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five-rivers · 22 days

Text

Funeral

“I’m sorry,” said Danny, speaking to the headstone in lieu of anything else to talk to. He certainly wasn’t going to speak to the empty and expectant grave a few feet away. “I wanted to wait. I want to wait. It’s just–” He cut himself off, curling his hands into fists. “There are so many things I haven’t seen, haven’t done. Jazz got married, you know? She’s pregnant. If I was– I could have–”

He fell silent and adjusted the collar of his overcoat, trying to keep the frigid Ghost Zone wind away from his currently human neck.

“Sam and Tucker are thinking about getting married, now that we’ve all graduated,” he said softly. “I would have liked to see that, too. And have a career. Travel. I know you wanted to do that, too. But–”

He broke off as his voice pitched weirdly, too high, too loud. Sparks jumped off his fists as his emotions rose. He flickered in and out of sight and tangibility, and his skin started to–

With an effort, he wrenched himself back together.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “This is why I have to go. I’m too unstable, and it isn’t like you. I’m not just a danger to myself.”

(A premonition: Disturbed soil, a hand reaching out, a solid body… but there was nothing there now. The ground was troubled only by slowly growing grass.)

He turned away from Dani’s grave and walked back to the mortuary shrine.

The wind kicked up again. There was ice in it.

A motto was carved above the threshold of the shrine. It read, LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR OWN DEAD. Appropriate. No one fully living would be here tonight. Sam, Tucker, and Jazz had all wanted to be, just like they had all wanted to be there for Dani, but there were rules about this kind of thing, old rules, and–

Ice feathered out from under his feet. And it wouldn’t be safe for them.

The mortuary shrine was cozy on the inside, not at all like a morgue, or an embalmer’s studio. There were some similarities, overlaps in function, but the shrine was not organized with decaying fleshy bodies in mind. The central altar, for example, was high off the ground, for ease of access by the celebrants, but it was soft, bed-like, for the sake of the one who’d lie there. The other altars were filled with other things, like candles, foods, oils and wines, salt, cloth, books, and strange implements Danny couldn’t name. All things needed for a burial.

There was other furniture, too, and the associated accouterments. Elegant ghost lanterns and a fireplace, burning with cold fire. Lovely chairs and small tables carved from bright wood. Plush footstools. Tapestries and curtains, softening the stone walls.

Three ghosts waited for him there, the proper number for a rite like this. Frostbite, his horns only inches from the ceiling. Pandora, who had taken a smaller form for the occasion. Clockwork, who looked much the same as he always did, except that he wasn’t changing forms, instead wearing a guise of solid middle age.

(Danny still had to look up at all of them. He'd managed to catch up to Jazz, but he'd never reached his father's height.)

“You are ready,” said Clockwork.

It wasn’t really a question, didn't necessarily call for a response, but Danny understood. This was his last chance to back out without any more consequences than the ones he was currently experiencing.

But those consequences were bad enough. He shuddered as intangibility and invisibility rippled through him again, and he just barely kept a grip on his more destructive powers.

“Yes,” said Danny. He looked around the shrine, nervous. He hadn't been here when Dani did this. He didn't know what came next. Not in any detail. “Should I change?”

“No,” said Pandora. “Not unless you feel the need to. The ritual will be a guide, as it was for your younger sister.”

“Then we shall begin,” said Clockwork.

Danny nodded.

Frostbite came forward fist, and leaned all the way down to kiss Danny’s forehead. “You are dead, Great One, and we will remember you.”

He stepped back, and Pandora took his place. “You are dead, little warrior, and we will send you on with honor.” She pressed a kiss to his forehead as well.

Then, Clockwork came up. He looked down at Danny for longer than the other two. “You are dead, Daniel, and the time comes for all the dead to be laid to rest.”

When Clockwork’s lips brushed against Danny’s forehead, he felt the first strands of the ritual wrap around him like silk. Still thin and tenuous enough that he could break free, but not without damage to both the weaving and himself.

