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torscrawls · 2 years

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Space Case

The first chapter of my contribution for the Invisobang is now out! You can read it here or on my AO3.

Artwork by the amazing MinnowMarsh and Amar Art!

Summary: Danny runs into some astronauts from NASA’s lunar mission while trying to do his homework on the moon. This leads to new friends, a new job, and eventually to Danny finding a place for himself out in the stars.

Also, Danny gets to be a gremlin in space.

Lunar Surface: Habitat 00

The first time Danny appeared they didn't know what to do.

There was a child. A teenager. Sitting at their table. Their table on the moon.

Cecilia Perez had worked for NASA for many years. She had been fascinated by the universe and all its secrets since she was a little child and had felt extreme delight in slowly uncovering and discovering new aspects of it through her work.

She had had the immense fortune of being chosen as one of the crew for a new project with a semi-permanent base on the moon.

It had all gone above everyone's expectations and now they had built the majority of the base and set up their residence there. Cecilia herself had lived in her, with generous words, quaint living quarters for a week now, together with four others. They were the first wave, the trials, and they learned so much every day.

Few things really surprised her anymore, as she had woken up to everything from blaring alarms to a surreal vista of storm clouds covering a majority of the visible side of Earth, but this…

This.

Cecilia was currently frozen in the doorway to the communal kitchen, staring with wide eyes and open mouth at a boy sitting at the table and reading a book.

A boy she had never seen before.

A boy who hadn't come with them on the shuttle here.

A boy she had never heard anyone even mention. And everything surrounding this mission was as heavily monitored and controlled as it was possible to be.

She stood there, staring, for what had to be a fairly long time, the boy didn't seem to notice her as he scrunched his brow in concentration and wrote something down in his notebook that laid splayed open on the table at his elbow.

He had almost blindingly white hair and was dressed in a jumpsuit that honestly didn't look too different from their own, and for a second Cecilia wondered if she had forgotten one of their teammates. But he was young, he didn't look to be older than maybe 15, and despite the familiar style of his clothes, what was out of place was the way it shone; despite being made out of primarily a black material, it was covered in shining white specks eerily resembling the stars just outside. The speckled dots started on the black of his arms and legs, few and far between, but got increasingly denser closer to his hands and feet until they blended together into pure white. Either his clothes were embedded with tiny LEDs, or they were in fact glowing.

She stood there, utterly flabbergasted, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation to what she was seeing, any explanation to what was right in front of her, until she heard someone approach her from behind and Naomi Watkins' voice said "Well, what's wrong, Perez? You got yourself stuck to the hull?"

Cecilia Perez slowly turned towards her colleague—her friend—keeping the boy in her periphery as she whisper-shouted her reply in a panicked voice, "There's someone at the table!"

Cecilia was determined to not let her friend walk past her before they knew it was safe and did her best to block Watkins' way into the kitchen, feeling a bit ridiculous since the other woman was so much taller than she was.

Watkins gave a short laugh—too loud—as she pulled her long curly hair up into a ponytail, and Cecilia tensed as she turned her focus back to the boy, but he didn't seem to have noticed the sudden sound. Watkins smiled easily and asked, "What? Is it Lovelace?"

Cecilia shook her head even as he wished that the person in the kitchen was indeed their shorthaired, buff, slightly intimidating, but familiar, commander. "It's—it's a stranger. I don't know who it is."

"Come on, we're only five people," Watkins said as she pushed into the doorway beside her, leaning to see into the room, "you're saying you don't remember one of us after all this ti—"

She stopped short as her eyes landed on the stranger, still reading, sitting at their kitchen table. "Okay, what the fuck."

"Right?!" Cecilia hissed back, eyes still fixed on the stranger.

"Have you informed Commander Lovelace?" Watkins asked.

Cecilia shook her head. "I just found him." She opted for not including the fact that she had been standing there staring for an indefinite amount of time since.

Watkins gave a short nod, her eyes also trained on the stranger.

As they both watched him he slowly reached up a hand and both of them tensed where they stood, before he flipped a page in the book. Grumbling under his breath as he did so.

Cecilia let out a quiet and relieved breath before asking, "Well, should you or I go and tell her?"

"We can use the com?" Watkins said as she slowly leaned closer to the wall, reached a hand up, and pressed the com to turn it on, making it spark to life.

The sudden sound succeeded in drawing the stranger's attention where all their whispered conversation had failed and he whipped his head around to look right at them with wide surprised eyes.

As if they were the ones who were where they shouldn't and had surprised him.

And those eyes. They were green enough that the color seemed to spill from their edges, leaking into the room and casting his face in an almost eerie light; seeping the color out of his cheeks until he looked almost as pale as a corpse.

His sudden movement made both Cecilia and Watkins startle, the latter badly enough for her to remove her hand from the com, turning it back off.

