Noctis

He held the boy closer, even when it made him oily wet with blood which shone almost green beneath his beater car’s brights. He pressed two fingers of his left hand to Danny’s bloody neck to feel all the nothing that would not pulse under his touch. “I should have—I should have—”

Lancer dug his left hand into his pocket, work pants ruined bloody. He spared a moment to wonder if he was dreaming, or dead, or about to look very stupid if his phone was NOT in this pocket. What was he doing. What was he holding. Lancer flicked the phone open and moved his blood-slicked thumb across 911.

It rang an eternity. And an eternity was long enough for Lancer to nauseously mutter “Oh my god” four more times while rocking with the body.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“I need help. Please send help. I have a hurt student here. He has no pulse. His chest is—he’s hurt.” Stupid. Stupid statements. Hurt. Yeah. And the class gerbil went to the farm.

“Can you give me your location?”

Lancer looked around, which was also stupid, as if he might see street signs decorating the dead-end edges of a never-used parking lot so far from the center of town that half the lampposts had gone dead and never been serviced back to life.

“The uh—the very edge of Amity Park. South edge.” Lancer desperately willed his brain to work and count back the turns he’d taken in his huffing car. “Take Larson Street down. All the way down. Turn right on the last side road and keep going.”

“Okay.”

Lancer stared down at Danny’s body, and his fear lit anew. “It’s Danny Fenton! Daniel Fenton! Please come fast. Please, he needs help.”

Maybe Lancer imagined it under all the blood pounding in his ears, but he swore he heard a wave of static fizzle across the cell connection.

“Sorry. Can you please try to make sense? I can’t help you if you can’t communicate with me.”

“Amity Park! South! Larson Street down, then take the last road on the right! It’s Daniel Fenton and he needs help!”

The static fizzled again, traveling across his brain.

“Sorry sir. Please call back if you can be reasonable with me.”

“HEY NO!!”

Then two things happened at once: The cell line went dead. And someone stepped out from the shadows.

Lancer snapped up at the motion, freshly soaked in adrenaline at the horror of who, or what, had found him. Aware and too aware of how vulnerable he was, kneeling in blood and gravel, which made himself so much smaller than the silhouette of the thing framed in the brights of his car.

“Oh…. Oh no….”

Lancer looked at the body in his hands. He looked up at the newcomer, whose flooding flashlight beam pierced Lancer’s eyes. Lancer looked at the body again, spots in his vision. He looked up to blind himself in the flashlight again. The body. The new-comer. He looked at both, and he understood less than he had at any point tonight.

“What?”

The pants stepped into clear sight first—baggy and loose and catching under the boy’s feet while he walked. Then his shirt, white and splotched wetly green. And then his face, ice-blue eyes staring at Lancer with an expression of reproachful disdain, as if Lancer were holding his diary, and not cradling the boy’s own dead body.

Danny Fenton flicked his flashlight off, and for a few seconds, Lancer could not help but feel like he was committing some social faux paus by holding also Danny Fenton’s body so close.

“What… What?!” Lancer asked.

“Hey uh… so this is a crazy dream,” the living Danny answered, enunciated with strain. He tapped the flashlight against his open palm. “REALLY a wild dream you’re having. Maybe you should go home and go to sleep? So that you can wake up from it.”

Lancer did not move. His brain screamed so many things at him.

Then new voices skimmed his ears, further off and fainter. Bouncy in their intonation, almost sing-song. Call and response. One deeper and one higher-pitched. Some deeply-buried part of Lancer’s mind almost wanted to assign them to the voice of Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. The sharp tensing and wide-eyed panic that zapped into Danny’s face perhaps confirmed it.

“So this is all CRAZY, right? Haha. Anyway. We need to move that.” Danny pointed directly at the body.

Mr. Fenton’s booming baritone voice sang closer. Lancer saw the faint edges of a flashlight swinging in the distance.

“NOW, actually,” Danny clarified. “That’s your car, right? That’s your trunk?”

Lancer was processing nothing. The wet oily cold body was so so heavy in his arms.

“If we can maybe just LIFT that into your trunk then, yeah?!” Danny asked. There was panic in his voice. Lancer could empathize with that panic, but he suspected they were panicked for very different reasons.

Lancer’s brain finished buffering.

“In my TRUNK?!” Lancer asked with a crack in his voice.

“Shh shh shhhhhhh it’s fine!” Danny insisted, pushing his hands toward Lancer as if to calm him. “My parents have super good ectoplasm cleaner. I’ll get some to use on your trunk. Trust me. I use it on my clothes all the time.”

Lancer was cradling a dead body in his arms.

“What the FUCK is going on?” Lancer finally asked.

“This is a really weird dream, Mr. Lancer! And if you HELP me move this body, I’m sure the dream will end much faster.”

There was a dead body in his arms. His own dead student. And something—

--Something—

--was trying to convince him to part with it.

Cell phone still in hand, Lancer brandished his left arm, out, extended, in a very stupid-looking facsimile of brandishing a weapon. Except it was his flipped-open cell phone, silent since the 911 dispatcher had left him for dead.

The living Danny—maybe playing along, or maybe responding genuinely—raised both hands in a show of harmlessness. Like Lancer truly had him at gunpoint.

Danny Fenton’s wet cold dead body was so heavy in Lancer’s single cradling arm.

“Who are you?” Lancer asked very simply.

And Danny, arms still raised high, let out a sigh deep enough to deflate his shoulders. Whatever light was in his eyes went dull, resigned to an acceptance Lancer could not in the moment understand.

“I am your worst student,” Danny answered. And he lowered one arm exclusively to point. “And THAT is the dead body of my ghost clone.”

Lancer swallowed. He pondered on these words that did not clarify anything to him. He finally looked at the body again and seemed to recognize fully for the first time that the green blood was not a trick of the light. The limp limbs and strewn body were, genuinely, saturated in ecto-green.

And now, so was Lancer.

“Ghost… clone?”

A flashlight beam arced through the parking lot. Danny ducked, crouched at the knees, fresh panic painting wet across his face.

“Yes! Ghost clone! Can we move it now?!”

“Why is there a ghost clone? Why do you have a ghost clone?”

“My PARENTS. They. You know—scientists, ghost scientists. They get up to stuff! Cloning, you know, haha! Now can we—”

“Your parents made a clone of you—”

“—maybe just put the body in your trunk and drive—”

“—a clone which is DEAD, now?”

“Clones die! You know, unstable. Happens! Now I’m sorry to be rude Mr. Lancer but we really—”

Jack Fenton’s chuckle rolled through the parking lot, sourced from somewhere in the woods and stepping closer.

“A clone. A GHOST clone.”

“Which would REALLY fit nicely in your trunk—”

“This is absolutely—this is—I think we need to—have a word with someone about this.”

“Okay but maybe after you put it in you—”

“I AM NOT PUTTING A DEAD BODY IN MY TRUNK,” Lancer answered, and Danny flinched hard enough to back up a few steps.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!” Danny insisted.

“We do not—I will not have a dead body in my trunk that your parents made. Cloned you? Cloned you AND the clone died? What? What!! Mr. Fenton I am going to stay right here, and I am going to TALK to your parents about what an absolutely unacceptable, horrific—”

“No, no no no no no,” Danny interjected with an urgent hiss. He held his palms out, smudged green. “I lied! I lied I lied! Sorry! My parents did not make the clone. But we do need to hide it from them!”

