Archive of Our Own ^beta

No one likes it.

He doesn’t, either, quite. But he’s made his choice.

It’s a little past the right time of year for the anniversary. Danny never remembers exactly what day it was that it happened—it was… August, maybe, or early September? That’s as close to the thought as he ever gets. Sam made sure to remind him, that first year or two, but he thinks eventually Tucker must have told her to knock it off. No one likes remembering the accident. Sam, it seems, likes him forgetting it even less.

Danny never does remember, but this year on the day-of, he could guess: by the clear effort it took Sam to keep her mouth shut, by the obvious faces she and Tucker both were making. Tucker, all day, insistently averted his eyes. Sam meanwhile stared straight at Danny like, unobserved, he’d disappear. Like she’d forgotten that he could. In freshman or sophomore year, he would have, and would’ve laughed at them both for the way they’d scramble—but it seems too cruel a joke to play now.

That was… three weeks ago? At this distance, he’s forgetting already. By now, it’s the last week of September: the leaves are turning, the weather’s changing. In a scant few days, the calendar will tick over into October, and the polite veil, waiting for its cue, will stretch sheer. The Realms will press its so-many faces to the divide. And death will seep through, as before.

Today, however, is Friday. It’s just after three P.M. on the twenty-seventh, and Danny and his friends have tucked themselves into a little inlet at the top of Casper High’s front steps, shivering—two of them shivering, anyway—and huddling close. Danny and Tucker shield Sam from the seeking breeze where she stands in the corner. Each of them are bundled up against the early cold: Sam in some layered, floppy mall goth number, coat open to show it off; Tucker, making fun of her, warm in his own buttoned brown sheepskin; and Danny, in, begrudgingly, at least a long-sleeve shirt. A concession to the cold everyone else is feeling. Amongst themselves, tucked into each other and hidden from sight of the yard, they pass a cigarette around. Between drags, and the banter Sam and Tucker bat back and forth like it’s all they’ve got, what no one’s saying hangs heavy.

As they snark at each other, Sam doesn’t say it. But she steps on it, sort of—a snake unseen in the grass that, hurt, lunges to bite.

“This is disgusting,” she mutters, bringing the cigarette to her lips anyway. She blows her smoke pointedly at Danny. “Why’d I let you get me into this?”

The pack they’re smoking from is shoved in Danny’s back pocket, half crumpled, mostly gone.

“’Cause you’re obsessed with me,” he says, grinning, waving away her smoke. He takes the cigarette from her and inhales. It’s a bad joke.

“Ha, ha. I’m quitting right after you’re—” Sam cuts herself off.

There’s an awkward, silent delay as Danny holds the cig to his right, waiting for Tucker to take it.

“After,” Sam saves, badly.

“Sure,” Danny says. Tucker snatches the cigarette from him as he does. “Like your mom did, right?”

Sam blurts out a harsh laugh, startled, still skittish. “Shit, shut up, Danny. There’s no way I’m falling into the same pit as her.” She takes the smoke again, though, when it’s passed back to her, pulling in that same shaky drag Tucker just exhaled.

“Doubt it,” Tucker says. “He’s ruined us forever, probably.”

Danny’s grin stretches wide. He takes the cigarette again. He feels morbidly amused; he probably shouldn’t. “Yeah, Sam. You’ll never get rid of me.”

Both his friends wince.

Before either of them can respond, Casper’s front doors shove open just behind Danny, tell-tale keys jangling at Ms. Tetslaff’s belt. His insides jolt and he cringes, dropping the cig, grinding it out with his foot and blowing his smoke into the corner—sorry Sam—hoping Ms. Tetslaff won’t see—but she doesn’t even turn to look. Instead, she fast-walks right past them, raising her voice to shout at a bus driver still idling in the parking lot.

Danny whistles performatively at their good luck. He turns back to his friends with a sheepish half-smile, drawing the word out as he says, “Lucky.”

Tucker scoffs, shaking his head in amused disbelief. He’d been the one to protest longest, when Danny first started smoking, especially at school. “You’re a menace,” he says, and hesitates—and then Tucker deliberately steps on it: the snake bites. “This is one thing I am for sure not gonna miss, afterwards.”

Sam’s face twists. Danny—something in him twists, too, something he isn’t looking at and hasn’t been for months now, for years if he’s getting pedantic, but he’s not, and he’s not looking at it, so. He laughs. Too loud. But genuine.

“My darling presence?” he purrs, batting his eyes, giving Tucker his opening.

“Your incredible ability to get us in trouble.”

Danny laughs again, his cheeks aching. “You’ll be bored within a week, I bet.”

“It’ll be peaceful, actually,” Sam butts in, finally playing along. She and Tucker both turn their noses up at him, performative, silly. Like the joke doesn’t at all hurt to make.

It’s then that Sam’s chauffer rolls up to the curb, late at her request to piss her parents off. It pisses them off more when Sam offers Danny and Tucker rides home, too, so off the three of them go: all unpeeling from the corner, stepping out into the breeze. Lingering smoke clings to their coats as they bump hips, walking too-close down the sidewalk. The unspoken, snake-bite, stepped-on weight clings just the same as that smoke. It follows them right into the car and splits evenly—none the less heavy—as they part, each dropped off in turn at their own homes.

Danny is the one that leaves first.

No, he doesn’t remember when the accident happened, not the particular date or whether they’d gone to school that day or what the weather was. But Danny does remember the accident itself: that cool metal, that light; green-spark death, suffusing. He remembers, in that moment of making, the Realms’ welcome.

Soft-but-so-deep. Unignorable. Not a voice or a sight but a connection at the core of him: hello, hello, hello. welcome home.

They all have it: the ghosts, his kind. A connection to the Realms, a point which they erupt from, an anchor of their very being. A core, yes—but a core is more. It’s a tether. A seed. A branched connection, a single synapse, a thread-end in a vast web, a—

Danny remembers, is the point. That feeling of being created. The—not care, not quite, but… preciseness with which he is maintained. The Realms takes care of its own.

That night, Jazz takes him stargazing.

It’s not a completely out of left field activity for them. Danny winds up on the roof most quiet nights, and when Jazz was still living at home, she’d join him if her insomnia got bad—which it did often—but they haven’t gone out of town to actually, properly stargaze in years. That’s what they’re doing now, though. Right after dinner, Jazz tucks a real coat around Danny’s shoulders and shuffles him out the door, into her car, to drive a few hours southeast to the darkest of dark-sky areas they can get around these parts. It’s a rare treat. A good one—Danny’s excited, honest. He tries to let that excitement outweigh the nagging discomfort in his chest, of being driven so far from Amity. From the portal. From the Realms, and so soon before—well.