Frostbite, meanwhile, had turned to one of the lesser altars. There was a small teapot chilling there, above a braiser of cold fire. Frostbite poured its contents into a large mug, then added three scoops of shimmery white powder, each from a different small pot, before stirring three times.

He held the mug out to Danny. “For your nerves.”

“Is this drugged?” asked Danny, taking the mug. He kept his tone light. Considering the parts of this Danny knew were going to happen, that was really the least of his worries.

“Drugged and poisoned,” said Frostbite. “We did research into the best way to ritually account for your continued life. This is it.”

If Danny was younger, he’d ask if it was going to kill him. He knew better, now, about how durable half-ghosts were. Memories of long-ago history lessons, of trivia, of drugged drinks and gentle, honored deaths on cold mountains ghosted through Danny’s mind. But those were children.

He raised the mug to his lips and took a drink. It tasted of chocolate, cream, and a bewildering array of spices and herbs, from capsaicin to vanilla to rosemary. There was also a bitter undertaste, and Danny would have pulled away instinctively, but as soon as he’d started the reflexive motion, Frostbite put a friendly but firm hand on the back of his head, and another on the bottom of the mug, keeping it tilted back.

(A premonition: Other hands hovered nearby, ready to assist if Danny resisted. He could feel them. One over his nose, another stroking his throat, taking advantage of the remaining reflexes of his human body. But they weren’t there. Not yet.)

The rites, now started, would not be so easily refused.

Danny drank deeply, finding a strange sort of enjoyment in the extended physical contact. He’d been avoiding touch ever since a nasty scare with his ice powers and Sam’s skin. There had been close calls before that, too, with his newer, more esoteric powers, but until then…

Frostbite tilted Danny’s head all the way back, ensuring the last few drops of the drink fell past Danny’s lips, then pulled the mug away. Danny licked his teeth and lips, and swallowed one more time. He didn’t feel anything yet.

“What next?” he asked, wincing at the edge of power behind the question. He should probably just. Not talk. Especially not with drugs in his system.

“After a death, the first step is to clean and prepare the body,” said Pandora.

Of course. Danny nodded. The mortuary shrine… wobbled.

Frostbite swept Danny up into his arms - which would have been more embarrassing if Frostbite wasn’t huge - and carried him to one of the lesser altars. It was smooth-surfaced and the neighboring, even smaller altars had bars, bottles, jars, basins of water, and washcloths, all arranged to stand at precise angles from one another. He was laid down on the altar, and Frostbite and Clockwork started to undress him.

At first, Danny tried to help, peeling out of his overcoat and sweater quickly. But then, his movements seemed to… blur. His mind was still sharp, as far as he could tell, but his limbs were becoming clumsy, slow.

It was Clockwork who untied his boots, and Frostbite who unbuttoned Danny’s shirt. By the time they got to his underthings, it felt like there was a barrier between him and his body. Not anything solid, he could still move, still react, but something muffling, slowing. Frostbite laid him down so that he was flat on his back on the lesser altar. Clockwork started going through Danny’s hand with a wet, lightly perfumed, comb. Frostbite, meanwhile, took out a set of dentists tools and eased Danny’s jaw open with one claw.

Across the room, at the main altar, Pandora laid layer after layer of cloth. Some of them were patterned, others plain. Some were thick with embroidery, others were gossamer thin. Some were edged with beads or woven with gold, others looked tattered, as if they’d been previously used for something else, the scrupulously cleaned.

Clockwork, done with Danny’s hair for the moment, moved on to his feet. It was hard to describe the intimacy of being cleaned like this by someone else. By someone he knew. He wasn’t a patient, Clockwork wasn’t a nurse. He wasn’t an infant, and Clockwork wasn’t his parent. But this was an act of care and love, offered without judgment. It was also embarrassingly efficient and thorough. When a body was cleaned, prepared for internment, it wasn't just the normal surfaces that were cleaned, but areas generally considered private.

As Clockwork moved upwards, the powers that churned along the surface of Danny’s skin quieted. They did not go silent - they never did, these days - but they were no longer so maddeningly active.