“Who made the clone?”

Danny stared back like Lancer were forcing him to admit his crush to the whole listening school. He stared back looking like he’d rather throw himself into the open top of a volcano than be here, now, subjected to this line of questioning.

Voices were closer.

“Vlad Masters, okay! Billionaire Vlad Masters! Our dear new mayor!” Danny stepped nearer—an urgent march—yet gentle, coaxing, like the body were a dog toy Danny was trying to wrest from a bratty pup. “Is that good enough? Okay? Are you satisfied? Because if yes we really need to move—”

“The mayor…?” Lancer knew… not a lot about Amity Park’s new mayor. Some corporate talking head with enough money to fund all the public rejuvenation projects he was using to bolster his image. Seemed good for the town, at least. “The mayor is making ghost clones of you?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

Danny ducked another flashlight beam. And the panic in his face blossomed into full blown fear. “I’ll tell you. I PROMISE I’ll tell you. But please, right now, please please please, just help me move this body. I’m begging you. I need help.”

I need help. And Lancer remembered the same face, the same voice, asking him this before. Wasn’t that the point?

Lancer let out the breath held in his chest. He willed himself to look at the clone, understand its weight, its shape, its open glassy eyes. It sent such a primal pang of terror through his chest.

And Lancer stowed his phone, slipped his left arm under the crook of the clone’s knees. He lifted the whole weight of the body. His back immediately scolded him.

The weight lessened. Danny grabbed himself from under his own armpits, bearing half the weight. Danny pivoted, directed them both—Danny backwards and Lancer diagonally-forward—to Lancer’s trunk.

Lancer moved with Danny’s motions. Lancer had, in fact, managed to accidentally pop the trunk while he was jamming every button in his car. It was there, open-mouthed, practically waiting for the body which—Lancer unhappily acknowledged—Danny was right about fitting nicely inside.

Lancer did his best to lower the dead body of Danny Fenton gracefully into his trunk. He did not succeed. The body rolled out of his grip as a tangle of limbs. Its cheek and broken nose pressed flat to Lancer’s dirty carpet. The neck struck an angle that necks should not strike. The arms went opposite ways, twisting behind the body in a backwards hug.

Lancer reached forward again, because he needed to right the body.

He did not make it that far before Danny shut the trunk.

…

In the dark backroads of Amity Park, streetlights were threadbare. Once in every 10 or 15 seconds one would pass overheard, dousing Lancer and his student in a pale flood that illuminated the ecto-green stains soaking their clothes.

They hit bumps in the road. The trunk went clunk. The trunk went ker-clunk.

“Take a left here.” Danny said, dull. “We’re near the golf course. It hasn’t been used in forever. No one comes out there.”

Lancer pulled a left. His tires screeched and huffed. They’d been doing that. They maybe needed service. Lancer maybe needed service on his car that had a dead body stuffed in its trunk.

“Golf course will have gardening tools. Shovels.”

Lancer hit the curb on his turn, too startled at the casualness with which Danny spoke. Lancer made the decision to believe Danny meant anything other than what Lancer was pretty sure Danny meant by ‘Shovels’.

Danny was right about the golf course being empty. And maybe a December evening after 5pm when the sun had already set to pitch blackness was not peak golfing time anyway, but the overgrown hedges of grass at the lot perimeter and the deep cracks in the asphalt all suggested no one had been here in years.

This meant Lancer had his pick of spots. He chose one which was maybe just far away enough from the nearest streetlight to hide his car from God’s prying eyes—or any CCTV camera that might be mounted on the streetlight pole.

Danny popped his side door and slid out, fluid, all momentum, as if magnetism brought him to the back trunk. He stood there, eyeing Lancer through the rear window, waiting.

“Pop the trunk,” Danny demanded.

Lancer exhaled. He flipped off his ignition. He, less gracefully, popped his own door and exited the car.

“You forgot to pop the trunk,” Danny repeated.

“Mr. Fenton,” Lancer said. “Danny… Fenton.” He looked the boy up and down again. Were the boy’s clothes always that big, or was it the ecto-gore weighing the fabric down? Did Danny’s eyes always look so intense, or was it only when hauling bodies in the middle of nowhere?

“Mr. Lancer,” Danny responded.

“Are you… Danny Fenton?” Lancer asked. He hoped his tone would not betray the roiling confusion tying his insides into knots.

Danny sighed. “Yes. From such classic hits as ‘missing your class on Tuesday’ and ‘getting a 57 on the last test.’”

Lancer faltered. He did not usually remember exact student grades, but he did in fact remember Danny Fenton’s recent 57. Perhaps only because Danny got the same exact score two tests in a row, and the sight of two exact 57’s stacked atop each other in the grade book had caught Lancer’s attention, for just the idle coincidence of it all.

“Do you need more proof that I’m me? Because I’m me.”

“And a ghost clone of you is in my trunk.”

“Which—by the way—I think we should take out of your trunk now.”

“Vlad Masters?” Lancer asked, pinching his nose. The headache squeezing behind his eyes was in full skull-pounding swing. “Why is Vlad Masters making clones of you?”

Danny suddenly would no longer look at Lancer. He busied himself, unconvincingly fascinated, in figuring out if he could manually pop Lancer’s trunk.

“You can’t manually pop the trunk,” Lancer said.

Danny shifted his hand in one fast weird motion. The trunk popped open.

Danny reached inside the trunk. Lancer reached for him faster. Wet hand around wet wrist, Lancer seized his student.

“Danny,” Lancer scolded, teacher voice in full bloom. It was surreal. Wrong. As if the guilty swing of Danny’s eyes to meet his was a student caught skipping detention, and not one caught pulling his own dead body from Lancer’s trunk. “Danny, I need you to work with me. You said you would explain,” Lancer elaborated, softer.

Danny freed his hand from Lancer’s grip in another weird sleight Lancer could not visually track, but Danny no longer prodded at the trunk. He took a step back on the sidewalk, soaking in the faint edges of the streetlamp lights.

“I need you to explain why Vlad Masters is cloning you.”

“Because he wants me as his son,” Danny answered, strained, all said a bit too quickly after a few moments of silence.

“What does that mean? As his son?”

“He wants a son who is me, but I won’t ever accept him as my dad, so this is Vlad’s fun little Plan B.”

“You already have a dad,” Lancer said, which was a stupid thing to say.

“Oh cloning me is only part of the plan. The rest of the plan is killing my dad and marrying my mom.”

“What?” Lancer asked, feeling like he missed a stair.

“Hat-trick! Kill my dad! Marry my mom! Replace me with a ghost clone! Which—honestly!—” Danny threw his arms out wide. “—he’s getting closer and closer to! And soon enough one of these days he’s gonna make a clone actually stable enough to sneak into my bedroom and slit my throat in my sleep and take over my life as me.”

Lancer was striking his earlier missed-stair analogy. This was a complete falling-down-the-staircase of speechless slack-jawed surprise on his face.

“I’d… I’d like to believe if someone replaced you with a ghost, people would take notice.”

Danny barked a laugh at this. The sudden spark of mania in Danny’s eyes told Lancer he was reaching new heights with the stupid things he’d said tonight.

“Oh you don’t know the half of it.”

Lancer said nothing. Danny motioned to the trunk.

“Okay, so how about,” Danny continued, “if you watch the body, I’ll go find some shovels.”