He doesn’t say anything, anyway. He lets himself be ferried. No need to disappoint her.

And she’s trying so hard, too. The mood in her car is warm: a CD is playing that they haven’t listened to in years and the both of them are crowing along, Danny’s eyes closed, Jazz just squinting, keeping careful eyes on the road. At the rare stoplight, their bumping makes the car bounce, makes Jazz’s rearview ornaments swing. The windows are fogged with the heater on. In the dark, the dashboard’s glow lights them soft, just enough to see each other, just enough to catch their shared grins. Not quite dim enough to hide the strain.

This is Jazz’s second car. Dad crashed her first not a few months after she got it, so Danny barely ever rode in that one; between the two, this is the car he knows. This is the one he’s ridden sleepy mornings to school in, and rides home after, and as passenger on the rare outing like this, or just to the mall, or to get ice cream. Whatever they wanted. He’s bled in this car. The ectoplasmic proof of it is stained in Jazz’s back seat, futilely scrubbed at and abandoned, eventually covered by a knit blanket thrown over that side of the back. It’ll be good for comfort, Jazz had said, if they’re ever in a bad situation like that again—but Danny thinks she just doesn’t like looking at the stain. Remembering. He doesn’t blame her; no one does, least of all him.

He averts his eyes from the rearview mirror.

Illinois’ one and only dark sky site is their destination. This or any time of year, Middle Fork is rarely busy, but because it is one-and-only, there are usually at least a few stargazers or amateur astronomers out. So, when they pull into the parking lot and Jazz’s headlights swing over empty dirt, catching no cars or figures, Danny grins. What luck.

Despite the wide-open lot, Jazz still parks neatly. She pulls in straight and flicks the headlights off and kills the engine—and as the music dies and the dashboard lights fade, the sky erupts above them: autumn stars, all there, as ever. Danny almost forgets the longing that tugs him back to Amity, looking up.

“Wow,” Jazz breathes, voicing that same feeling. “It’s been ages since we were last here, huh?”

“Years,” Danny agrees. Then he opens the passenger door—too loud a motion when awe asks silence—and steps out into the chilly night, to look up without anything between him and the sky. Jazz follows.

The car doors slam shut, and then there’s just sky, sparse woods, prairie. A breeze gusts past that makes Jazz shiver, pulling her coat tightly closed. She and Danny both come to stand a few steps forward, on either side of her car, the hood between them.

Hello, Cassiopeia. Hello, Pegasus, Andromeda, Pisces. Hello, Cetus. Danny traces the constellations he’s known all his life, greeting them, forgiving them their annual transience. If he could, he’d memorize this sight—but he has it all down by heart already. So he breathes the world in and memorizes everything else, instead: the sky, the sparse woods, the prairie. The wind that’s set Jazz shivering. Her and her creaky beater car. The necklaces and trinkets dangling from her rearview, the CD their voices had drowned out, that backseat blanket. This parking lot. Them alone in it, looking up.

“I can’t believe we haven’t done this since… what, middle school?” Jazz murmurs.

“Yeah. For me, anyway. You were a freshman.”

The trip to Middle Fork is one they and their family have made plenty of times. This, however, is the first time Jazz was the one in the driver’s seat. Some new and some old, both. The present is shot through with memory.

“I miss going camping here,” Jazz says, a little sadly.

Danny snorts. “No, you don’t. Eww, bugs! Eww, greasy camp breakfast!” He glances at her as he makes fun, and grins at Jazz’s open-mouth offense. If they weren’t a car apart, she’d definitely reach over and smack him.

“Shut up, Danny,” she retorts. “Okay, I’m not a huge camper. I still liked spending time with you guys. And it was fun, you know, to stargaze with you once Mom put the fire out.”

Four or five years’ worth of summer camping weekends unspool in Danny’s mind, lingering: many here at Middle Fork, many elsewhere, too. He remembers: the summer constellations, the ones he’s always known best. Mom dragging them out hiking. Dad dragging them out fishing. Jazz plunking them down in the tent to play cards around a sputtery lantern. Greasy camp breakfasts in the morning: bacon and eggs and hashbrowns from the cooler, all made in the same pan over a real fire, the best a breakfast can ever get. Being eight, ten, eleven. Skinning his knees and scratching bug bites and—yeah. It’s been a long time since then. For all Danny’s teasing, he didn’t love camping either, at least not the way their parents loved it—but he gets what Jazz means. He does miss it.

“We haven’t done much as a family since the portal started working, huh?” Danny says softly. “Just that one dumb road trip.”

“The Youngblood debacle?”

“Hah, yeah. That’s the one.”

Jazz hums melancholy agreement. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “You’re right. Since the portal.”

Bugs chirp. The wind gusts again, and Jazz shudders, hugging her arms tightly to herself. Danny catches her glancing at him: looking at his unzipped coat, only worn to appease her. At his too-still body in the below-forty night.

“How long do you want to stay?” Jazz asks, turning away, squinting into the shadowed landscape.

“Tomorrow’s a weekend,” Danny replies, ignoring the insistent pull within him, the one that reminds him constantly, incessantly, of the distance between himself and home. “No school, so. As long as you’ll let me.”

Jazz’s lip tugs up at the corner. There’s something on the hysteric edge of amusement in her voice when she says, “I haven’t been sleeping much lately, anyway,” and leans against the side of her car, settling in.

He knows she hasn’t. Not since he told her. She putters about in her room late at night, pacing, working on whatever project she’s currently got her hands in. Normally she’d be at college right now, puttering about just the same in her off-campus apartment, but… well, she came back for this.

It’s late already. He’ll stay a few hours. Stare upward until the night obscures itself. Let Jazz bring them both home when she starts shivering a little too hard, when the night is deep and coldest. In the car, warm, they’ll listen to a softer disc in not-quite-comfortable silence and ride deserted dead-of-night roads homeward. And Danny will relish in the relief that pumps in him, at the core of him, as he follows the lead of that tug. Back where it begs.

For now, Danny leans against the other side of the car, mirroring his sister. And he traces Cetus again.

For all that the Realms keeps its denizens, it does not pay any particular attention to them. That moment of death, when it greets a ghost for the first time, ties them to itself and sings that connection to afterlife—that is the closest most anyone ever gets.

