#Once again Danny is denial&trauma in a bottle ™

[angelic-ish-phantom]

Staff

Danny leaned on Sam’s shoulder, hiding his face in her neck as he dozed.

They were in the cafeteria, and Danny understood that he probably wasn’t helping quell the rumor that they were dating.

Tucker, sat on his other side, chattering to them as he absentmindedly fiddled with his PDA, one hand in Danny’s.

He knew he’d been clingy lately, but the fact his friends didn’t mind the affection made him feel a lot better about it.

(Ghosts didn’t have friends.)

Danny shuddered at the memory of red that flit through his vision.

That had thankfully been happening less. It didn’t seem to be anything he could actively prevent, so he was just doing his best to move on, to forget the orders that had played on loop in his head for days.

He was currently more focused on stopping the involuntary flinches, and the three days of sleep he’d missed.

Thankfully, he didn’t need as much sleep due to his ghost half, but he still had to keep up with the ghost attacks that had happened at night since so catching up on sleep was not the most straightforward task. He’d been trying to catch naps between classes, which helped him pay more attention during them, but he really wished he could just take a day off from school and defending Amity Park to rest.

Sam and Tucker had already suggested he do exactly that, but he’d already missed a whole two days of school that week. He could wait a until the weekend. Even if he felt terrible.

He was lucky the school hadn’t reported his absences to his parents. Or his parents had missed those calls; that was probably the more likely option.

They’d been more wrapped up in their work lately, which was fair considering there had been an entire circus (stopthinkingaboutit stopthinkingaboutit-) of ghosts in Amity. They’d been a lot better about not obsessing that badly since the portal started working, but they still had their moments.

Moments that could lead to his absence not being noticed. Danny had a curfew and he tended to adhere to it, but his parents seldom caught him breaking it, considering more often than not if he was staying out that late, he wasn’t coming home that day. And if they didn’t hear him come back, his parents tended to think he was in his room. Or at least somewhere in the house.

This worked in his favor when he left to fight ghosts while they were busy; he could just faze in and out of his room. The system worked. The whole Freakshow incident had made him start to wonder how okay it was they didn’t always notice when he disappeared…

But, like all things related to that incident Danny was doing his damndest not to think about it!

Jazz tended to notice if he was out of the house though. Almost always. It was annoying.

Or it had been… Lately she’d been noticing a lot less. When he’d gone back home after he and the other ghosts had been freed from the staff (youareaghostyouhavenofriendsobeyobeyobey-), despite really wanting to stay with Sam until he could get the red tinged image of her falling to her death out of his mind, Jazz had looked at him concerned, but knowing. She had told him to tell her if he was going to spend the night at his friends’. This meant he didn’t have to make up an excuse, but it was out of character for her to just write off him being gone for so long…

Point was: his parents didn’t notice, his sister hadn’t realized, and his school didn’t ask! So he was fine to just pretend nothing had happened.

The flinching on the other hand… Danny had been walking a fine line of trying to keep from cowering whenever someone came too close, and trying not think about why that impulse had grown in the first place.

It was shaping up to be a general rule for everything that had happened in that place: just don’t think about it.

So Danny tried to focus on his friends, the light drone of their voices, on the fact they were there and that was enough to make his core thrum pleasantly beneath his skin.

In this sleepy state, he almost wished he could be closer to them. Before everything, he might have thought overshadowing would achieve that. Now though…

The thought of overshadowing anyone, of controlling them, sounded depraved. He wouldn’t, never again.

It was a ridiculous thought; he knew that logically. Overshadowing was different. It was taking a persons consciousness and

pushing it down, gently locking them away in a comfortable little box as you puppeteer a body. They’d have no memory of the event at all.

(There was no slimy red guiding your thoughts and clouding your head with pain. No crimson fire behind crystal, biting into your eyes, your skin, your very core.)

The overshadowed persons mind wasn't

even touched during the process.

Unless you counted the foreign

muscle memory the ghost would have, or the fleeting thoughts left behind like an echo for the overshadowed party to pick up on when their body was their own again.

It was supposed to be like being asleep.

(Danny had been painfully, horribly awake while under the staff's control.)

The bell rang, startling Danny out of his own head as he blinking blearily. Sam shrugged, trying to shake him awake, and Tucker moved away.

Danny sighed as he complied, mourning that quiet moment. (It was the closest thing to contentment he could get with the resonance of red still in his head.)

Danny got up, looking at his friends a smile came almost easily. And he tried not to think about it.