#will o' the wisp | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

scarletsaphire · 8 months ago

Text

Danny knew that he wasn't supposed to follow the wisps, but when you're a child, lost and alone in the forest, you don't have much of a choice.

---

I took a small break from @phicphight but I'm back with a fill for @jackdaw-sprite! The prompt I used will be at the bottom.

There were lots and lots of rules that Danny needed to follow; don't try and use the stove by yourself, don't wander into the lab without supervision, always wear his welding mask when helping his mom or dad with their work, and most importantly of all, do not, under any circumstances, follow the will o' wisps.

His parents had spent a very long time hammering that rule into his head, ever since he was a baby. "They may look friendly," his mom would say, as they cuddled on a sofa watching Brave . "It may seem like they're trying to help her. But they are not. If they hadn't appeared, than none of this would've happened in the first place."

"They're going to be beautiful," his dad had said, while hammering a sheet of metal into the shape he needed. Danny was standing on the stool next to him, a significantly smaller, less effective hammer clasped between his tiny hands. "They might even be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. But that's a lie. They just want to trick you, and take you away from us. You can't trust them, just like you can't trust any ghost. Do you understand me, Danno?"

Danny had nodded, and his dad had ruffled his hair just like he always did. "You're such a smart kid, you know that? I wish I'd had half the brains when I was five!"

Now, lost deep enough in the forest that Danny couldn't see the sky, Danny didn't feel all that smart.

He hadn't meant to wander off; the rest of his family was still somewhere in the park, setting up the picnic blanket and basket for lunch. Jazz had been playing hide and seek with him, but knowing her, she was using his absence to read the book she’d brought. That was okay; as long as Danny hid well, they’d all have to find him eventually.

Danny had thought hiding in the trees would've been a good idea; he’d be able to see everyone, but they wouldn’t see him. There was the added bonus of being able to climb a tree, which was always a plus. He'd needed to go a few trees deep to find a good one he could climb. By then, he'd seen a flower, a lovely soft purple color that he thought would match his mom's eyes. But if he got his mom a flower, he had to get his dad one too, cause that was only fair, and there was a pretty yellow one only a little further in...

The next thing he knew, he'd been stumbling around the trees, tripping over protruding roots and dead logs that could've been there for centuries. He had no idea which way he'd come from, or which way led back to the park, and all he really wanted to do was sit down and cry.

His bottom lip had just started to quiver when the will o' wisp first appeared.

His father had been right; it was beautiful, a kaleidoscope of colors all mushed into one creature, constantly shifting and flickering in the air, as if someone had taken a chunk of the northern lights and left it right here, in a random park in Illinois just for him to look at.

Danny recognized it instantly. He should’ve looked away; he knew what the rule was. Do not, under any circumstances, follow the will o' wisps. But...

Danny glanced back up at the sky, completely covered by the canopy above him. He couldn't tell if the sun was starting to set or not. He had no way of knowing just how close to, or even how far past lunch time it really was, but by the growling of his stomach, he was fairly certain it had been a little while at least.

Surely it was better to follow the wisp than sit here and starve, right? It wasn't like they could lead him into any more danger than he was already in.

Danny took one, hesitant step towards the wisp. It stayed exactly where it was, circling through a dozen different colors. Danny took another step.

It did not disappear when he got close, like it did in the movies. It hovered inches in front of his face, close enough that if he just stretched his hand forward, he would be able to touch it. This close, he could see that he'd been wrong to compare it to the northern lights; those were probably beautiful, sure, but it didn't hold a candle to this.

It was like peering through water at the bottom of a pond, if the only thing on the other side was a rainbow. It rippled and flowed from one vivid color into the next, constantly changing and shifting and yet never once was it muddied. The temptation was too strong, and Danny couldn’t help but reach out. It was only then, just as his fingers were about to brush against the top of whatever it had instead of a head, that it disappeared, reappearing a few feet away.

Danny didn't hesitate this time. He was off as fast as his little legs could carry him, running towards the wisp. This time, the roots did not catch his feet, the weeds did not scratch his legs, and the logs did not break his stride.

He chased the wisp through the woods with reckless abandon, running as fast as he possibly could. Danny needed to touch that wisp, needed to catch it between his hands like a lightning bug. He didn't know why, he just knew he needed to know. He needed to know how it felt beneath his fingers.

He was so focused on the will o' wisp that he didn't notice when the ground beneath him became more level, when the sunlight streamed through the leaves in larger gaps. He didn't even notice that he'd emerged out of the forest until the wisp disappeared for the last time, and he couldn't find where it had reappeared.

Jazz grabbed a hold of his arm, and the memory of the will o' wisp was knocked out of his head all at once.

