is to say— finding usable ghost fight videos is hard.

Danny wonders how Bruce got his hands on this one, and then stops wondering.

The audio is muted, which is - good. Good, because the fight is ugly and chaotic and clearly this was taken on someone's phone. Fuck, he can't remember if he ever saw that before — clearly not. They're hiding behind an overturned car, and Danny grits his teeth so he doesn't tell that idiot to run.

The camera turns up, and focuses on two figures in the air. It takes a few seconds, but when it does, Danny gets hit with a wave of vertigo. His grip tightens and he leans heavily on his cane, he waits for the black dots to disappear.

He- uh, he remembers this fight now. Uh, sort of.

He remembers being twelve at the time, and he remembers some of the injuries he got out of it. His eyelid spasms abruptly. This ghost wasn't one of his regulars, so he doesn't remember whatever name they had, barely remembered what they looked like up until- uh. Now.

Was he always that small? Well— Phantom's never been particularly big, perks of being a dead kid, but— it's - different. Seeing it from an outsider perspective. Was he that small? Or is it just because he's wearing a jumpsuit clearly too big for him that casts the illusion of being small?

Doesn't really - matter. Now. He can't access his ghost form, and he already knows the answers to his appearance.

Phantom is clearly bleeding, viscous and violently green like the bubbles of a lava lamp, clutching onto a limp shoulder that's missing an arm from the elbow down. Half his face is drenched in similar blood, the eye on the drenched side is closed — not because he can't see through the ectoplasm.

Danny's memories of that fight slowly come in a bit clearer. Right. He took a pole to the eye in that one. That had - hurt. A lot. Getting an eye gouged out usually does. It and the missing arm took hours to grow back.

He rubs his eye with his palm for no other reason than it itches.

The other ghost isn't untouched of any injury either, but he's not in a state of dismemberment like Phantom is.

Danny drops his gaze down at Bruce, whose sitting in his chair with his hands threaded together, looking so tense that Danny half expects to meet solid steel if he were to touch his back. His face is - blank. Terribly blank, with an intensity in his eyes that Danny doesn't see often.

He looks terribly distressed.

He opens his mouth, and finds that nothing comes out. His throat is thick with an ugly, tar-like feeling that makes his eyes sting. Kinda reminds him of when someone wraps their hands around your throat and presses. He closes his mouth, then tries again.

"B—" hhhhhh, "Buzz."

Finally Bruce looks at him, one hand slaps the space button on the keyboard, and the video pauses. His expression doesn't shift, but there's a weight in the lines of his face that reminds Danny of a set of weights sagging.

He looks quite like he's grieving something.

Bruce opens his mouth, his voice comes out terribly soft and heartbroken: "He looks like you."

Which is— a terrifying sentence in and of itself. One that makes Danny's legs shake and ignite his ragged, poison-chewed nerves alight with the need to run. An instinctive urge to deny, deny, deny.

How could he? He could say, that's a ghost, Bruce. I'm not a ghost. He could crack a joke, and ask, 'do I look dead to you?' or say something about how he knows that his parents studied ghosts, but that didn't make him one.

He could say that, and he could say it knowing full well that Bruce would see right through it. He'd probably let Danny too.

Danny closes his eyes. They sting, you see? So does his nose, right in the back like someone popped him in the face. And his throat is thick and gross and like someone stuck a spider, the big fat tarantula kind, right down into his esophagus.

He breathes in — through his mouth, because his nose stings and so it'd be best not to irritate it further with air — and it's terribly shaky and uneven. But it clears a pathway to his lungs big enough for him to say — whisper, really:

"You know, I think you're the first person to notice that."