“What? No. What?!” Lancer answered, a bit mad at himself for letting the silence linger long enough for Danny to fixate on the body again. “Danny, you’re in danger.”

“Not arguing that.”

“We need to—well we need to call the police, clearly.”

“Oh, go ahead and try. Let me know how much that doesn’t work.”

“What does that mean?”

And the eyeroll that met him was so very 14-year-old.

Danny sunk his hand into his pocket, fished out his cell phone. He held it up for display and flicked it open with bravado. He made sure Lancer was watching closely while he punched in “9” and “1” and “1”.

The dialing took another eternity. Just long enough for Lancer to shiver in the wind and notice the chemical ozone smell that had sunk into their clothes.

“911. What is your emergency?” rang out from speakerphone.

“Yeah. Hi. This is Danny Fenton. Vlad Masters—the mayor guy—is trying to kill me.” Elbow propped to palm. Phone held to cheek. Casual. Like someone ordering a pizza. “I’d really really like some help with this.” And hold the olives.

Clear to Lancer’s ears, this time, static fizzled like a wash through the cell phone speaker.

“Sorry, can you try speaking coherently? I really cannot help you if you won’t make sense.”

Danny snapped the phone shut with flourish. Lancer wasn’t entirely sure what he just witnessed, but the shiver of static, the sudden denial from the dispatcher, curdled rotten in his gut.

“He’s got the whole town in his overshadowing ghost pocket,” Danny answered with a bite of hatred in his voice. He stared at his own pocket while he restowed his phone. “He’s got… everyone.” Danny looked up, just enough to watch Lancer from the corner of his eye. “Except you, I guess. Because why the fuck would he go after my English teacher?”

Lancer was cold for reasons that had nothing to do with the wind. Suddenly, he could no longer remember the last time he had to shush Fenton, Manson, and Foley for talking to each other during class.

“What does ‘he’s got everyone’ mean?”

“It means I’ve got no one,” Danny answered bitterly. And for all the bravado Danny had been putting on, Lancer saw the crack of something childishly scared break through Danny’s façade.

“Have you been dealing with this all alone?” Lancer asked. “Is no one helping you?”

“You’re helping me,” Danny looked up, then away again. “Maybe. If you’ll let me get the body out of your trunk.”

“I am—I do—want to help you. I think I am making that clear. I also do not think just wantonly burying a body on a golf course is what will help you.”

“It will help me, actually.”

“Not with all of this!” Lancer gestured widely, then pulled his hand back in to pinch against his nose, in hopes of finding any slight relief from the skull-rattling pain in his head. He breathed in deep, and exhaled deep, shuddering all the while. “I am concerned for you.” He released his nose, looked at Danny, and the intensity on Danny’s face made him look away. “I would like it if you would allow me just a moment to express that."

“Look, I appreciate it, okay? Really, I do. And I promise, you can express all the concern you want later,” Danny answered. He spread his arms, staring at the ecto-gore staining his fingers. “Right now, you can help me by helping get rid of this body—”

Get rid of…

“—or I guess by brainstorming a great excuse for anyone who might ask some questions about why I’m dead.”

“I just need you to let me wrap my head around the whole thing first,” Lancer pushed back. He thought that was fair at least—to want a bit more time to think before being conscripted into burying a body. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“Yes, okay, fine, but can we please do that AND focus on the dead body in your trunk?”

“Considering you won’t let me focus on anything else…” Lancer looked up. “At least explain why burying the body is so important.”

“Because I don’t want Vlad getting his hands on it and learning from his mistakes,” Danny answered, sharp. “Because I don’t want my parents finding it and asking me questions I can’t answer for them. Because I don’t want some random citizen finding me dead and …making this into a whole thing I can’t control.” Danny went quiet. His shoulders hunched, and it made his whole body smaller. “…Because this is literally the only thing I can do about any of this right now.”

Lancer watched him. Danny’s aggressive eyes found him, and then the fire left them.

“You’re right,” Danny continued. “It’s a lot to wrap your head around. I clearly haven’t. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t stop Vlad. I can’t rat him out. I can’t get help. I just know I can keep burying the dead clones. So… I’m going to keep doing that.” Danny pointed to Lancer’s car. “So if you’re opting out of this, could you at least give me the body so I can bury it myself?”

Lancer stared back, and there were a hundred empty reassurances he wanted to give, and none which felt true.

“I’ll watch the body,” Lancer said. “Go get the shovels.”

…

Lancer’s back was not cut out for the task at hand. He had that suspicion going in, and he was proven very unhappily correct at the very first cleave of shovel to earth that carried like an electric shock through his lower vertebrae.

Lancer eased off his handle, because maybe this was a sign he was doing it wrong. He inspected the dirt for answers. He inspected the pile of two other shovels crisscrossed on the ground, because maybe he’d have better luck with a different shovel, and maybe there was a reason Danny had grabbed four of them. And four shovels from where, Lancer did not know. Danny had simply vanished and reappeared with all of them. Probably, Lancer assumed, from a maintenance shed on premise, which would almost certainly have been locked, and which Lancer did not ask how Danny had unlocked. Probably the same way he had popped Lancer’s locked trunk.

Danny broke ground next to him, and he did it with far more impact and fluidity than Lancer’s meager attempt. There was concentrated effort in Danny’s tight muscles as he took his shovel like a butcher’s knife to the earth. Foot stepping heavy to the back of the spade. Twist and bend of the handle to sift dirt to shovel. Full rotation of his trunk as he hefted the dirt away. Then Danny repeated the motion faster, with more aggression, shaking slightly, like he was trying very hard to bleed away the tangle of emotion that was making his face so pale.

So Lancer did the same. Blunt spade of his shovel into the cold earth. Weight stepped onto the back of the blade, wiggling and wriggling it until the earth moved. He lifted dirt and flung it aside. And then Lancer’s back complained all over as he started the cycle anew.

Lancer was breathing heavy by the third cycle. Sweat dripped along his jawline despite the cold. He watched Danny from the corner of his eye, noting Danny moved easily twice as fast. Lancer did not like how practiced the boy’s movements were.

They dug in silence, tucked against the forest edge along Hole 1. They’d set up their craft just beyond the overgrown golf course, behind the bush line, contending with ambling roots and sharp rocks and unearthed bugs that protested against their digging. Danny had hitched his flashlight to the branch-nook of a tree, angled down to light their work and paint deep shadows fanning outward. Wind filled their silence, and so did each sshhnk of their blades, and so did the heavy grunts from Lancer, and so did the occasional skitter of a small rodent which set Lancer’s neck hairs on edge every time.

They dug. And dug. It was almost peaceful, almost meditative, compared to everything that came before. But mostly, it was tedious and difficult monotony, punctuated only by the brief breaks Danny took, leaning his weight on his own shovel. Lancer was thankful for those breaks, leaning in his own way as to maybe conceal how absolutely winded he felt. Danny did not look winded, or even sweaty. Judging from the look on Danny’s face, the breaks were far more about his mental state than his physical one.

Then each time, Danny would resume his digging, and Lancer would follow suit.

“’In his overshadowing pocket’…” Lancer mused aloud, after more than enough silence had passed. Shovel, dirt. “Is Vlad Masters a ghost?”

Lancer’s eyes drifted to Danny. The boy was consumed in the dirt, pointedly ignoring Lancer’s question.