"There you are!" she said, dragging Danny over to where the picnic blanket had been laid out. "Mom, I found him!"

His mom and dad rushed over to him, pulling him into a hug. "We've been worried sick about you, kiddo!" his dad said, pulling away to look at his face. "We've been calling your name for fifteen minutes now!"

"You must've wandered pretty far into the forest, huh?" his mom said with a smile and a laugh. "What were you doing in there?"

Danny looked back at the woods. He hoped to see the wisp among the trees, one last glimpse of the beautiful, cascading colors. All he saw was the browns and greens the forest always had.

"I was climbing trees," he lied.

He was quiet for the rest of the day. His parents never bothered to ask why.

Danny was eight when he next saw the wisps. He'd almost forgotten about them entirely, so many years had gone by. He probably would have, if his parents warnings didn’t serve as near constant reminders.

He was supposed to be in class, but he wasn’t. Dash had been picking on him again, and the teacher had looked the other way, just like she always did. That was normal. Most days, Danny dealt with it.

Unlike most days, however, Danny didn't have Tucker to help distract him; his friend was home sick with some kind of stomach bug, so for this day and probably the following week, Danny was going to be all by himself.

Danny thought his solution made perfect sense. He’d waited for the teacher and Dash to turn their attention away, and slipped out into the hallway. He knew he wasn't supposed to be wandering around without permission, but it was probably fine. Dash wasn't supposed to be insulting him and his parents like that, at least not according to the signs on the walls everywhere, so Danny deserved a little bit of rule breaking here and there. It was only fair.

This staircase went to the roof, supposedly, but since he didn't have the key, and neither did any of the other staff as far as he knew, it was pretty much just a dead end. This worked perfectly for Danny's purposes; no one would come up here for any reason, which meant he had as much time as he wanted. At least, until someone realized he was gone, but that probably wouldn’t be for a while.

Now the problem was what he was going to do. He hadn’t thought to grab his backpack before sneaking away, so he didn’t have all of the random goodies he’d accumulated over the past few months. He didn’t have any homework or studying that he could do, not without his worksheets, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t; that was something Jazz would do, and Jazz was boring.

Danny dug through the pockets of his jacket and jeans and came out with two halves of a purple crayon, a small container of extra pencil lead for a mechanical pencil, and a form he was supposed to give to his parents last week that he’d forgotten about.

It looked like he would be drawing.

He was halfway into a doodle of some kind of space monster eating a planet when he saw the light out of the corner of his eye. At first, he'd thought it was the door opening; the light was soft and natural, like sunlight would be, but that didn't make any sense; no one had come up the stairs, Danny was sure of it, and there was no way anyone was on the roof; they’d need to climb the side of the school, which was way too much work.

It was once he looked up that he recognized it: a will o' wisp, hovering above the stairs, just out of reach.

The crayon fell out of his hand. It was just as beautiful as he remembered it being, just as ethereal, and completely out of place with the bleak surroundings of the elementary school staircase.

Danny didn't bother packing up his things. He left his drawing unfinished on the floor, the pencil lead spread out against the tile. He climbed to his feet as if in a trance, hand outstretched, just like he remembered doing in the forest three years ago. Just like it had done then, it let Danny get close enough to almost touch it, close enough that he could almost feel it against his finger tips, and then it was gone, floating above the landing just below him.

He hesitated. The first time he saw the wisps, he'd been a dumb, scared, lost child, who didn't have any other options. It was different this time; Danny was older, and smarter, and most importantly, he wasn't

It was weird, for the will o' wisp to appear here, of all places. In all of the stories Danny had heard, either from books or movies or from his parents, the wisps had always appeared to people who were lost, or in danger, and (depending on who was telling the story) they would help or hinder whatever traveler happened to stumble across them. Danny wasn't in danger or lost, unless you counted Dash being mean, but if that was the case, the wisps would've appeared years ago.

Everything about the situation was wrong. Danny knew that it was all wrong, and that he should park his butt back on the floor and finish his doodle. He also knew that if he didn't investigate now, than he would never get the chance to investigate again.

The doodle could wait; it wasn't that good anyway.

With the initial shock and awe of seeing it gone, Danny approached the wisp cautiously, making sure to watch his step. The wisp stayed in place, glinting in the artificial school lights just as it had in the sunlight three years before. It was only once Danny had landed solidly on the landing, with his hand outstretched to the wisp, that it vanished, reappearing on the next landing down.

It brought Danny down to the bottom floor before disappearing. That was weird; It hadn't brought him anywhere, but it was definitely gone. Unless...

Danny pushed the door separating the stairs and the hallway open just a crack, then breathed a sigh of relief. The wisp danced in the hallway, just a few doors down from where he currently was. With a quick look glance for any wondering teachers, Danny was out in the hallway, chasing after the wisp again.