Well, it was too late for stealth now anyway. Cecilia exchanged a look with Watkins, gestured for her to stay back, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and asked, in a voice that was only slightly shaky, "Where did you come from?!"

The boy silently pointed to the wall to the right, but Cecilia was well aware that the only thing outside that wall was the surface of the moon itself, no structures or ships or anything.

She took a step closer to the table and pressed on, "Who let you in?!"

"No one," the boy said as he raised his hands in a disarming gesture. His voice seemed to echo strangely in the room. "Sorry. I just wanted to use the table for a second. And I was curious who you were. I haven't seen you here before."

"What do you mean you haven't seen us here—Who are you?!" Cecilia asked, and she would be the first to admit that it came out as quite aggressive, but she was confused and she was stressed and she needed some damned answers.

The boy smiled at that and extended a hand as if greeting. "My name is Danny!"

Cecilia did not take it, instead looking at the appendage cautiously as she asked, "Alright… Danny. What are you doing here?"

The self-proclaimed Danny sent a pointed look down at the book still laying splayed open on the table in front of him before looking back up at her and Watkins with a raised eyebrow. "…My homework?"

And that… was not the answer she had been expecting. She looked over her shoulder to exchange a glance with Watkins, but she seemed just as confused from where she hung back by the door. She looked back at the boy with an incredulous, "Are you serious?"

"Why wouldn't I be? I like to do it here sometimes, on the moon, I mean, but this time when I got here I saw this place! And I just wanted to drop by and say hi and maybe see if you had a table or something. My back hurts from sitting on the ground all the time."

"Why are you doing your homework on the moon?"

"Well I get left alone here! Mostly." He sent them an almost accusing look. Cecilia didn't know if she was expected to feel apologetic or not.

"We're sorry?" Watkins piped up from the doorway.

"Don't be!" Danny sent her a smile and a thumbs up, "I love your work!"

"But that's not an explanation!" Cecilia exclaimed in frustration.

Danny shrugged. "It's the answer to your question. Maybe you should ask better ones if you don't like the answers." The boy calling himself Danny paused, before continuing in a quieter and almost distressed tone of voice, "Oh, Ancients. I'm turning into Clockwork."

He was infuriating, no doubt about that, but he didn't seem hostile. At least not yet. If this was some kind of trick, some kind of attack, then at least maybe she could learn more about him first.

"What are you even doing?" Cecilia leaned to the side, trying to get a glimpse of the book lying open on the table; maybe she could get some answers that way. She needed something to tell the higher ups after all this.

"I'm working on a project for my science class, it's about theoretical travel between planets, and what better inspiration than real space, am I right?"

"I—I guess?" Cecilia agreed before frowning as what he said really registered, "Wait, you're what? In high school?" How did a seemingly ordinary kid end up all the way out here? And from what he said, it didn't sound as if this was the first time he had been here.

Danny gave a small grimace at that. "Yeah… But not for long! Hopefully I'll get into a good college and then I can come back more officially!"

She was almost scared to ask. "Officially…?"

Danny nodded with a big smile and shining eyes. "Yes! I want to be an astronaut one day! It's been my dream my whole life!"

"Seriously?" Watkins exclaimed, looking exasperated. "You're on the moon."

"I know! Isn't it amazing?" He smiled. "So?"

"No, nothing," Cecelia said as she shook her head, before muttering, "Well, how are we going to explain this?"

"Explain what?" Danny asked as he tilted his head.

"You!" Cecilia said with a gesture to encompass all of him.

"Well, what's the problem? I can… I can leave, if you need me to? I didn't mean to cause any trouble," he said and he looked so crestfallen as he said it that Cecilia almost felt bad. Almost.

"Do you have a way of getting back?" Cecilia asked, feeling ridiculous even saying the words. "To Earth, I mean?" If that was where he came from…

"Yes! Thanks for asking though. It was great meeting you guys," he gushed as he gathered up his book, notebook, and pen and smiled at them. "You're just as nice as you seemed from the interviews."

Cecilia gave a mute nod and a strained smile, a part of her was almost morbidly curious to see what he would do next, and considering the silence beside her, she guessed Watkins was in a similar position.

Danny waved at Cecilia and Watkins before walking towards the wall to the right, and then passing right through it and disappearing from sight.

Leaving the kitchen empty except for Cecilia and Watkins.

"Well," Watkins drew the word out on a sigh as she slumped against the doorframe. "We didn't cover this in training."

Cecilia found her eyes trained on the spot where Danny had just walked through the wall. Like a— "Is the moon haunted?!"

Watkins was silent for a long while, and when Cecilia finally managed to tear her eyes away from the wall and look at her colleague, she found her frowning at the com. "…Who's going to tell the commander?"

#dp #danny phantom #phic #dp fanfic #danny phantom fic #astronaut danny #dp fic #my writing #who's ready for some space shenanigans??#invisobang #invisobang 2022 #space case

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