“Is Vlad Masters a ghost, Danny?”

Danny sighed. He slammed shovel into dirt. “Ding ding ding.”

“And he’s after your parents,” Lancer heaved his shovel with a grunt and sucked in another breath, “…because they’re ghost hunters?”

Danny laughed. He folded his arms over the shovel handle, leaning his weight to it. “Oh, no. It’s entirely personal.”

Lancer thought about prying more. But it was hard to keep asking questions while his arms dug and his lungs ached for air.

“They all went to college together. Friends,” Danny elaborated, unprompted. “Then my dad caused a lab accident that ruined Vlad’s life. This whole thing is a grudge 20 years in the making.”

Lancer carried out another cycle of hefting dirt from their shallow hole. Danny had stopped speaking. Lancer pulled in enough air to ask.

“What kind of accident?”

Danny wasn’t digging anymore. He also wasn’t looking in Lancer’s direction anymore. He had sunk down a fraction, half-crouched, fingers still clasped to his shovel handle which bore his weight.

“Did you father kill Vlad Masters?” Lancer prompted.

“………………No,” Danny answered, after far too long thinking about it for Lancer’s comfort.

“But Vlad Masters is dead, right? He’s a ghost.”

“Not… really. You can be a living ghost. Kind of.”

“What is a living ghost?”

“That thing was,” Danny released one hand from his shovel to point absently in the direction of Lancer’s trunk, “until recently.”

“Was that clone alive?” Lancer asked, and he felt a twinge of regret immediately at the way Danny’s shoulders buckled closer to his already hunched body.

“I dunno. Define ‘alive’, Mr. English Teacher.”

“Was he… conscious? Autonomous?”

“Maybe,” Danny muttered. “The conscious part at least. I dunno what autonomous means.”

“Did he have a will of his own?”

Danny stared a whole lot at the dirt and blood obscuring all of his once-white shoes.

“I think so.”

Danny’s body sunk lower by fractions. His crouch deepened, knees bent sharper, arms extending to keep his hands wrapped to his shovel handle while his butt connected with the dirt. He looked like a frog almost, crouched to the ground, gorily green, small to everything around him.

“I’m gonna sit here in the dirt for a second, okay? I don’t feel well.”

Lancer stared. He was not sure if this was an invitation for him to take a break as well, but he was certain it was a sign to change the subject.

“You can… stop digging,” Lancer offered. “I can—I think—do the rest.” And this was, perhaps, a complete lie. Because their hole was not even a foot deep so far, and Lancer suspected that even an offensively shallow grave would still have numerous more feet to go.

Danny stared up through his bangs. “Do you want to do the rest of the digging?”

“’Want’ is not an apt descriptor of anything which has happened tonight.”

Danny let out a muted laugh. He pushed himself up, weight braced on his shovel, taking deliberate slow breaths. He stood nearly to full height when he let out a sharp noise, clenching his fist around the center of his shirt while he buckled a fraction forward.

“Are you okay?” Lancer asked.

“Fine,” Danny said, loosening his grip on his shirt. “I think I’m above my doctor-recommended daily dose of stress.”

Lancer’s eyes wandered to the trunk of his car, and he could not help but agree.

“I do believe the current recommended dose for a 14-year-old is one unreasonably tight deadline for an English essay per week. I’d have to review the literature about burying clone bodies.”

Danny let out another breathy laugh. He brought himself to full height now, but kept his weight braced to the shovel. “I didn’t know you were funny, Mr. Lancer. That’s good. I thought I’d be carrying this whole conversation.”

“I’ve always been funny,” Lancer answered deadpan.

“You don’t get to decide that. That sentence will be left to a jury of teenage students.”

“The word you are searching for is ‘verdict.’”

“Hard-assery is not funny.”

“I’d consider it pedantry.”

“I’ve changed my mind!” Danny drove his spade deep into the earth and shoved it deeper with his foot. A bead of sweat dripped down the curve of his jawline. “I was having a better time burying bodies alone! You may leave!”

Lancer matched him—not quite achieving the same depth of earth-piercing, but he managed to strike a soft enough patch of dirt to fill the shovel while he hefted the dirt away.

The silence that followed was better than before. Some of the anxious twisting in Lancer’s chest had loosened. It was replaced with the glow of pride knowing that, if even for a moment, he’d gotten Danny to smile.

Lancer fell back into the metronome motion of their task. It was almost comfortable. Or it would have been, if Lancer’s back didn’t hurt.

…

By the time the hole hit one foot deep, Lancer was at least as much sweat as he was ecto-gore. Both weighed down his clothes tremendously. Both made him smell in a way that had him fantasizing about his shower. Both made him really wish he could shed his work clothes and strip down to his underwear. Though he figured, burying a dead body or not, it wouldn’t exactly be appropriate to stand around in his underwear beside a student.

But at least, at one foot deep, Lancer figured this was good enough progress for him to call for his own desperately needed break.

Lancer jammed his shovel into the dirt beside their grave. Danny glanced up from his trance-like digging.

“I need to… well, get my water bottle from my car, at the least. And maybe sit for five or ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Danny said, and he resumed his digging.

Lancer had hoped maybe Danny would join him, or at least agree the break was needed. But he also couldn’t blame Danny for maybe just wanting this done as soon as possible. Lancer wanted it done too.

So Lancer hefted himself out of the grave alone. He shook his arms out, feeling the strain on tight muscles, the static fizzing through his palms. He evaluated the twinging displeasure in his back. It ached in steady rhythm. Lancer considered striking a vow to stand more during the day from this day forward, as he flexed his palms and studied the reddening callouses burgeoning at the base of every finger.

He shot one last look toward Danny (“Do you need anything?” Lancer thought about asking, but Danny was focused back on digging.) before turning on heel. The car fell back into his line of sight. It struck a funny picture to Lancer, somehow–like a patient dog waiting in the lot for them, watching their slow grave progress. Like it might thump its tail at his approach.

Maybe Lancer just wanted to feel like they had another companion in it all. That way he could believe it was not just him, the adult, and his terrified and gore-soaked student, who was doing all of this as his best answer to being hunted into replacement.

Lancer shivered violently. It was the December night and the wind piercing his soaked-through clothes, surely. But it was also more than that. The car got closer, and still Lancer threw glances over his shoulder every few seconds, as if something might happen to Danny in the moments he stepped away.

Lancer worked his fingers into his door handle. They felt strange being pressed to something that was not the hilt of a shovel. Lancer ignored this as he opened the door, snagged his water bottle (chilled to ambient temperature, which was nice), and—in an impulsive moment, with one glance spared to the gravesite to ensure Danny was not watching him—Lancer pressed the button to pop the trunk.

It opened with the quietest clunk. A mouth drifting lazily open. And in the moment, Lancer was afraid. He approached cautiously, as if his trunk contained something that might leap at the first sharp movement. He was afraid in a way that did not make total sense to him. When the trunk contents fell into faint view, scarcely lit, Lancer found there was nothing scary about the clone inside.

Its limbs were still twisted, face still pressed to the carpet, but the bounce and motion of the car ride had shifted the body slightly. A single unseeing eye was now visible, staring at all the nothing which was the interior of Lancer’s trunk.

The sight did, absolutely, fill Lancer’s gut with a twisting horror. It was just not horror of the body. It was a horror for everything that led to the body’s existence, and its demise. In the moment, Lancer felt only a deep sadness for the body, the sort which sunk like winter cold into his bones.

