#dannymay17

“That coat is worth, like, fifty bucks. And that’s not even counting the tax.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I’ve been saving up for it.”

“Are you sure you have enough?”

“I have around eighty. I’ll be fine.”

“If you’re sure.”

Danny rolls his eyes and folds the coat over his arm. “I came here to have a good time. I don’t need you killing my vibe.”

Tucker scoffs, swiping his finger across the screen of his phone. The picture spins around and drops off little virtual items. “I’m just trying to be realistic. I don’t want your dreams crushed.”

“My dreams are fine, Tuck, really. Right now they consist of me buying this coat and maybe a keychain and some postcards and I’ll be happy. And before you ask, the keychain is cheap and postcards are, like, forty-one cents apiece,” Danny says, striding over to the spinning display stand to pick up a few postcards.

“Why postcards though?” Tucker asks, looking over stand himself.

“They’re cheap, they’re high quality photos, and they’re printed well. What most could you ask for? It’s not like I can take my own pictures of the moon or Mars.” Happy with his selection, Danny turns and heads towards the keychain selections, mind already made up on which one he wants.

“Alright, fine, you got me there.” Tucker sighs and swipes his screen some more, smiling when the screen shows little stars coming off a red and white ball. “It’s just… really hot here.”

“Well duh, Tuck. It’s Texas. It’s like. Ninety-six degrees outside.” Danny frowns when he can’t find the keychain he wants and he sighs, turning towards where he saw a manned cash register.

“And why couldn’t we have gone to the NASA in Florida?”

“Because I’ve already been there, duh. I wanted to see the one in Houston.”

Tucker rolls his eyes. “Of course,” he says, but doesn’t argue.

Danny smiles at the woman ringing him up and he sighs in relief when he has plenty of money for what he wants. She hands him his bag and he stops himself from pulling the coat out. Texas summer is not made for heavy coats, no matter how badass they are. As they’re walking away, Danny says, “I have to go back to that other gift shop.”

“You mean the little one by the food court? Why?”

“This one didn’t have the keychain I wanted. They had one similar but a lot bigger. I wanted the smaller one. It’s less keychain to keep track of, ya know?”

“Fine, fine. We’ll go back to that one. Then we’re leaving, right?”

“I wanna take some pictures next to the Curiosity model and then we can go.” Danny glances back at the SUV-sized Mars rover replica near the front doors. “Somehow I missed that when we first got here.”

“Thank god,” Tucker sighs out, rolling his head to look at the ceiling.

“Aw, what, don’t you like space? And learning? And learning about space?” Danny gives an overdramatic pout and crosses his arms, tilting his nose up. He stops himself from smiling when Tucker gives him a shove.

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Danny. I didn’t say that.” Tucker waves an arm back towards Curiosity. “Anyway, you probably missed that when we got here because you were too busy staring at the giant wall art of the Earth with ‘The International Space Station’ written below it.”

“Oh. Yeah, that might’ve done it.” Danny gives a sheepish smile. “And that demonstration that guy did? That was cool.”

“Those special effects were pretty rad,” Tucker concedes. “That thing with the projected water absorbing into that towel they had hanging was sweet.”

Danny nods, smiling wide. “This was just… a really good day.”

“Yeah,” Tucker agrees, nudging into Danny, “it was.”

Danny stares at the ectogun pointed at his face with wide eyes. His mouth is dry but he doesn’t think that he could speak around the closing of his throat anyway. The whining of the charge is making his ears ring and his head starts to hurt, a dull pain in his temples. He swallows and dares to look up into the face of his mother, speech still beyond him.

“Don’t move, ghost,” she spits, eyes narrowing behind her red tinted goggles.

Danny flinches back against the ghost shield he’s been pinned against and gives a hasty nod. He tries to swallow around the lump in his throat and almost chokes. His breath is starting to come out in short gasps as his heart rate kicks up. He’s thoroughly stuck and the terror encroaching his mind is making the edges of his vision blurry.

Maddie Fenton stares at him with such an intensity that he winces. He can’t look her in the eye, afraid of what he might see. He remembers once, back when he’d still been getting used to his powers, right after his first major fight with the Lunch Lady, that he asked his parents, “Why do you guys hate ghosts so much?”

His mother had laughed and told him, with certainty, “Ghosts are unfeeling blobs of post-mortem energy. They don’t feel, they don’t think, they don’t live like we do. They’re aggressive and destructive and completely mindless, driven by their last, tortured moments. We don’t hate them, but they hate us.”

He remembers that he’d felt the air leave his lungs so viciously it left him weak in the knees. He’d been unable to speak to his mother for the rest of the night and he’d felt so utterly crushed by her words that he shied away from her for nearly a month. No matter what his mother says in the contrary, his mom and dad hate ghosts, and very blindly at that.

Sam and Tucker never again pressed him to tell his parents his secret after he told them what she said.

He shivers and wilts under the force of her glare, curling inward in an effort to make himself seem smaller. He doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, holding the fully charged gun inches from his face, but he sucks in a deep breath and tells her, “I don’t hate you.” His voice quivers and he can barely hear it over the roaring in his ears, but the weapon falls half an inch.

Maddie’s face remains unchanged. “What did you say?”

“I…” He swallows and focuses on breathing for several beats. “I don’t hate you,” he forces out, louder this time. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”

“Liar,” his mother hisses, stabbing him in the forehead with the end of the gun.

He whimpers and squeezes his eyes shut, pressed soundly against the ghost shield at his back. He feels like he might collapse, his panic kicking his instincts into overdrive. His hands flicker in an out of physicality, the urge to turn intangible fraying at his weakening control. He wants to say something, anything but he’s so, so scared.

“Ghosts can do nothing but hate and lie and steal and kill,” Maddie growls, the shifting of the gun telling him that she’s fingering the trigger. Every muscle on Danny’s body is tense with terrified anticipation. “You’re no different than the rest.”

“I can’t hate you,” he sobs out, clenches his hands into fists. He can feel tears building up behind his closed eyes and he squeezes them tighter, hoping the burning wetness will go away. “I can’t.” His voice cracks and he sniffs once.

She’s quiet for a long moment. Danny wants to open his eyes, to spill his guts, to tell his secret, but every cell in his body tells him not to. The charge built up in the barrel crackles against his skin and he’s sure he’s going to have a burn on his forehead where the weapon is sitting.

Maddie finally pulls the gun back and Danny’s eyes fly open in disbelief. Her eyes are calculating and he dares to hope that she’s changed her mind, that she’s going to let him go. “Well,” she says, conversationally, “if you won’t hate me, then I’ll just have to make you.”