But the Realms communicates in its own way. Its pleasure is sung across itself; its ire sparks dread in all. It ripples out, changes, dreams. It guides its young to other ghosts, to those who can explain, and take care. Its joy it shares. And its grief—

Well. When Pariah Dark was locked away in forever-sleep the first time—the work of ancients, barely successful; they took one seat of his power away but not the other—all ghosts everywhere could feel the Realms’ mourning. Pariah had been a cruel King. But he was King: chosen by the Realms, loved by it. Danny himself had been born into that mourning.

When Pariah Dark was freed—when he lost his second seat of power—all those defeats, all that preemptive grief, it built. It led to something: a breaking everyone in the Realms felt. Even Danny, unconscious following the disaster, was left in disarray; his dreams were cut and broken by the shift.

Everyone was on edge, in the years hence. Everyone was waiting: for the Realms to emerge from its loneliness, for the true mourning to end. Danny felt it, too. And he pretended he did not understand it.

Fall’s chill has descended on Amity in earnest, now—but it can’t hope to touch the inside of Sam’s greenhouse. In contrast to the season, the garden within is warm, humid; its glass walls are fogged to the point of being opaque, and condensation drips from everything. Just the way the plants must like it—and just the way Sam seems to like it, too, despite how the humidity messes with her hair.

Danny is there watching as Sam kneels, sweating in just her favorite tank top, sticky with soil as she repots a… something. A bush? A baby tree? It’s tall and its stem-or-maybe-trunk is sturdy-looking, anyway. Ignorantly, he stands near and watches as the plant is transferred from big to bigger vessel.

As much as he loves his friends, Danny’s never been able to get it to stick, the details of the things they love. Sam’s botanical explanations go in one ear and out the other; Tuck’s tech-wiz jargon swims meaninglessly in his mind. At some point he had at least something of a grasp on it, Danny’s sure—but, too, at some point that grasp fell away. These days, he has so little room for anything in his mind but ghosthood.

He can be here, at least. As Sam does mysterious plant maintenance, he can watch, and offer his hands to help where directed.

“How long have you had this greenhouse?” he asks idly after a while, not really all that curious, just wanting to hear her speak. He’s a little away from her, staring blankly over wall shelving, looking for “plant food”—which he’s not totally convinced isn’t something she made up.

“Forever,” Sam says behind him, distracted with a huff of effort as she scoots the now-repotted (and heavier than it looks) maybe-tree back into place. “My parents had it built when I was maybe eight or nine? That was when I first really showed interest, I think. Mom was thrilled I was into a ‘girly’ hobby.” Sam scoffs. “She wasn’t expecting the carnivorous or poisonous plants, that’s for sure.”

Danny cracks a grin as Sam sweep-sweeps soil off of her palms. “I bet. But it’s still girly enough for her not to disapprove?”

“Yeah. She shows off my flowers to her friends when they get together for tea.” Sam says it like it’s ridiculous, but Danny hears the note of pride beneath her scorn. “Here, it’s this.”

Danny has been making no progress in finding what she asked for, and so sags with relief as Sam reaches past him to pull a large shaker bottle off the shelf: the plant food, it seems. She pops the cap and motions for him to follow, and he does, obediently trailing her steps as she “feeds” the members of her garden. The motions she makes are practiced. The lift, the shake, how she lightly nudges leaves out of her way and sifts soil over scattered plant food pellets—it’s a barely-noticeable sort of muscle memory. Paying this close attention, it’s suddenly clear: this is a routine Sam has settled into over years of the hobby. This is something she could do in her sleep, something she’s so in tune with that she barely has the words to explain it to Danny when he asks. It’s something she’s developed a sixth sense for, grown an extra limb. Danny knew this all already, he thinks—but it’s different to see it.

“Do you still have blood blossoms in here?” Danny asks eventually.

Sam glances at him. “Yeah. But they’re in a case. You should be fine.”

She gestures toward a corner of the greenhouse, and when Danny cranes his neck, he sees them: in a small glass chamber that seems to be Fentonworks design, a full bush of the blossoms is flowering, bright red and dark-stemmed and threatening. But Sam’s right; Danny can’t smell them. If he could, he’d already be writhing on the floor.

“Did my parents make that for you?”

“Jazz got them to,” Sam says, after a moment’s hesitation. She kneels down by a particular plant and pulls a pair of clippers from her belt, snipping bits off—pruning?—as she speaks. “I don’t know what she said to your parents to convince them, but it’s got its own mini version of the greenhouse’s climate control, and it vents its own air. Keeps the pollen out of the main greenhouse.” She thumbs the edge of a stem she’s just cut. “I wanted to keep them. But I also wanted to make sure it’d be safe for you.”

That’s sweet of her, Danny thinks. It’s too bad he and Tucker rarely indulge Sam in this, of all her hobbies.

Instead of following that thought any further, he asks, “Did you keep them because they’d be good to have on hand for ghosts? Or because they’re cool plants?”

Sam blinks, and makes a bemused face, before straightening and tucking her clippers back into her belt. “Both, duh.” She sounds like she’s teasing him, and she is, but there’s also something under it. Disappointment, maybe. Like she’d wanted him to say something else.

Sam turns away again, pushing past that undertone. “Mostly because they’re cool, though. Not a lot of plants have dark stems like that. Not a lot of plants have fun-colored stems at all—like American pokeweed.” She points toward one corner, at a plant Danny’s reasonably sure he’s seen before. It’s tall, with dark bunches of berries hanging from bright magenta stems. “I like the weird ones.”

Danny smiles. “Yeah, like me and Tucker,” he snarks.

Sam rolls her eyes. “Totally. The weirdest.”

Together, they move through the rest of the greenhouse as Sam follows what Danny gathers is her regular routine: watering what needs to be watered, pruning what needs to be pruned, checking things over for rot or parasites or whatever other problems a plant might have. As Sam explains it, the “food” is apparently only an every-couple-months thing. It goes over Danny’s head, mostly—but it’s nice. Following her instead of the other way around. Listening to her expertise, her passion, and asking questions that keep her going. It’s abominably easy to engage with it, to launch her into a tangent, crack a smile on her face which these days is so perpetually fogged with dread. Danny keeps thinking about how, of his visits to Sam’s greenhouse, this one still marks a number in the single digits. And he keeps batting away that thought.

“I wonder if I sent you any ghost plants, if you could get them to grow here,” Danny says idly, lifting one finger to a nearby shrub’s thorn.

Sam turns and watches as he presses down, the pad of his pointer finger easily pierced. He doesn’t flinch.

There’s a beat of dead air where Danny lifts his barely-bleeding finger to his mouth, sucking the wound.

“I’d try,” Sam eventually replies. “Amity might have enough ectoplasm floating around to make it possible.”