The chase didn't last much longer. He'd barely gone halfway down the hallway when it disappeared for good this time, leaving Danny standing right outside his own class's door.

"But-" Danny started, talking to empty air. He shook his head instead of continuing his question; he wouldn't have gotten an answer, even if the wisp was still here.

He opened the door to the classroom and slipped back amidst the students. As far as he could tell, nobody noticed he was missing.

The intercom crackled to life barely two minutes later. "Attention teachers and students. There is an active shooter inside of the building. This is not a drill. Stay calm and commence lock down procedures. I repeat, this is not a drill."

The class immediately panicked.

(Later that night, safely in a chair at home, Danny would overhear the news on the television. "It had been lucky that the shooter hadn't injured anyone, as a children's drawing was found next to the point of entry," the reporter was saying. "In the future, the Casper Elementary School will make certain that the roof access door is locked from the inside, hopefully preventing an issue like this from arising again.")

---

Fires were no rare occasion at Fentonworks. Between their positively abysmal cooking skills, the amount of faulty inventions that were tested in the laboratory, and the Fen-Toaster which was probably a violation of the Geneva conventions, the Fenton's were single-handedly keeping the fire hydrant companies in business. The fires were never a big deal, hardly more than a scorch mark on the ground or wall. They were always caught early, and proper fire safety had been ingrained into Jazz and Danny since before they could walk.

This fire was different. It hadn't been caught early, if the smoke that woke Danny up was anything to go off of, and it certainly wasn't something that could be tamed by a standard fire extinguisher.

Danny held the back of his hand up to his door. It wasn't hot; that was a good sign.

The hallway wasn't on fire, at least not that Danny could see, but he couldn't see much through the thick smoke that clogged the air. He fumbled his way towards the staircase, eyes squinted against the burn.

"Danny!" It was his mother's voice, raspy and punctuated with a cough.

He turned back around towards their bedroom, and could just barely make out the silhouette of both her and his father. Before he knew it, they had reached him, pulling him into a quick hug.

"We need to get Jazz and get out of here!" his dad said.

"Right here," Jazz said, her blurry figure joining the rest of them.

"Good. Good." His mother's relief was palpable. "We need to get going."

She was right. They didn't have much time, and the fire was only going to grow worse as time went on. They needed to get out of Fentonworks, and fast. The front door was the easy answer; they could all get there with their eyes closed. Danny should've been following her down the stairs, as fast as his aching lungs could carry him. Instead, he found himself reaching out and stopping her descent.

"We can't go that way." He was certain of it. If the door was clear, than the colorful light, distorting through the smoke in the air, wouldn't be at the end of the hallway.

"Danny, we-"

He didn't wait for an answer, taking off towards the end of the hallway. The wisp was there to help , he was certain of it, just like it had helped him those times when he was younger. They'd proved that they were here to help, and despite his parents' warning, Danny trusted them.

His family was close behind, calling his name between coughs, but he didn't turn around.

The wisp lead him into the bathroom, which was surprisingly smoke free. With the wisp hovering in the window as it was, it wasn't hard to see why; the window had been left open, and the door closed. The rest of the family funneled into the room while Danny approached the window. Peering out, he could see the reason the wisp must have brought them here; his parents' old mattress, just recently replaced for a new, upgraded one, lay on the ground directly beneath the window. It wouldn't be the comfiest fall in the world, but they wouldn't get hurt. Probably.

Danny didn't think about it. He blocked out the protests of his parents and sister, heaving himself up over the windowsill and out into the clean, cool air. The fall was quick, not enough time for him to regret the decision even as his stomach flipped. The mattress did not completely cushion his fall - he'd probably be dealing with bruises for the next week, maybe more - but he was able to roll off the mattress and onto his feet without an issue.

The wisp was gone when he looked back up at the bathroom window, replaced with the worried faces of his family. He tried to shout up at them, but all he managed to do was trigger a coughing fit. Instead, he waved, beckoning them to follow. They seemed to understand. Jazz came down first, letting out a ear piercing shriek on her way down. She was grabbing onto Danny's shoulders mere seconds after she'd landed.

"What were you thinking?" she cried, shaking him back and forth. "You can't just run off like that! You could've gotten yourself killed!"

"But we're fine," Danny argued.

"And we would've been just as fine if we had gone downstairs! And you wouldn't have given all of us a heart attack and made us jump out of the window!"

"We can talk about this later." His mother had joined the conversation, and his father had just landed on the mattress with a big puff. "And we will be talking about this later-" she narrowed a glare at Danny "-but right now we need to make sure the fire departments been called. You two run over to the Pallay's house to borrow their phone, we'll see if the Kennywood's will let us."