Finished with Danny's mouth (which now felt much more clean than it ever did after the dentist's) Frostbite moved on to his nails, clipping and cleaning them, smoothing rough edges and cuticles. Danny tried to be helpful with this, to at least hold his hands in the right way, but the effects of the drugs were progressing. His movements were slowing, growing smaller.

He should be panicking. The loss of control, at least, should bother him, given the constant vigilance his rapidly growing powerset required. But, as a human, his emotions were still principally dependent on physical systems and chemical reactions. His heartbeat was slow, and growing slower.

They turned him over to work on his back, and Danny half-dozed, eyes barely open, as they diligently scrubbed him clean.

Then, he was on his back again, anointed with oils and perfumes, smokes and incense wafted over him. Something wet drew a line from his lips to his groin.

Danny's heart twitched to a stop.

Blue-white rings flared from his core in an instant, painfully arresting the moment of death, then swept out to Danny's extremities. He flinched, twisting on the table, onto his side, suddenly able to move again. Everything was too bright, too loud, too close, too present. He covered his face with his arms.

The panic he’d missed earlier was in full force now, shining bright and pure and crystalline in the way only ghostly emotions could. He was in danger. He was dangerous. He could feel his powers coiling, ready to strike, whether it be his will or against it. He fought them, and paid the price, bones and skin going soft, their fine, detailed structures destabilizing, running like wax, like the flesh of a caterpillar in a cocoon.

A hand scooped through his sticky, melting flesh and pressed a cool, hard, surface to his lips. He drank. It was the same thing Frostbite had given him before, but without the bitterness. With every gulp, the ritual spun onwards, strands thickening, multiplying. By the time he was finished drinking, his skin was sticky and damp, but solid again underneath that.

“No poison this time?” he asked.

“Just because you cannot taste it does not mean it isn’t there,” said Frostbite. “Do you know what separates a medicine from a poison?”

“Dosage?” hazarded Danny. Jazz was an MD. He’d picked up a few things.

All three of the older ghosts chuckled. Frostbite went as far as to ruffle his hair.

“He does learn,” said Clockwork, unzipping Danny’s jumpsuit (it had grown with him) and gently pushing aside Danny’s hands when he moved to help.

Whatever was in the second drink, if there was anything at all, it didn’t act nearly as quickly as the first. He could feel so much more, his sense of touch unblunted. It made the process of Frostbite, Clockwork, and Pandora undressing him all that much more, especially when they chided him (ever so gently) for trying to help them, for doing anything but lying there like a corpse.

(Deja vu: Rituals as old as humanity, reaching back, reaching forward. The preparation of the dead, laying them to rest. The duty of the family, to clean and prepare, to stand watch, sit vigil, to March the wake, to mourn, to celebrate. The dead did not move to help. They did not move at all.)

They washed the spaces between his toes and fingers, his teeth, the backs of his eyelids, the insides of his ears, every nook and cranny they had cleaned when he was in human form was cleaned again. The stickiness from his earlier destabilization was wiped away, replaced with a dry, fresh feeling. Invisibility and intangibility stopped wisping across his skin, too tightly bound by the ritual to be used even by accident.

The perfumes they used now were different, they tickled at his brain and core both, summoning feelings of nostalgia, regret, longing, grief, quiet, peace. They traced symbols in them, in languages Danny didn’t know but could feel the meanings of, of linear past and spreading future, of the pinpoint present, of decay and rot, of the loosening of muscles, of the blurring of boundaries, of reconstruction, of change, of stability, of things remade, of things caught in time forever.

Frostbite picked him up and brought him to the main altar. It was soft, piled high with cloth. They felt cool and silky on Danny’s bare skin and there was a pillow under his head. Absently, he ran his palm back and forth across the top cloth. Or, no, not quite the top one. The main one he was touching was large, large enough to hang off the altar and pool on the ground, but there was a smaller strip of embroidered cloth, almost like a long belt or ribbon, at the height of his biceps.