Danny smiles thinly. His gaze skates over the greenhouse: so warm and bright and alive. At turns benign and poisonous, carnivorous and not. And, in the corner, in a little glass box, the one thing in this garden that detests death most, thriving.

“I will, then,” Danny says.

He doesn’t expect it to really be possible. But he expects Sam will try.

That interim—that period of mourning—was years-long and echoing and cold. Danny doesn’t much mind the cold, but this was different—this was sucking, and cavernous, and lonely. All ghosts felt it, and avoided talking about it: how the Realms had been hollowed.

How Danny had done it.

It was necessary. Everyone knew: Pariah Dark had been bad for the Realms; had made it cry out weakly, never as angry as Pariah himself was. Everyone knew that the Sleep was a desperate measure, and temporary; everyone waited with bated breath for the person who’d be dumb enough, brave enough to step up and try to really wrangle the Realms from its mad prison—

And, well. It was done by that very combination: one man’s foolishness. One child’s courage. And beneath them both, the Realms’ own ache to be free.

So Pariah was unseated as King. So, within that re-locked coffin, did his core crack, falter, and become nothing. So were the artefacts of his rule reclaimed by the Realms, blinking away from the hands that tried to hold them.

So the true mourning began. Sucking, cavernous, lonely.

And anticipatory.

Nightfall sees Amity Park’s lamps brighten and its temperature fall to breath-fogging. It’s another exceptionally clear night, stars twinkling—though not so brightly as outside the city—and crisp in that way that leans toward biting. Or, it’s probably already a cold that bites, for everyone besides Danny.

Most of the day he spent with Sam, watching her work in the greenhouse and then following her inside when she was done. They surfed the web together for a while, and then Sam read something from one of her poetry books she thought he’d like (which he didn’t totally get, but it did sound nice), and eventually they ordered delivery and curled up together in her basement and put a movie on. It was one they both like, that they’ve watched almost annually and basically know by heart. Sam invited him to stay the night, after it ended—but Danny declined.

Instead, now, he’s out over Amity, not flying so much as letting the wind push him around. Below, he stares down at the familiar streetgrids and rooves, feeling the stars at his back. He likes being this high up. He likes the night sky: quiet, far enough from the noise, almost fish tank-like. Glass between, and all that.

Of course, Danny is rarely the only one in the sky.

Other ghosts roam the night too. Less often the rambunctious folk, these days; mostly now it’s the barely-there spectres, or long-dead birds winging past, or a regular that Danny’s made an agreement with. There are the live birds, too, though those are dwindling now that the cold’s set in. And finally there are the usual suspects: the regulars who still insist on being a bother, and her.

Tonight it’s only her.

Valerie is a red-blink-blur in the night, the top of a radio tower in motion. Her gear hasn’t changed much since the Technus upgrade of freshman year—hard to radically change a suit that’s part of your body, Danny assumes—but the design suits her still. Sleekly, like a deep-sea predator, she darts through the night’s blue. As always, her sights are locked on him.

But not to hunt, this time.

When she catches up, she brakes to match his drifting pace. Her helmet retracts—a vulnerability she’d never have shown, if they were still fighting—and curious eyes seek his. A frigid wind gusts past them, and normally her hair might have blown in her face, obscuring it, but just recently she put some tight braids in. Danny gets a full view of her expression as she shivers.

“Freezing,” Valerie says, voice inviting commiseration. She looks like she wants to put her helmet back up, but she doesn’t. “It’s not even October.”

“Is it that bad?”

Danny’s voice comes out more earnest, less teasing, than he meant it to. A frown briefly flickers across Valerie’s face.

“Enough that I’m almost jealous of you,” she replies, maintaining the casual air. Then she settles down to sit on the edge of her board, idly encouraging it to follow his path as he continues to drift with the wind. “With so little to do these days, there’s nothing to get my blood pumping.”

“Could always chase me around for old times’ sake,” Danny says, not sure if the offer is genuine.

Valerie snorts. “Please.” It sounds amused. It sounds like an attempt to sound amused—beneath the word, Danny can hear it: the incident that changed her mind, weighing. He very narrowly avoided outing himself that day, and Valerie hasn’t raised a weapon to him since.

It sounds like a more substantial shift than it actually was. Really, it was just another reoccurrence of a by-then-familiar pattern: he and an old enemy come to blows. Something drastic happens that changes one or both of their perspectives. They reconcile, and establish a truce or become some other kind of friendly. Hurrah. It happened with Pointdexter and Amorpho and like ten others; it happened with Valerie. And that was all that happened: they ceased hostilities. They stumbled through small talk when crossing paths. Occasionally, they traded patrol duty for minor favors.

What with their relationship freshman year, and their shared connections to Vlad and to Danielle, Danny used to think that between them, something else would happen, change. But he never did move to change it.

“So, hey,” he says after they’ve been drifting in silence for a minute or two. “After Monday, I’m not going to be around much anymore.”

Step down. Snake bites.

Danny tries not to look at it too closely, is trying, really, not to think about it at all, but—it’s soon, and Valerie doesn’t know. He doesn’t expect there to be much slack for her to pick up, after, but… better safe than sorry. She’s still only seventeen. Like he is.

Valerie turns to him sharply. “What?” Her brows knit in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I won’t be in Amity Park.”

“You’re just… ditching?” Valerie gives him a weird look. “After none of the ghost hunters could get you to leave, after how long?”

Danny snorts. “I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘ditching,’ but yeah. After all that.”

“Why?”

Danny looks away from her. He turns in the air, orienting himself horizontally so he can look straight down at Amity Park below him, arms crossed tightly over his chest. In a silly voice, he says, “I have secret, evil affairs in the Ghost Zone to tend to.” The affect drifts off as he continues. “So, I’m gonna be there… more than I’m here.”

Valerie looks at him for a long moment.

“A lot more, you mean,” she says, voice flat.

“Yeah.”

Silence stretches. The wind gusts again, harder than it has been, blowing them forward and making Valerie wince and shield her face. From his periphery, Danny watches her, trying to ignore the writhing snake.

“Well… okay, I guess.”

Valerie’s board drifts slightly off-course from Danny’s path. The gap between them widens.

“I’m a match for anyone that comes by. So Amity will be fine,” Valerie offers awkwardly.

A fleeting smile crosses Danny’s face. He flips up again, sits cross-legged in the air to be at eye level with her. “I know you are,” he says, genuine warmth in his voice. And he doesn’t say anything else.