(One of these days he’s gonna make a clone actually stable enough to sneak into my bedroom and slit my throat in my sleep.)

Had this clone been programmed to hunt Danny down and kill him while it was alive? Were its last moments dedicated to slaughtering the boy who was now digging its grave alone on the golf course? If that were true, maybe none of it mattered now. Not now that it was dead.

Lancer couldn’t picture this body as violent. It was too small, and too young. He couldn’t feel any contempt for it. He only stared at it, and felt more sorry for it than anything else he’d seen in the world.

“Lancer?” Danny’s voice rang from the gravesite.

“Coming! Couldn’t ah—find my keys,” Lancer said.

He set his water bottle down. He reached into the trunk and adjusted the body onto its back. He shifted its head to a comfortable angle. He pulled the legs so they did not twist. He grabbed the arms by the wrists and laid them gently, one overtop the other, on the clone’s chest. It brought his attention back to the gaping wound there, fist-sized, from which all the blood poured out to soak the shirt Lancer recognized from a hundred class periods. It was the same shirt that Danny in the gravesite was wearing—either perfectly cloned, or purchased for a completely fluid takeover of Danny’s identity.

It was of course not a perfect recreation anymore—not with the gaping hole, or with the other rips and tears that peppered the fabric at collar, shoulder, waist, and armpit. Each, Lancer realized, a wound of its own.

“Did you… maybe leave your keys over here?” Danny called out again.

“Nope! Nope, just found them. Sorry about that.”

“Okay well… Don’t wander off, okay? It’s dangerous.”

“I won’t. I’m coming right back over.” Guilt twinged in Lancer’s chest at the thought that, stripped of context, Danny sounded a bit like a lost child at the grocery store, nervous where Lancer had gone, perhaps even fearful Lancer had left entirely.

Lancer gave one last look to the body. He promised he’d bury it more carefully than he’d placed it in the trunk. He promised he’d be the one to do it, and let Danny avoid the horror of it at least once.

He made this promise to himself and to the body, and Lancer shut the trunk again.

…

Lancer lost his sense of time. At least any sense in minutes and hours. The rate by which the grave carved deeper into the earth became his only true sense of progression. And in that sense, time slowed down, because Lancer was tired, and Danny was tired. Lancer made shallower hacks at the earth. He spent more time resting between swings. Danny still pushed harder, but his bangs had soaked through with sweat, and he spent longer and longer resting on the handle of his shovel, trying to act like he was breathing normally.

Lancer shared his water bottle with Danny. Sometimes, they both sat down in the golf course grass. When Lancer stopped caring about saving face, he decided to lie down in the grass entirely, arms and legs fanned, willing the cold wind to wick the sweat from his face. He laid down for an unknown amount of time, because minutes no longer meant anything, and time froze while the hole was not being dug.

Danny lay down too. Sometimes they both lay there, sweaty on the ground, saying nothing. Lancer glanced over once, and he thought he maybe saw Danny crying silently. But tears and sweat rolling down the side of a face looked similar. So Lancer went back to staring at the stars in silence.

The moon was high overhead. Lancer knew his body would despise him in the morning. Danny got up from the grass and grabbed his shovel, so Lancer did too, and digging time moved forward again.

There was, really, only one moment of digging time that mattered. And after an amount of time Lancer had no real words for, it was Danny who signified they’d reached it.

The steady motion beside Lancer ceased. Lancer looked up as Danny stood motionless, shovel clutched in his raw hands, ice-blue eyes evaluating the earth in silent contemplation.

“I think that’s deep enough,” Danny said. And to Lancer, this was the only hour-strike that mattered.

Danny swayed just a bit pulling himself back to full height. He grabbed the grave edge to steady himself, which was now appreciably above hip-height. Then he set his shovel down at that same edge, and used both arms to lift himself out of the earth.

Danny waited, patiently, while Lancer struggled more to do the same. Danny even offered one outstretched hand, which Lancer considered taking until he understood the myriad of open and leaking blisters that peppered Danny’s palm, mixing with the green. Lancer hauled himself out the rest of the way, and wondered if there was a tasteful way to ask why Danny had been so careless with his blisters.

“The head should face the forest, I think. Feet toward the golf course,” Danny said, and he was already on a steady march toward the car. “The grave isn’t even and it’s a little bigger on the forest side so the head will fit better there. Also I think you should let me carry it by the knees this time and you take the arms. It’ll be less awkward to carry it that way.”

“Danny wait, stop.” Lancer broke into a jog to out-pace Danny’s forward march. He inserted himself in front of Danny with a palm out to halt him.

“What?” Danny asked. His eyes bounced up and down Lancer’s body, and then a hardened anger, buffed by exhaustion, flashed in his eyes. “Do NOT tell me you’re having second thoughts. We did NOT get this far with the grave just for you to tell me I can’t bury that body.”

“I am, in fact, telling you that you can’t bury that body.” And before the protest could leave Danny’s mouth, Lancer added, “Because I’m going to do that for you.”

This caught Danny off guard. Lancer could see something trying to connect behind Danny’s hazy eyes.

“Why?”

“Because I think you’ve had to bury enough of these yourself already.” And after a moment of thinking, Lancer added. “Because I want to.”

Lancer easily recognized the expression of a student too exhausted to understand an instruction given in class. “No... you don’t want to.”

“Actually burying the body—no, I do not want to do that. What I want, Danny, is for you to not have to touch another dead clone of yourself. I’m of the conviction that that’s been hard for you.”

Some gear still wasn’t turning in Danny’s head. “I don’t think this is… what is that word you used…? ‘Apt’?”

“None of this is apt.”

“I guess not,” Danny answered. Then after a moment, he asked, “What does apt mean?”

“Appropriate. Befitting. This was a vocab word, Mr. Fenton.”

“I got a 57 on that test.”

“You did.” And that was, in fact, the previous 57 in Danny’s two-streak of 57’s on tests, which were both doing pretty terrible things to his class grade, and which Lancer felt a lot more understanding about right now. That was maybe a thing Lancer could do something about, but was also a thing which seemed so absolutely cosmically unimportant in the scheme of everything.

And because the silence was awkward, Lancer put the thought into words. “Would you perhaps want to retake that test?”

Danny’s laugh was more of a wheeze, and perhaps more a noise of surprise than anything else. And it was surprise enough to crack the tension caging his tired body. “’Want’… is, I would say, not an apt description of… me and that test.”

“Okay. I have an alternative idea.” Lancer doubled back to his water bottle sitting on the ground. They had drunk it to emptiness earlier, and it had sat empty, until Danny had managed to locksmith into the little building that once held front-reception. Danny had come back with several unopened water bottles, and when Lancer had scolded him for possibly leaving fingerprints, Danny had cagily insisted he hadn’t touched anything… which did not seem exactly possible.

But it at least meant the bottle was refilled, and Lancer handed the half-full bottle to Danny to hold in his hands.

“I have 43 points of extra credit to offer you with this assignment,” Lancer continued. “Your assignment is to sit down here and think about vocabulary while I put something in that grave.”

Danny stared at the water bottle. “What is ‘think about vocabulary’?”

“Whatever you want it to be.”

“What if I don’t actually think about vocabulary?”

“I won’t know.”