There was, he noted, another such ribbon under his ankles, and another under his knees. He wondered what they were for.

He didn’t have to wonder for long. Clockwork picked up the long ends of the ribbon and wound it around his ankles in a complicated fashion. The twists and turns showed off the intricacy of the abstract embroidery. He finished it off with a knot that disappeared under the rest of the ribbon.

The strings of the ritual gathered faster, wound thicker, tighter, with a physical anchor.

Clockwork moved on to the ribbon at Danny’s ankles. The weaving was slightly different, but had the same effect.

He expected the one under his arms to go the same way. But instead Pandora, Frostbite, and Clockwork gathered flowers from another altar. They were all black and white, so it took Danny a moment to recognize them. Lilies, roses, marigolds, carnations, asphodel, nettle, nightshade, poppies, lycoris. Flowers for death, for funerals, for mourning.

Clockwork wrapped Danny’s hands around the bouquet, and pressed the ring finger of his left hand against a rose thorn. A drop of blood welled up. Blood, not ectoplasm. Danny stared, surprised. But he didn’t get to stare long. Clockwork produced another ribbon, and wrapped it around the flowers and Danny’s wrists.

Then, he picked up the other ribbon under Danny and tied it around his upper arms and elbows before tucking the ends into the ribbon around Danny’s wrists.

It all felt very secure.

Under normal circumstances, Danny would have been able to escape such flimsy restraints in a hummingbird’s heartbeat. But it wasn’t just the ribbons that held him. He could still escape, yes, but it would take a great deal of effort.

He twitched his shoulder, just to check that he could. The motion was slow, heavy, and smaller than he expected.

Pandora put a stilling hand on his shoulder and held a coin up in front of his face. It was large and silver, inscribed with symbols from languages both long dead and never alive. Danny wondered if they had made it just for this occasion.

“A last chance,” said Pandora.

His last chance to back out, is what she meant. To say something. He could do it. He could stop the ritual and suffer the consequences. He could be a danger to everyone around him for the rest of his existence, however long or short that was.

He gave Pandora the tiniest shake of his head. She smiled and pressed the coin against his lips. He opened his mouth, just enough to take the coin. It fit comfortably on his tongue, in between his teeth but not jostling against them. If it wasn’t custom made and sized, it might as well have been. It tasted metallic and sweet, as if, given enough time, it would dissolve on his tongue.

Pandora took out one more embroidered ribbon and wrapped it around his jaw and the top of his head, holding his mouth closed. There was enough tension in the ribbon to press, but not enough for its edges to dig into tender flesh. Taken together, the coin and ribbon made an effective gag.

His wail was now bound just as effectively as his intangibility and invisibility, as effectively as his tongue and voice. For the first time since the incompatibility between his powers and his body became clear, the stress of keeping his wail under control was lifted away.

(A possibility, unraveled: Danny standing at the center of a crater made with his own voice. No, kneeling. No, weeping, curled on the ground, head touching dirt and fractured concrete. He knew those buildings, teetering on the edges of new cliffs. He knew them.)

This was the right decision.

The three older ghosts busied themselves at the other, smaller altars briefly, allowing Danny to collect himself and sink deeper into that sense of relaxation. The wail wasn’t the only thing that had been taken off his shoulder. All his other voice-based powers were similarly locked away, and he hadn’t even noticed losing his shapeshifting, but he couldn’t touch that, either.

When Pandora stepped back into his field of view, she was holding a mask. A death mask, more specifically, styled after Danny’s own face. Frostbite, next to her, held a small, square cloth, like a handkerchief and a small bottle.

Clockwork reached out and touched Danny’s face, briefly tracing each of his features. His lips, his nose, his eyebrows. He slid his fingers down, pressing Danny’s eyelids closed. The motion was gentle, but held a strange sort of finality.

Danny found that he could not open his eyes.

Fabric, soft and smooth, whisper thin, covered his face and was adjusted, straightened. Something fragrant dampened it from above, near his nose. More perfume. He inhaled. Exhaled. Stopped.