Valerie’s lips thin. The way she’s looking at him is complicated—expectant, disappointed. “Yeah. Alright,” she says, antsy-sounding, and then—sure enough, she stands. She folds out her helmet again, expression obscured. Danny has no idea what she looks like when she says, “I’ll… see you around then, ghost boy. Make sure your affairs aren’t too evil, or I—well. I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.” The word is molasses as he works it out. Even then, a ghost of amusement tugs the corner of his lip up. “Sure. See you around, Red.”

Valerie kites off, red-blink-blur. And gone.

The night is, again, just his.

When the mourning period ended—when Pariah’s era finally, fully dissolved—all the Realms felt it rise again from dormancy. Everyone stilled—everyone waited—everyone suspected the outcome, but braced themselves anyway, in case someone unexpected was chosen—

But no. It was as had been guessed and whispered.

Danny, in that moment, seventeen and stock-still in his dark midnight kitchen, learned: having the Realms’ full and utter attention was like dying. It was like being made again, like the first time his core brightened, like that homecoming hello he’d first heard in the maw of his parents’ portal. Here it was, greeting him again, directly and personally in that way which before had been reserved exclusively for death.

The Realms, the Core-of-Everything, reached out to Danny and tugged.

hello, it called. Again and again, hello, ringing in the core of him, playing that thread that tied him to it, to afterlife, to existence and ectoplasm-pulsing. hello, it called, acknowledgement—or, not acknowledgement, but attention. Care. Of all its denizens, all its web-ends, the Realms had singled out him.

When it happened, Danny had drowned in that attention. All he had been was a-piece-of-the-Realms, its favorite, its wanted. He had drifted toward the portal in the Fentonworks basement thoughtlessly, barely comprehending the world before him. He had been overcome completely by the tug.

And then Jazz caught his shoulder in the hall, and Danny’s heart jumped in his throat, and he remembered he was human.

Early Sunday afternoon, after making himself a luxurious breakfast and staring for a while at his room, at all of the knick-knacks he’s collected over the years, Danny goes out.

Specifically, out on main street, to a mom-and-pop that gets no business but stubbornly survives, eking out a living. It’s an eclectic, messy place that does tech maintenance, buys and sells spare parts and old computers, and… whatever else they do. It’s also Tucker’s first and only job.

He’s worked here since the middle of junior year, after he turned sixteen, and somehow—between all sorts of ghost bullshit and regular teen bullshit besides—he’s kept the position, barely missed a shift. Tucker’s work ethic was a surprise to both Danny and Sam (neither of whom have had a job themselves, though for different reasons) when he started out, and then more so when he kept at it. Especially surprising was his vehemence that they not bother him while on the clock. It looks unprofessional, he’d told them—snapped at them, really, after they’d brushed off his annoyance the first few times. He’d wanted to put a good face forward, really wanted to. So they acquiesced. Occasionally, now, Danny and Sam will stop in quick to pass on gossip or drop off food—but they don’t linger.

So Danny cringes a little when he steps inside, hears the front door’s bell clang. The main counter is situated directly across from the door, so Tucker needs only glance up to see Danny slinking awkwardly toward him. The whole time, Danny is expecting to be kicked right back out, that familiar get-outta-here expression on Tucker’s face—but no such kicking occurs. Instead, when he meets Danny’s eyes, Tucker almost looks relieved.

“Computer troubles again?” Tucker doesn’t make the relief obvious in his voice. “Gotta stop torrenting all those X-rated gigs, man.”

Danny stops bracing himself. He return’s Tucker’s grin with one of his own. “Man, go to hell.”

A flash of quick emotion crosses Tucker’s face. “After you,” he says, faux-polite.

They do a little back-and-forth of cheeky “no, after you” motioning, and then Danny smiles and straightens and finishes his jaunt up to the counter. It’s quiet in the store. As far as he can tell, there are no patrons around except for him.

“Slow day?”

“Always is. Today especially, though. Owner isn’t here, so neither is anyone that comes in to chat with him.”

“Do you get any actual customers?”

“Ha, ha.” Tucker rolls his eyes. “Store has to stay open somehow.”

Danny leans onto the counter. There are ads and reminders and posters taped to the front of the desk, some old and yellowing, some new, and they crinkle as he leans. This place is a crowded one: every bit of its history is overlaid atop the rest, none forgotten, just buried. Most likely it’s a result of low staffing and nobody bothering to update the signage, or fish outdated stock out of the back of the shelves, or whatever; if Jazz worked here, she’d be fixing that right up. But Danny doesn’t mind it. He likes it, even. It appeals to him: the lingering. Anything can be a ghost if it stays long enough.

“It’s a ghost town in here,” Danny says. “You might as well be getting paid to take a nap.”

Tucker grins. “I do, sometimes. I can zone out so hard I go right into REM with my eyes open.”

That makes Danny laugh, startled, clear and bright. “The detention special.” He grins as Tucker snickers back at him. “So, you got anything to do after this?”

“Nothing,” Tucker says. “No hot dates yourself?”

“Not a one.”

There’s something complicated in Tucker’s face, when Danny says that. There’s something complicated, it seems, in everyone’s faces lately—all different shades of the same thing, different flavors based on everyone’s individual neuroses. No one is talking about it but everyone is stepping on it. The snake can’t bite enough ankles to keep up, and Danny isn’t looking at it, but—well. He keeps glancing.

“I would’ve figured you’d be booked up for the weekend,” Tucker says lightly.

Danny sort of has been. Gotta find time to pencil everybody in, you know, before he’s… busy. “Come on, Tuck. Obviously you’ve got a prime time slot in my calendar.”

That makes Tucker really smile. He raises a teasing brow. “During my shift?”

“Maybe I forgot you had work. You have no proof.”

“Uh-huh. I bet.” Tucker looks away, smiling with that familiar bitter twinge that’s been sticking to the corner of everyone’s mouths.

It’s a rare thing, getting to see Tucker like this: behind the counter, with that silly uniform vest on, yellow nametag on his breast proudly spelling “TUCKER F.” Danny wonders, sometimes, about Tucker’s seriousness—about this strange second self he’s carved, professional, punctual, forward-thinking. None of them have really talked about college—at least, neither Sam or Tucker have talked to Danny about college—but he wonders: what are Tucker’s plans? Is that what he’s saving for? Danny can’t imagine his secret ambition is to take over this little place one day, although he’s clearly working toward something.

Too late, Danny supposes. It would have been a conversation for another day.

Across the counter, Tucker is drumming one hand’s idle fingers on the edge of a keyboard, gazing around the store. He looks… considering.