“Can I get partial credit?”

“No.”

“Can I—”

“The assignment, actually, is sit there.” Lancer placed a hand on Danny’s shoulder, slight pressure applied. “Sit there. Let me bury the body. And then I’ll drive you wherever you need to go when this is all over.”

To Lancer’s slight surprise, Danny complied. He sunk under Lancer’s applied weight, butt to grass, knees to chest, arms wrapping knees and holding the water bottle between them. He did not quite look at Lancer, but he did not look at the grave either.

“’When this is all over’… that’s a nice thought,” Danny whispered. Then he leaned harder into his knees, cheek resting to his knee cap. “Okay. I can do that assignment.”

…

Lancer did not spend much time at all looking at the corpse now. He’d had his conversation with it already, made his silent promises earlier. He hoped it understood the clinical way he lifted it from the trunk this time, and marched huffing with its weight back to the grave. It needed to just be an object, right now. Because Danny was watching from where he sat in the grass, and Lancer needed to put on a show of a task no more horrible than taking a piece of broken furniture to the curb.

Lancer kept his promise to be gentle with the corpse when he kneeled beside the grave. He set the body down carefully, and then with hands free, Lancer lowered himself into the grave. He scooped his arms beneath shoulders, beneath knees, lifting it again, in a second phase to set the body in the grave.

He had, though, forgotten Danny’s earlier instruction about placing the head to the forest-side of the grave, so Lancer had to pivot a 180 adjustment to lay the body down properly.

This was a bit of a screw up on Lancer’s part, because the 180-rotation meant he locked eyes with Danny in the grass, watching, as Lancer dipped the dead body out of view for the final time. It was hard to read the look in Danny’s watching eyes, but Lancer felt a moment of conviction that he made the right call to keep Danny out of this.

Lancer pulled himself one leg at a time out of the grave. He stood tall for just a moment to pop his back thrice in quick succession, thankful that he hadn’t yet thrown it out. He bent down to grab the shovel he’d left at the grave edge and readied himself for the silence of grave work to continue.

“Do you want to know the rest of it?”

Lancer paused, shovel-full of dirt half-tipped into the grave. He heard the whisper of dirt falling, filling the gaps around the silent body. He glanced over his shoulder to his student, still studiously watching, still sitting small in the grass.

“I do, think, I’d like to understand more of what’s going on,” Lancer answered with caution. His heart kicked up. He hadn’t exactly expected, and wasn’t exactly prepared, for Danny to give up information both unprompted and voluntarily.

“Vlad Masters is half-ghost. Or he’s, what I’m calling, a half-ghost. He has a human form and a ghost form he can change between at will. He uses his ghost form for all his crimes. He stole all his money. He didn’t get rich normally.”

Lancer had the idle thought to send Danny some pieces of class-conscious literature that argued “stealing money” was in fact the normal way that rich people got rich.

Lancer shivered more dirt down on the clone. He figured Danny would prefer less homework. “And that’s what you meant by ‘living ghost’?”

“Yeah. And my dad did it to him. Dad doesn’t know he did it—or that Vlad’s a half-ghost. As far as Dad knows the lab accident was just a lab accident. But Dad never apologized for it either, still thinks they’re buddies even after not talking for 20 years. Dad has no idea Vlad wants to kill him for this.”

“Can you tell him?”

Silence answered Lancer for the next phase of his shovel jammed into dirt, raining it down onto the grave.

“Dad’s as overshadow-able as anyone else. I don’t think it’ll help at this point.”

“You mentioned that a few times already… Is Vlad possessing people?”

“Sort of… Possession is like… ongoing. One ghost can only possess one person at a time. But a strong ghost can like… implant ideas. And that just takes one overshadowing once to like, implant the idea, and make the person act… wrong… about certain things.”

There was a strain building in Danny’s throat, a tightness that seemed on the verge of cracking his voice. Lancer rested the shovel blade to the ground and looked over, and he could read the tension in Danny’s hands gripping the water bottle.

“I feel like that 911 dispatcher was acting ‘wrong’ about everything we told her,” Lancer said.

“She was. That is… exactly… what I mean.” Danny leaned forward, and his eyes came up to meet Lancer’s. “Someone will act completely normal until they don’t. You’ll think you can trust them until you can’t. I don’t have help from anyone because everyone is—Vlad knows who to target. I want to find a cure, but I don’t… I’m just me… I’m just trying to survive.”

Lancer shivered. He felt a weight in his stomach that threatened to drop him on the spot, a horror brand new in a night of unimaginable horrors.

He shoved shovel into dirt, and the gouged wound of the corpse vanished beneath another shiver of earth.

“Why you?” Lancer asked.

“Why is Vlad targeting me?”

“Yes.”

Danny let out a laugh short and humorless. “Because I’m everything he wants. I’m my mother’s son. I’m the half-ghost Vlad can believe is his own half-ghost son. I’m the family he desperately wants.”

Maybe it was the cold, and the exhaustion of too long spent digging, that made the shovel slip from Lancer’s icy fingers. He did not fumble and grab for it as it smacked dully into the earth, but he did stare at it for a long moment, remembering again the sensation of feeling like he’d missed a stair.

“Half-ghost… because the clones Vlad is making are half-ghost? He’s replacing you with a half-ghost?”

And for the first time, Danny let out a real laugh. It came from his core, and he pressed one hand to his cheek, letting the laugh rumble and fade out of him before staring at his palm.

“The clones aren’t half-ghost because Vlad randomly decided to make them that way. The clones are half-ghost because I am.”

Danny pushed his arms out. His hands were splayed, palms on open display. He wiggled his fingers. “Did you notice? I’m bleeding green too.”

And this time Lancer only stared. The distance between them made the shapes vague, details blurry, lit only by flashlight and gawping moon. But Lancer could understand what Danny was showing him, because Lancer had noticed the popped blisters on Danny’s palm when he’d offered Lancer a hand out of the grave.

Lancer had noticed the green, too. All the while, he’d chalked it up to the stains of the corpse’s blood. That, Lancer realized, made very little sense. The ecto-gore on his own hands had long since rubbed off with the friction of the shovel. Danny’s had been bleeding all the while.

“Your hands are… need bandages,” Lancer said, stupidly and with terrible grammar. But it was because he was tired. And because most of his thoughts were being pulled against their will into parsing the rest of what Danny meant.

After a moment, Lancer asked,

“Are you a ghost?”

Danny offered a sheepish smile.

“A half-ghost. Have been for most of the time you’ve known me.” Danny folded his hands over his knees again, smaller in his partial avoidance of eye contact. But then he looked at Lancer with a word clearly on his tongue, and Lancer stared back silent, patient, to let Danny speak. “You ever heard of a guy called Danny Phantom? I think you have, but maybe that’s my ego talking.”

That was a stupid question—and maybe Lancer was glad that finally, for once in this conversation, Danny had been the one to ask the stupid question.

It was stupid because the news reports and the town chatter and the ghost-fights happening just outside Lancer’s window on the weekly were all, always, Danny Phantom. But it was particularly stupid because back in the fall, Lancer had slipped while trying to escape at the rear of his students (making sure they get out first, always make sure they get out first) and Lancer had, in that moment, viscerally understood the saying about not needing to be faster than a bear to outrun it—only needing to be faster than the slowest person running from the bear.