Stopped.

Before he could have any more thoughts about not being able to breathe, the death mask was pressed into place. The weight of it pressed the thin shroud over his face snugly into his skin. It made his other limitations - his eyes, his breath, his general immobility - more acceptable, somehow.

Other talismans were placed on his skin or tucked into the ribbons. Some, he could identify by touch. The ticklish barbs of a feather. The cold roundness of another, smaller coin. The familiarity of his childhood stuffed bear. Others, his powers identified for him. The sparkling wonder of a lunar meteorite. The shiver of a carved piece of ghost ice. The thrumming power and glory of a vial of ectoplasm shed by a god Danny had fought and defeated. He hadn’t known they’d kept that.

But other things were too strange to identify by touch alone. He could make guesses. Maybe that was a flower petal, maybe this other thing was a coil of string, and while he was sure that last was paper, he couldn’t say what was on it. ��

With every token placed, another one of his powers was called up and locked away, like bound by like. His awareness of the stars winking out as the meteorite was placed was sad. The powers he’d ‘earned’ from that god being placed firmly out of his reach, however, was only a relief.

He was verging on helplessness, now. Helpless, but unburdened.

Clockwork started to speak. None of the words were recognizable, but Danny knew the feeling of a prayer. This one was old. Old old. Old even by the standards of ancient ghosts. They hummed briefly in his bones before settling in them like lead weights. Or golden ones.

The edges of the sheet he was lying on were lifted up and folded over him, then tucked under him. Wound around him. It was a winding sheet. Of course. Of course. The next cloth, too, was pulled up and over him, the motion a little more brisk now that the tokens were held in place by the first sheet. Then, the next. Cerecloth and cerements.

Danny twitched a little, at first, at certain unexpected touches, but when the third wrapping added its comforting, soothing pressure he was reduced (or, perhaps, elevated) to a state of perfect limpness.

They added more tokens between the third layer and the fourth, but Danny couldn’t even begin to guess what they were. They were too muffled by layers of silk - those layers being both the literal layers of cloth and the figurative layers of the ritual.

Clockwork’s prayers were getting harder to hear, but Danny felt like he could recognize some of them, now. Snippets of Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, a word or two off the Oracle Bones. Prayers for the dead, for their revenge and their remembrance, for their reverence and their reward, for their repose and their return.

He was wrapped again and again, until the pressure, the gentle rocking motion necessary to wrap him, and the nearly unintelligible rhythm of Clockwork’s prayers threatened to lull him to sleep.

He could hear snatches of Esperanto, now, and English.

“... rest, and rest in peace… until waking… to hope… blessing in memory…”

Some parts of it felt familiar. Others were strange, so strange, but he was bound so securely, now, that he almost felt as if he was floating.

“... iron and wood, we entrust this most precious… an embrace… the hallowed graves… deliver and defend…”

No, he was floating, sort of. He’d been lifted up, sheets and all, and now he was being moved sideways. Sideways, and now down, down, into a snug cavity. Was he bordered by flowers? Pillows? Both? He couldn’t tell.

“... into silk… like dust by sunlight into gold… changed… after a long day, to sleep…”

A faint weight draped over him, a final sheet covering him. He felt, with a strange sense that lay deeper than instinct, further down and closer to his heart and soul, that Pandora, Frostbite, and Clockwork had drawn closer, that they were kneeling beside his casket or coffin, heads bowed.

“Now we lay thee down to sleep,” whispered Clockwork, words startlingly clear despite his voice being harder to hear than ever, “we pray thy grave thy soul to keep, until thou choose the form thou take, and the hour thou shall wake.”

“And should thou never wake,” whispered - someone. It was getting harder to tell the muffled voices apart. “We shall mourn for thy sake.”

Very slowly, the force pushing in and down on Danny increased, deliciously. It was almost enough.

(Danny didn’t know where that thought had come from.)