Tucker’s Sunday shifts, Danny failed to remember when he got up this morning, are eleven to three. Now, it’s about one-thirty, and, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, an hour and a half isn’t a long time to wait for Tucker to clock out. Hell, if Danny remembers right, Tucker’s cool coworker overlaps with him for the last half hour; she wouldn’t say a word if he ducked out early. An hour isn’t a long time to wait.

But it is. But they’re both impatient. But there’s only today and tomorrow before October first, and there’s a reason Danny chanced it in the first place, coming to bother Tucker at work.

Tucker meets Danny’s eyes.

And then he stands, reaches around, and powers off the company computer.

With conspiratorial mischief, Tucker leans into Danny’s space and says, “Let’s get outta here, dude.”

Stunned, Danny blinks, stepping back and watching as Tucker shucks off his vest and snags a keyring off a wall peg behind the desk, picks up his bag, slings the strap over his neck. Tucker’s around the counter before Danny fully registers his words, and his hand is clasped around Danny’s wrist, tugging him along as he heads for the door.

A bizarre, guilty thrill shoots through Danny as Tucker leads him. This job he has taken so seriously, that he has never willingly missed a shift for—he’s ditching it? For Danny?

On the sidewalk outside, Danny watches, unsure how to feel, as Tucker flips through keys and locks the door to his workplace in the middle of the day. As he does, he tugs his phone from his pocket and dials what Danny can only assume is the store owner’s number. With real emotion in his voice, Tucker makes his excuse: Sorry, have to close up, something crazy just happened with family, you understand, bye— short and sweet. The story pours out of Tucker easy, like reality, even over the increasing decibels of his manager’s ire on the other end.

When Tucker clacks his phone shut and turns to Danny, the way he’s looking at him—Danny almost wants to turn away. Lately, every time they’ve met eyes has felt like the last time.

He instead leans to the right and looks over Tucker’s shoulder, grinning nervously. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Tucker says, and Danny can’t hear a hint of regret in his voice. “Come on.”

Danny follows. Ahead of him, for a moment, he sees an old silhouette—of Tucker six-and-eight-and-twelve, young, the both of them ensconced in that sweet and so-poppable bubble of best-friends-forever.

“Smooth,” Danny compliments as he catches up, pushing that mirage away.

“I’ve picked up a thing or two.”

“You gonna get in trouble for that?”

Tucker scoffs. “Oh, definitely.” He turns to look directly at Danny. “Worth it, though.”

Worth it. Selfishly, silently, Danny agrees.

He knew what had happened.

It was as the Realms was: unignorable. He knew; it told him.

But he didn’t believe it—didn’t want to—he raced through the portal and ignored the Realms’ welcome, beelined for every reputable ghost he knew and then some; he asked them all what it meant; he cast terrified eyes on their reverence, tore past their vague and indirect words. He begged Frostbite, and Clockwork, and Pandora, and Wulf, and every text he could find on the subject in Ghostwriter’s library: tell me it is not true.

But no one could tell a lie like that.

The rest of the long stretch of that afternoon, Danny and Tucker spent in town. Together, giddily, they touched down in all their old places: descended on the park playground they’d loved as kids, ignoring judgmental mothers; had late lunch at the greasy pizza joint that was their after-school haunt all of sophomore year; walked the sidewalks of Amity’s industrial district, that which they know well from late-night ghostly trespassing, for fights or just for fun, snickering to each other in the invisible dark. As the hours launched forward, they brushed up against memory after memory, from elementary school right up to last month, and at the end of it all they found themselves at the base of the trellis that climbs right up to Sam’s bedroom window. Like eighth graders, sneaking Sam out of this mansion for the very first time, they climbed it: human, defiant of gravity, stupid. At the top, they tapped illicitly on the glass of Sam’s window.

She’d called them both morons when she found them there, clinging to her trellis, Tucker wincing at pricks from the thorny vines that called it home. But she let them in.

Now, it’s nearing ten o’clock. Sam’s mansion is so large, and the walls so thick, that there’s no real reason to worry they’ll be heard—but they whisper anyway. The three of them giggle and shush each other and stumble to Sam’s canopy bed, piling onto it like children, tugging the curtains closed around them. They flip on a nightlight and spookily illuminate the bottoms of their faces. They huddle close. Three bodies lean back against Sam’s myriad pillows and headboard. Two bodies sandwich Danny in, holding onto him; as always, he’s the middle leaf.

On his left, Tucker:

“Truth or dare?”

“Truth.”

Sam, at his right.

“Do you ever break your vegetarianism?”

“If you can believe it, no. Never.”

“Not even once. Started in seventh grade, never stopped.”

“Dang.”

“Okay, truth or dare?”

“Dare. No, wait—truth.”

“Scared?”

“Terrified. Nah, I just don’t wanna get up.”

“Right.”

“Did you actually never eat a vegetable before freshman year?”

“Pretty much. I was allergic to so much that Mom just gave up.”

“How are you alive?”

“Lots and lots of multivitamins.”

“Yeah. I grew out of it, mostly. Still hate veggies though.”

“I’ll convert you someday.”

“You wish. Danny, truth or dare?”

“Do you still have a fear of heights?”

“What? How did I not know about this?”

“How are you scared of heights?”

“Still? After everything?”

“Sorry, man.”

“I am too.”

“Scared of heights, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Truth.”

“I… no, yeah, you’re right. I wasn’t.”

“Can’t you guess?”

“’S called ‘truth or dare’ for a reason, Sam.”

“Come on.”

“… Ugh, it was a bunch of things.”

“Ember, Circus Gothica—I don’t know. I don’t like falling.”

“Truth or dare?”

“Are you scared?”

“Sam—”

“You barely seem—I just. Are you scared?”

“Of what’s going to happen, the day after tomorrow?”

“Sam.”

He’s been blasé. He’s been not-thinking-about-it. He’s been stepping lightly, carefully, avoiding that snake. Danny’s been laughing, even, making jokes like it’s nothing serious, frankly provoking his friends when he feels like they’ll let him, and so—he gets it. Why she’s asking. Danny gets Sam; she always needs things to be clear, explicit. Danny, recently, has wanted anything but.

Tucker doesn’t follow up his pointed “Sam”s, just looks nervously between her and Danny. As if they haven’t been dancing all over that snake the past few days; as if it isn’t dead already from the trampling. No bite. Just the sick squelch of it.

In just a little over a day, the calendar will tick over into October. But the month isn’t the important part.

Danny picks at the edge of Sam’s bedspread. He stares at the canopy curtain directly across from them, black, gothically ornate. He doesn’t want to answer the truth. But that’s the name of the game, isn’t it?