That had been him, nose cracked and bleeding against the lemon-scented Casper High floors, raking in a shuddering breath where the fall had knocked the wind from him, feeling the clambering rush of heat as the thing in pursuit of them let loose an attack that would perhaps roast Lancer’s feet off before completing the mercy of killing him.

And then something had slammed behind him, and with it the heat had vanished. When Lancer had found enough of his composure to turn his head, he’d been met with the sight of a blazing green shield, held up with enough force to visibly strain the ghost boy’s shoulders.

“Run!” Danny Phantom had said, head snapping to Lancer, glowing eyes severe, sweat pouring down his pale jawline. “Get to safety!”

Lancer sat down beside his shovel.

He drew his knees up.

He rested his wrist atop his knees.

His whole body ached.

“Oh,” Lancer said. He looked at Danny, pale and sweaty in the grass. And he heard Get to safety! in Danny Fenton’s voice.

Danny stared back with eyes that did not glow.

“So is… that a yes?” Danny asked.

“Yes! Yes,” Lancer clarified, cold wind catching his words. “I know who Danny Phantom is. He… saved my life.”

“That’s pretty cool of him,” Danny answered.

Lancer stared at his own knees for a very long time. They were darkly soaked and smelled awfully of ozone. His sweat was now chilling him cold. He played the scene back in his mind a few times. It was still sharp, a frequent visitor of his nightmares.

“That was you?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. And then, after a long pause, he added, “Do you mean like, with the dragon?”

“I don’t know what it was. …Enormous. Beast-like. It attacked with fire.”

“Yeah that was Dorothy. She’s… nice, usually. The amulet is still—”

“I thought I was gonna die that day.” Lancer looked up, hand clenched to his knee, feeling an emotion he had no idea how to express. “You saved my life.”

Danny looked away, uncomfortable. “Yeah don’t… don’t mention it. Dorothy would have felt bad if she killed you. Or maybe she was gonna… not actually kill you. Sometimes, you know, I’LL take a hit where I’m like ‘Oh that’s gonna kill me,’ but it doesn’t. Or. Half-doesn’t. Or…” Danny was fumbling. “Portal. By the way. Um. You didn’t ask but. My dad’s—my mom’s and dad’s—ghost portal. I um. Inside there’s a button, I guess. Or like a short-circuit, maybe. I went inside and I um… touched it. I think. I don’t really remember. But then I--” Danny spread his arms wide, “—ghost. Ever since. Same thing as… Vlad. But I don’t steal billions.”

Lancer tried to form thoughts through the screaming in his head. He was recontextualizing over a year of class time with the single piece of information that made 100 oddities click into place.

“You did… steal test results.”

“ONCE!” Danny answered with more explosive energy than Lancer expected. “I gave them back! Come on man, I gave them back. That was—” Danny flopped his head into his knees, “—a whole thing. I’m failing tests like an honest man these days.”

Lancer thought on this a long while too.

“And I’ve been giving you those tests expecting you to work like a normal student. Oh my god.” Lancer pressed his fingers to his temple, squeezing. “I thought you were playing video games.”

“I don’t… not like video games. I would like to play video games.”

“But you’re not. You’re out here burying your clones on a school night.”

“Yeah,” Danny answered. And he hugged his knees tighter, rested his cheek on them, staring off to the side. “Well I wish I was playing video games.”

More of the picture clicked in Lancer’s mind. Danny’s sleight of hand that popped the trunk. His getting of the shovels and the water bottles. The ecto-gore on Danny’s clothes may have not entirely been the clone’s…

And if Danny Phantom was out here, now, that meant no one was on duty if a ghost attacked Amity Park.

And if Danny Phantom were eliminated by Vlad Masters’ machinations, then what would that mean for the next ghost attack to hit the town?

Lancer stood up. The spiraling thoughts were seizing his muscles, taking up space from his lungs. These felt like questions too deep and too cruel to ask of a boy who just wished he were playing video games instead of dealing with a nightmare Lancer could only just begin to scratch the surface of.

Lancer understood Danny, suddenly, wholly and completely. Lancer didn’t know yet what he could do about any of this.

(Lancer reclaimed his shovel from the ground. He sunk it into a waiting pile of dirt. He felt Danny’s eyes on him as he transferred earth to spade and dropped it shivering down into the grave they’d dug together.)

But he knew he could bury the corpse.

…

Lancer resolved to not ask a single additional question of Danny before the corpse was buried. He’d asked enough for one night. Danny had given more than enough answers for one night. So, as a thank you for saving his life if nothing else, Lancer withheld all his questions, and he piled dirt onto corpse while the night drifted past.

Was it possible to just kill Vlad Masters? That was IF no true route through legal authority could work. But in the extreme case, where Vlad Masters could willfully possess anyone who might crack consequences down on him, could they just kill him?

Heft. Dirt. Heft. Dirt.

Usually Lancer did not advocate murder. In fact even entertaining the idea felt like he had wild dogs chewing on the inside of his ribs. But this was purely a matter of practicality. Especially if a failure to act came at the cost of Danny’s life.

Heft. Dirt. Heft. Dirt. Lancer glanced over his shoulder. Danny hadn’t moved, still watching, in a way that reminded Lancer a bit of a bunny in the grass.

Danny’s life was worth saving regardless, of course. That was in fact the most important thing. But it was more than that even. It was Danny’s life and his father’s life and the life of everyone Danny Phantom would save in Amity Park. And this brought Lancer back to the notion that the work alone might kill Danny—Vlad or no Vlad—and Lancer felt a parent-teacher conference welling up in his chest. But not yet, if being ‘overshadowable’ meant Mr. and Mrs. Fenton were useless allies.

Heft. Dirt. Heft. Dirt. Lancer retrieved one of the unopened water bottles. The blisters on his hands made opening it into a journey.

Was Lancer himself overshadowable? Probably. Almost definitely. Almost certainly he had been before. The thought made Lancer itchy with the idea he was perhaps already some kind of walking sleeper-cell. But Danny had said it took a powerful ghost to implant intent. And, from how Danny had phrased it, Lancer’s protection had come in the form of “Why the fuck would Vlad bother with Danny’s English teacher?”

Which, almost definitely, put a giant target on Lancer’s back now.

Lancer really really did not like that.

He recapped his water bottle and picked the shovel back up. Heft. Dirt. Heft. Dirt.

Not that he liked anything he was doing or learning tonight.

Was Vlad himself dangerous, or were the clones? Or were they both dangerous? Danny wanted to hide the corpse to prevent Vlad from learning from his mistakes, which meant something was still wrong with the clones. What did an ‘unstable’ clone act like while alive? Were they always violent? Were they mind-controlled by Vlad? Partially mind-controlled? Were they like the overshadowed people, who seemed normal until something made them not?

And when the next one attacked, was there anything at all which Lancer could do? Or would he just supply some well-meaning hostage fodder?

Heft. Dirt. Heft. Dirt. This whole part was quicker. Gravity was a friend to refilling a grave. What must have been hours of digging was able to be undone in a few-dozen minutes of work.

Broad daylight. Surely a clone would not attack in broad daylight with witnesses. Vlad was the mayor, after all. He was a public figure. He cared about reputation. If he wanted Danny as a son, he needed to keep both himself and Danny out of a public scandal concerning a boy killing his doppelganger in the middle of a busy street.

Things got scary after the sun went down. Could Lancer help there? Could Lancer help by offering Danny a place that was not his own home—tonight, or possibly every night?