A loud thump shuddered through Danny. Another. They were nailing him in. Another restraint. Another limitation. Another step towards the cumulation of the ritual. Almost. Almost.

Thirteen nails sealed Danny into the coffin.

(He had been snug before. Now, he wasn’t sure he could have moved even if the ritual hadn’t removed the ability from him.)

(All his powers were bound. There was no more sense of responsibility keeping him awake. His body was cocooned in every way possible. There was no more fear about destabilizing and melting. None of his choices would change what would happen to him next. Only a curiosity about what it would feel like to be buried kept him from succumbing to his soul-deep exhaustion then and there.)

Vaguely, ever-so-vaguely, Danny could feel his coffin lifted, moved. He knew where he was going. Out of the mortuary shrine, across the lawn, down the rows and rows of graves, and to one grave in particular. He’d wanted to be buried next to family, and Dani was his only family available.

They stopped. He was lowered. Down. Down. Stopped again.

A chill stole over Danny, like the cool side of a pillow, but all over his body, as if it meant to draw out the last of the warmth of life from his ectoplasm. Restful.

The dirt came down in sifted shovelfuls, like rain on a roof, like distant thunder. And– he did have more powers, either so subtle he didn’t notice them as such or as of yet undiscovered. These were buried as thoroughly as the others.

Up and up the dirt piled, until he could barely feel it as it came down. Until all that was left was the weighty, solid thump of a headstone coming down.

Then there was nothing. Nothing but silence, stillness, silk… and sleep.

Danny woke with the comfortable confusion of someone who had gotten their blanket wrapped around them unevenly while they slept. Slow, unhurried, well-rested, but just slightly less cozy than expected.

He shifted, mumbling and rolling over. No, that wasn’t any good. He made a face. There was something on his face. He reached up to wipe it off, and the sheets wrapped around him tore like cobwebs.

That roused him further. This… he did not think this was his bed. It was his, but not his bed.

He wiped something thin and crackly off his face and inhaled deeply. Dust. Salt. Dust, salt, and something like decay, but sharper, fresher, cleaner.

He breathed, remembering. His mouth tasted like silver and sugar. His hands quested outward, seeking, seeking, until he found the edges of the space he was in.

This was his grave. His coffin.

It was bigger than he’d imagined.

His eyes opened to a darkness relieved only by his own faint glow. The many sheets he had been wrapped in had been reduced to fragile scraps, except a very few that remained stubbornly wrapped around his shoulders. His mask was a thin shell. The flowers were desiccated, colorless strands and flakes. The pillows were flat and torn, showing the wooden sides of the coffin in places. The only token he could see and identify was the plush and pristine form of Neil Bearstrong. He gathered the toy close, pressing him against his chest.

He’d made it. He was awake, aware, and apparently stable, when before he’d been bracing himself for death. He breathed out, breathed in. His breath caught in his throat, and he giggled.

Did that mean Dani had made it, too?

He rolled onto his back and put a hand against the lid of the coffin. It looked strange there. Disproportionate. But of course it did. His body had just finished reformatting itself into a stable form. Frostbite had told him that he’d probably look different, maybe even radically different. Clockwork had even confirmed that medical opinion, from a temporal perspective.

Positives: his hand was a recognizably human hand. He was awake.

He didn’t dare turn human - if he even could - until he had Frostbite and the others look him over. He wouldn’t be able to phase through the Ghost Zone’s soil. Teleportation was inadvisable while he was this disoriented. So were portals. And most powers, really.

He’d have to dig his way out.

Bracing himself, making sure his limbs were free of restraint, he drew back his fist to punch the lid. The dirt would come in fast, and he wasn’t sure how deep he was. Six feet was traditional, of course, but it was also traditional for the dead to stay that way. So.

The lid flew upward under the force of his strike, all the dirt overhead bending away. He grabbed the edges of the hole and pulled down, widening it enough for him to claw his way out without warping his body. He… wasn’t quite ready for that, after the whole melting thing.