In his periphery, both Tucker and Sam are watching him, waiting.

So he replies: “Yes.”

Sam’s face twists. Was that the answer she wanted, or not? It’s true, anyway. And so is this:

“No,” Danny continues. “Both. I—I made the decision already, you know? Fear doesn’t even factor into it now.”

“Couldn’t you—” Sam starts, but catches herself.

Couldn’t you change your mind? No. Not really—not without giving something else up. And he doesn’t really want to, besides.

Like before: no one likes it. He doesn’t either, quite. But he doesn’t quite not. But he’s already made his choice. But there’s a reason he made it, at all.

They’ve already had all the arguments they could. Tonight is their last night. Tomorrow, the three of them will go to school like it still matters, and Danny will return home and attend family dinner with Vlad, friends-not-invited—ugh—and then, after dinner, a bare few hours later, it will be midnight. The calendar will tick over into October. The polite veil, waiting for its cue, will stretch sheer. So—for Danny and Sam and Tucker, this is their last night.

No one likes it. But no one wants to waste this time fighting, either.

So Sam catches herself. And she doesn’t say what she had impulsively started to—instead, she stops, and closes her mouth, and looks away. And to the room, she says: “Tucker. Truth or dare?”

No comforting lie was told to him. Only truth rung.

hello, hello, hello, the Realms was calling. To him. For him.

choose, choose, choose, the Realms implored.

A Weight was held in its not-voice. Vibrant, pulsing, already attached to him—if only he’d take hold of it, strengthen that connection! It was attractive. It was bright: not a voice, not a feeling, not anything living language could describe. It was—so much! So much. To be offered the opportunity to hold all of Death in your palms: that was indescribable.

To be told, in a hushed voice, by ghosts he trusted, what he’d be giving up if he took that Weight—what he’d be giving up if he didn’t—was incommunicable.

Truly. No matter how many times he explained it to his living loved ones, they never could understand why he would make that choice.

Monday comes.

It is Monday, September thirtieth, and there is no convenient holiday that gets them out of school. Everyone had uncomfortably agreed beforehand that drawing attention by playing hooky today of all days would complicate things too much, so they don’t. It is Monday, and tomorrow is October first, and today they go to school like good little students. Like it matters.

Well. For Tucker and Sam, it matters. Tucker’s already started, with his job; he’s begun carving out a future for himself that is not dictated by ghosts, by secrets, by what goes bump in the night. His is a future that does rely, some, on his grades in school. Sam’s, less so—but Danny knows her. He knows she will not rely on her parents to coast by after graduation. She, without ghosts and secrets to bog her, will shine. They’ll both be free to take life’s mundanity exactly as seriously as everyone else does.

For Danny—for Danny alone, it does not matter.

So, at school that day, he does not pay attention to the material in class. Instead, he pays attention to everything else: he looks, really looks, at each of his classmates’ faces. He takes note of how they squint at the board, and stick tongues out when they write, and bounce their knees and drum with their pencils. He eavesdrops on side conversations he’d always before ignored: Dash and Kwan whispering about homework they didn’t do, Mikey and Nathan confirming a D&D session after school, Valerie begrudgingly asking Star a question about the classwork.

He looks past the people. Danny traces his eyes along all the everyday edges of the rooms: cracks in classroom walls and windowsills, scrubbed-at graffiti on desks and lockers, etched initials on lunch tables and in bathroom stall doors. Everything forgettable. Danny could draw Casper High’s floorplan from memory, but none of these details would make it in—so he tries to memorize them. He tries to, if he cannot memorize them, take deliberate note of them. At least in this moment. Before all the things irrelevant to him slip away again, like his friends’ hobbies, like his time of death.

When the final bell rings, Danny takes his time gathering his things and stopping by his locker. He drags his feet heading for the front doors. Tucker and Sam, good friends, as they’ve always been, dawdle alongside him. They hold muted conversation. They hold a snake, dead, all venom expelled, together in their arms.

Sam’s chauffeur picks them up again. Sam and Tucker aren’t invited to family-and-Vlad dinner, so, again, Danny is the first to go.

No one liked it, when he told them, when he shared his decision. In fact, they protested quite loudly. It… it took a while, to talk them down. To get it through: that this was a decision that had already been made.

Listening to their arguments—privately, selfishly, amusedly—Danny thought: they’re lucky they got this much time with him in the first place.

Danny’s last meal is the most awkward family dinner he’s ever been part of.

Family dinner with Vlad is always awkward, admittedly; Danny is already bracing himself for the mess that is Vlad and his parents when he first sits down at the dinner table. But tonight that mess is compounded by the other one, his own. On his left, Jazz is very admirably, and very poorly, pretending everything is normal. On his right, Vlad is being normal, but keeps underestimating Mom’s ability to pick up on his “subtle” jabs at Danny. And Danny himself is… well. He’s sitting at the dining room table, not badgering Vlad, for once. And beside that fact, he has no idea what’s on his face.

More and more as the night goes on, Mom tries to make eye contact with him and Jazz. They both avoid her gaze.

“So, Jasmine,” Vlad opens as the excruciating dinner is winding down. “It’s your, what, second year of college? Have you gotten used to being away from home?”

It’s two digs in one: Jazz is here, at home, in the middle of the semester. And Danny—well. He’s the reason she’s here. He’s not going to college. Take your pick.

Normally, Jazz might handle the jab gracefully. But tonight, she’s wrong-footed: “I—yeah! I mean, mostly—you know, it’s one thing being away from home in the first place, but something completely different when you’re whole states away from home, right?” She smiles unconvincingly. “Plus, with my courseload? Sheesh! I needed some home comforts this time around. Some of Mom’s great—um—home-cooking.”

Danny doesn’t envy her Vlad’s interrogation. But he does muffle a snort into his hand, badly disguising it as a sniffle. Mom’s baking is great, but her cooking? Hah. Tonight’s dinner is delivery from an Italian place for a reason.

“Aw, Jazz,” Mom says fondly, reaching across the table to squeeze Jazz’s arm. “You don’t have to ham it up. It’s okay to just want to be home for a bit.”

Vlad smiles, tilting his head in agreement. “Yes, you’re young. Nothing wrong with staying close to home.” His eyes cut over to Danny. “The prospect of leaving it forever is a scary thing, isn’t it?”

Dad scoffs, failing to read the room. “Don’t say forever, V-Man. I’ll wrangle one of these kids into carrying on the Fenton legacy. Then they won’t be able to escape!” He and Mom both laugh.