Danny and Jazz nodded their head, before taking off around the corner. The moment they were out of earshot, Jazz started again. "What were you thinking?"

He didn't have an answer. What was he supposed to say, that he followed the wisp? Jazz wouldn't understand; she didn't believe in ghosts at all, and even if she did, she wouldn't trust them, not like Danny did. Luckily, he didn't need an answer.

The contorted, melted in mess of a front door was answer enough.

---

"It's a bummer that it doesn't work," Tucker said, making himself comfortable on the one empty spot of workbench. "Your parents have been working on it for like. Forever."

"Yeah they're not happy," Danny said, staring at the shell of what should've been a portal. "Jazz had to basically drag them out of the house today, they haven't left at all this week."

"I don't blame them," Sam said, raising the camera around her neck to her eye. "At least it looks cool, right?"

"I guess so," Danny agreed.

Sam hummed. "It doesn't photograph well."

"I can try and get another light on?" Danny offered.

Sam shook her head. "That's not the problem. It's just too... static. I think it'd look nicer with one of you in front of it."

"Not it!" Tucker called quickly, lifting his hand to his nose. "Too slow!"

Danny, who was midway through the same motion, lowered his hand back down with a sigh. "Fine, I'll do it. But I'm putting on my suit! It's still a dangerous machine, even if it doesn't work right."

Sam nodded while Danny got into the suit "I think it'll look better anyway. More thematic than jeans and a t-shirt. Though, maybe without the sticker of your dad's face."

Danny's face heated up as she removed the sticker. "I didn't put it there."

"Yeah, yeah, get in front of the portal," Sam said.

Danny listened, standing just beyond the lip of the metal. A chill traveled down his spine; there was something... disconcerting about it all. He knew what was actually behind him; he knew the portal almost as well as his parents did, years and years of talks about it over dinner, family time in the lab spilling over blueprints that should've been far above his comprehension. He knew that, when it lay dormant and dead like this, it was nothing more than metal and machinery, just like every other thing in the lab.

And yet he could feel it's exhale, cold and sour on the back of his neck. He could see stray wires on the corners of his vision, and he couldn't help but see them as teeth, closing in around him. This was the portal to the afterlife, supposed to bridge the gap between life and death itself. Maybe his parents were wrong; maybe it did work, and they just couldn't see it. Maybe he was balanced on the edge of death itself, and one more step, one slip of his foot, and he'd go falling backwards into whatever endless nothingness the afterlife had for a living soul.

Sam's camera clicked, chasing away to foreboding feeling in an instant. She grabbed the polaroid, shaking it out, before squinting at it. "Something's still missing."

Tucker leaned over her shoulder. "Yeah, it still feels kinda bland."

"Maybe you should go into it more?" Sam asked, glancing up at Danny, then back down at the picture.

"I don't know..." Danny said. "I don't think its safe."

"Come on, it'll be fine," Sam said dismissively. "Your parents said its not working. And besides, its a ghost portal. Don't you want to see what's on the other side?"

He wanted to say no. He wanted to walk away, take off his stupid jumpsuit, and go back upstairs to watch whatever stupid show Tucker had found them earlier today. Her words had hit a little to close to home, a little to close to that nagging fear he'd felt before, and he spared one glance behind him, just to assuage his nerves before shutting her down.

The wisp danced in the maw of the portal, brilliant, blinding, dazzling colors reflecting off the sheer metal surface of its mechanical innards, and Danny's worries washed away. "Yeah," he heard himself say. "It would be pretty cool."

The portal wasn't deep, so when the wisp disappeared, it didn't go far. It hovered alongside the portal wall, so very close. He took one step further, and then another, and was already in touching distance of the wisp. Danny reached out his hand slowly, cautiously, expecting for it to disappear just like always.

It didn't. It was silky and cool under Danny's hand, and yet it seemed to float away like water or mist, allowing him to put his hand further and further in. He let out a disbelieving laugh that echoed through the tunnel, and he almost thought he could hear the wisp laugh with him, a tinkling of bells, mischievous and soft, echoing just behind his own. The wisp seemed oddly happy to have Danny's hand through its not quite face, it's colors shifting swifter and more vibrantly than ever before. With reckless joy, Danny pushed his hand in further.

His hand met metal with a soft click, and the wisp disappeared, bringing its colorful, kaleidoscope lights with it. Danny was plunged into darkness before his world went green.

Prompts: jackdawsprite - Danny knows better than to follow the will o' the wisps. But the rules are different now, aren't they?

#danny phantom #danny phantom fanfiction #danny fenton #pre canon #will o' the wisp #phic phight #phic phight 2024 #team human

24 notes · View notes