He burrowed upward, feeling like something between a worm and a badger, batting away dirt, crawling, squirming, reaching upward. Despite his best efforts, some of the winding sheets came with him, clinging, slowing his passage. Still, his hand hit free air. Grass tickled at his fingers. He set his palm down on the ground, and pulled.

The dirt did not want to let him go. It pulled back, its embrace offering an eternal peace, but Danny was firm, eager to go, to see, to live. He pushed himself up, and out, then lay, panting, on the ground.

That had been… more tiring than expected, actually.

Someone propped him up, large hands bringing him into a sitting position. “Daniel,” said Clockwork. A loose and oddly cut robe was wrapped around him.

“Mm,” said Danny, his voice cracking.

A cup was raised to his lips. He drank greedily, the sweet, floral liquid soothing his dry throat.

“Shall we get you cleaned up?” asked Pandora, another hand, laid on the center of his back.

“Can you walk?” asked Frostbite. “Or fly?”

“Yes,” said Danny, hoarsely. He reached up to put his hand on Clockwork’s shoulder. It took some to get it there. It was further away than he’d thought.

He was smaller than he had been. Not entirely unexpected. Returning to one’s appearance at death was, apparently, one of the more common ways for this to go. But had he really been this small at fourteen?

They did not go to the mortuary shrine, but made their uncertain way to the other shrine in the graveyard: the revival shrine. The structure was much the same inside and outside, but it had only one altar. The rest of the space was reserved for a bath, bed, and mirrors.

Pandora guided him to a chair in front of one of the mirrors. Danny stared. He wasn’t much to look at right now, but what he could see of his body…

It hadn’t been a winding sheet dragging at him as he’d crawled through the dirt. It had been wings. He shrugged the loose robe off his shoulders to see them better. They were patterned with white and black, star and moon shapes on a dark background. He had antennae. Long, soft, feathery looking things curving up and back from his temples.

Clockwork brought a damp cloth to his face and, slowly, began to clean away the dirt.

“Surprised?” asked Clockwork.

“Are you?”

Clockwork chuckled.

“Did Dani– Is Dani–?”

“She woke seventeen years ago,” said Clockwork. “She is quite smug about technically being older than you in terms of lived experience.”

“She would be,” said Danny.

He pulled away from Clockwork’s ministrations to get another look at the mirror. He had about the same proportions he did when he was a teenager, and his hair was as white as it ever was in ghost form, but it sparkled, as if someone had dusted it with silver glitter. His antennae matched the color pretty well, too. Star-shaped freckles littered his cheeks, and when he tilted his head this way and that… There was an effect like a hologram, depending on the light, of a dark or glimmering domino mask around his eyes.

And, beneath that, his basic features, the structures of his bones… They looked about the same as they had when he was young. Except… softer, somehow. More neutral. The change, as subtle as it was, gave him a genderless mien.

(The idea of that trend continuing elsewhere on his body didn’t bother him nearly as much as he would have expected before this.)

He wondered what he would look like in human form. But… later. Later.

For now, Pandora was running a tiny brush though the delicate hairs of his antennae, removing irritating bits of soil and grass.

“In fact,” said Pandora, “I would wager that she will be smug about physically appearing older than you.”

“She looks older than me, too?” asked Danny. “That’s hardly fair.”

“That is the way of things, I’m afraid. She hadn’t truly died until she was buried.”

“But she’s okay?”

“She’s doing very well, last I saw her,” said Frostbite.

“And Jazz? Sam and Tucker?”

“All fine,” said Clockwork. “They visit you frequently.”

Pandora did something complicated with telekinesis that pulled most of the dirt from Danny’s skin and left him feeling distinctly fluffed. The fuzz along the bases and upper edges of his wings stood on end. He shook himself all over, then plucked the washcloth from Clockwork’s hands so he could clean behind his ears and in-between his toes.

“Clothes?” asked Clockwork.

“Cut for wings?” challenged Danny.

“Of course.”

#danny phantom #dannymay #dannymay 2024 #dannymay 2024 day 21: funeral

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