“Are you… gonna keep doing that?”

Lancer snapped to attention, stunned out of his thoughts. He whipped around like someone had walked in on him. Only Danny, bunny-crouched in the grass, sat there.

“What?” Lancer asked.

Danny pointed. “Grave’s full.”

It was a weirdly casual thing to say. Lancer turned back around, and the grave was indeed full.

Well, more like the additional dirt Lancer piled on served to overrun the ground-line. He’d managed to make the slightest anthill in the center of the grave where his piled-on dirt overflowed.

“I’m um… going to tamp it down,” Lancer said, which wasn’t untrue, but was definitely an excuse after getting lost in his thoughts. He pressed the back of his shovel to the dirt, whisked it around the perimeter of the grave to obscure the fault-line they’d dug. He got to work hefting the body’s worth of remaining dirt, spreading it around so that is drew no attention as a mound by itself.

Then suddenly, the grave was done.

Lancer stood over it, weary to the absolute core of his bones. Everything felt just a bit rotten, including the tinge of pride he took in the accomplishment, as he remembered the weight, sight, and form of the thing which they had buried beneath the unmarked soil.

Lancer was… tired. Physically, mentally, and every other possible way there was to be tired.

So he lay his shovel down. He turned on heel, and snagged two more water bottles from the ground, and walked with legs sore and teetering over to the grass. He approached the audience that had stuck with him the whole time.

Lancer sat himself down beside Danny with a groan. He offered one water bottle on an outstretched hand. Danny studied it—or maybe he was studying the open blisters on Lancer’s palm—and took the water.

“Thanks,” Danny said.

“Don’t mention it. You fetched the water after all.” And Lancer was deep in his thoughts wondering on the best way to put forward the idea—to offer, maybe, that Danny come home with him tonight. That if a clone wanted to slit his neck in his sleep, then maybe, somehow, Lancer could—

“No I mean thanks for burying the body…” Danny elaborated, twisting open the water bottle cap with a single crackle of breaking plastic seal. “I’m… thank you.”

Lancer took pause. “Oh. You’re welcome. I’m glad to help.”

“And thanks for… digging, too. You made it go a lot faster. My powers are being weird so I couldn’t really do much.”

“You definitely dug more than I did,” Lancer answered.

“And um…” Danny picked at the broken plastic ring at the water bottle cap. “Thanks for believing me when I said I needed help.”

This one caught Lancer off guard. He studied his pants and his shoes, wholly stained in dirt. He studied his student, worse-off in every way, mud-stained and blood-stained, intentionally avoiding eye contact once more.

“I hope I’m someone you always believe you can turn to for help.”

And I said I’d drive you where you need to go when this is over. Would you want to maybe come back to my apartment?

“What um—” Danny let out a little laugh. Some of the tension had left his shoulders; some of the worry had left his eyes, when he turned to Lancer now. “What were you even doing out here, by the way?”

“What do you mean?” Lancer asked.

“I mean—” Danny spread one hand out to motion to the parking lot. “This whole area is like, the absolutely middle-of-nowhere far edge of Amity Park. Don’t tell me you live out here.”

“Danny,” Lancer started, a crease of confusion on his brow as he studied the honesty on Danny’s face, “I came out here because you asked me to come out here.”

Danny’s mouth shut. He fell quiet. He matched the confusion on Lancer’s face. “No I didn’t.”

“Today. Right after detention. You grabbed my sleeve when I walked past you. You asked me to meet you out here.” Lancer looked back and forth between Danny’s eyes, hoping to read something. “…You were scared.”

“What? No, I didn’t do that. That wasn’t me.” The confusion on Danny’s face morphed a fraction into unease. “Why would I do that?”

“You said you were afraid something bad would happen to you.”

Now only the wind filled their silence. Danny had stopped pulling at the plastic ring of his water bottle. He was staring at Lancer, face a mask of ashen exhaustion, and deep confusion.

“What something?”

“You didn’t say,” and now Lancer found himself questioning his own memory. But this had happened. He knew it with absolute certainty. “I figured it must have been Dash Baxter or his friends giving you a hard time.”

Danny, holding him by the cuff of Lancer’s sleeve, giving Lancer an address that was not a real address. It should have been someone else’s problem—someone above Lancer, or a parental intervention maybe. But Danny was scared, and this was urgent, and Lancer believed him when he said that because when had Daniel Fenton ever turned to Lancer for help? Because that tear in the shoulder of Danny’s shirt could have been from normal wear, sure, but something about it felt like an omen to Lancer. A shirt worn a 100 times, now torn, on the day Danny came to Lancer for help.

“Danny?” Lancer asked, quiet.

Danny had both his elbows on his knees, his hands in his hair, head planted forward. The tightness in his tendons cast stark shadows in the moonlight.

“I don’t remember going to detention,” Danny said. And he pulled his head out of his hands, turned bodily to Lancer, glassy fear in his eyes. “I don’t remember going to school. I don’t remember today.”

Lancer’s eyes fell to Danny’s shoulder.

The fabric was perfect.

Lancer’s heart beat to the march of a war drum. It was powerful enough to make him dizzy. He thought about the body in the trunk. He thought about it soaked in ecto-green. He thought about the massive hole in the center of its chest. He thought about all the other tears in its shirt.

“Danny,” Lancer started, and he swallowed compulsively, mouth aggressively dry. “How did that clone die?”

Danny stared, his eyes pouring into Lancer, seeming to beg something which Lancer could not provide. Danny shook his head.

Without fully meaning to, Lancer inched away. His shadow scooted behind him, its fear stretching far under the interrogation of the flashlight hitched to the tree. He was aware suddenly of the vastness and the isolation of this golf course, of the high evergreens and the barren canopies that scratched their branches in the wind. It was a freezing December night, moon high, and no one was around for miles.

“How did the clone die?”

Danny shook his head again. The pleading did not leave his eyes.

The wind picked up. Every muscle in Lancer seized. He felt colder than he had all night.

Was this like the ghost attack again? Was he the slowest person, again? The only person, left alone with the bear?

Maybe that had been someone else already, tonight. Buried now in a shallow grave.

“Who are you?” Lancer asked.

It was Danny now who scuttled backwards, distancing himself from Lancer. His chest rose and fell too fast. His eyes fell to his own green hands, hyperventilation seizing him whole-body. He looked back up to Lancer with eyes glowing green, and he stared into all the pure wet terror in Lancer’s eyes.

Danny pushed up from the ground, unsteady. He wobbled on his feet, looking around as if for escape, but it was only him and Lancer here, in the graveyard dipping colder in the wee hours of the morning.

Danny’s breathing would not calm. Lancer could not do anything even if he wanted to. So they only stared, wide-eyes to wide-eyes, gray into glowing green. A hundred plans in the making all felt like sand slipping through Lancer’s fingers, because the core conceit of every plan was to save Danny Fenton’s life. And maybe he’d missed that chance already, by however many minutes late he’d been to the parking lot where he found Danny Fenton’s body.

Lancer did not know what to do anymore. He only knew he was small, and he was weak, and that if he needed rescue—like Danny who had pleaded for it at the sunset of detention—no one was coming to save him.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Lancer said, small.

And Danny kicked off into the air, rings grabbing his form and, in a rush of wind, the ghost who had been momentarily there was no more.