Vlad lifts his fork, twirling a bite of pasta as he lightly responds, “Well, you never know, Jack, do you? I certainly haven’t been back to visit dear old mother since our college days.”

“No?” Dad asks, shocked.

This proves to be a bad move by Vlad—both Mom and Dad latch on to this turn in the conversation, affronted at the idea of Vlad being so estranged from family—and he is summarily locked into a back-and-forth on the matter. Normally, Danny might even be a little interested—he knows plenty about Vlad’s past with his parents, after all, but little otherwise—but he is thoroughly distracted by an invisible whisper in his ear.

“Gross, thinking of a guy like that having a mom, right?”

With long years of lying under his belt, Danny doesn’t jump. But he does privately grin.

“Hi, Danielle,” he murmurs.

“Hi, Danny,” she whispers back. “Long time no see.”

Still no see, he’d argue if they were alone, what with her current invisibility—but he’s still stuck at the dinner table, and her terrible creator is only a foot away, albeit occupied for now with his parents’ bluster. So he doesn’t. Instead, he tilts his head slightly to the left, and—hah!—bonks it into Dani’s invisible one. Not hard. Just—gently. A greeting.

Because it has been a long time. Her voice has changed, he notes, grown older. It sounds more like his now, except the accent’s different—wherever she’s been spending her time, she must have stuck around awhile, let it shape her. He wants to know where that is. He wants to see what she looks like: whether she’s growing and changing like he did when he was her age, or whether she’s diverged from him even further. They haven’t ultimately spent very much time together—their initial meeting was brief; the times they’ve seen each other since, intermittent and fleeting—but no matter the brevity, those meetings have never been awkward. They get each other. The label “cousin” feels close enough to right; she’s someone of-his-blood, someone he shares something with, will never be unhappy to see—she’s not him, none of the clones were; that was their folly in Vlad’s eyes, but—she’s something close to it. She’s family. Danny’s never gone long without idly wondering where she is, what she’s doing.

He hasn’t particularly thought about who he’d like to have here, when the calendar ticks over. He mostly just… expected it: that Sam and Tucker and Jazz would join him, and that would be all. He didn’t wonder beyond it. But—now Danielle is here. In his kitchen, invisible, unexpected but warmly received. He’s… relieved. If Danny would have let himself think about it longer than seconds, he’d have realized before now that he does want her here, for this. At the table, he’s realizing it—and then Valerie pops into his head, too, and then his par—

Danny shuts that door.

“Glad I could make it,” Dani breathes into his ear. “Why’s he here, though? Is he invited?”

Danny shakes his head no as subtlely as he can.

“Phew. Am I?”

There’s not exactly a guest list in the first place. Below the table, Danny gives her a solid thumbs-up—which makes Jazz glance over, confused. Wordlessly, he shoots his sister an I’ll-tell-you-later look.

Vlad, invited? After the Pariah Dark incident in the first place? No. The very idea makes Danny, and that tug within him, shudder.

It’s about then that he gives up on family-dinner-with-Vlad. Jazz is clearly of the same mind, because the second he starts tentatively getting up and collecting plates, she’s also shooting out of her chair. With their parents and Vlad still distracted by the family discussion—it’s getting heated now, in fact—it’s easy to slip away, up to Danny’s room. A wall clock on the way up informs him: right now, it’s a little after nine P.M..

Upstairs, door shut and ghost security firmly off, Danny and Jazz turn to the room and wait. And then—there she is. Danielle, hovering, ghost-glow healthy, body older. She looks well-traveled. She looks bright.

“Heya, cuz,” Dani says, and then she launches herself into a hug.

There’s the necessary back-and-forth between her and Jazz—oh my gosh, it’s been so long, when did you get here?, are you doing alright?—since Dani had reserved her whispered dinner table commentary for Danny. Once that’s out of the way, though, it’s still nine. They’re all three sitting in Danny’s dim room, lit by outdoor streetlights and glow-in-the-dark stars and a space-themed nightlight, and they have three hours to kill. Less, until Sam and Tucker arrive.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Danny offers into the suddenly-thick silence.

Dani quirks a smile. “Wouldn’t miss it. I mean—no one could, obviously, but… I’m glad I’ll be here for it.”

Jazz, tactfully, doesn’t ask for an explanation, though Danny knows she itches to understand.

“You ready?” Dani asks. Isn’t that the question of the hour?

Ready? No one could possibly be ready for this.

He smiles. “For sure.”

Neither she nor Jazz call him out on the lie.

They meander away from heavier conversation. Instead, Danny and Jazz interrogate Danielle on her travels: about the people she’s met, the places she’s been, the things she’s been up to. They talk and question and laugh—and shush each other, hoping none of the adults downstairs will get curious about their ruckus, and cheer at their luck when no one does—and they avoid the big fucking elephant in the room. Because Danny wants them to. Because it’s almost, almost time.

The next time Danny looks at the clock, it’s just past eleven-thirty.

October looms.

And, right on time, there Tucker and Sam are: standing below his window, throwing pebbles up, so human. Invisibly, he descends one at a time to let them in.

He could do both of them at once, if he wanted; he’s strong enough. But he chooses not to. Instead, in the scant few seconds it takes to fly them each to his room, he goes back to his memorizings: this time, of their hands, their arms, their warmth, looped around him, trusting him to hold their weight. He memorizes the way Sam’s grip tightens, just slightly, as she’s lifted up. The way Tucker’s eyes fall closed—not out of fear, Danny thinks, but why actually, he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t ask.

In his room again, he touches down on the carpet with Tucker while Sam and Dani reunite, greeting each other warmly. Tucker walks forward, too, to say hello, and Jazz joins them, all four chattering greetings and commiserations, the little things they can get in in the short time they have. Danny is glad for it. As they do, his eyes cast down to Sam’s hands, not empty. In them, she carries a bouquet of flowers—none of which Danny knows the names to. He considers asking. But he doesn’t.

Instead, watching them, he detransforms and sits back onto the windowsill—and as he does, something in his back pocket squishes, sat on. His carton of cigs.

The flick of his lighter attracts Sam and Tucker like hounds, who snap to attention at the first spark. He grins at them—gets a stink eye back from Sam for his troubles—and then looks down again, cupping a careful hand around the flame, lighting the cigarette in his mouth.

“Oh, Danny,” Jazz says, admonishing.

“What? We’ve got a little time left.” He waves Tucker and Sam over, who come dutifully. With one hand, he reaches backward and shoves open the window, which gives with only a slight protest.

“Time is definitely not the problem here.”

Danny laughs. That’s so Jazz of her.

“Aw, come on.” He picks the carton up again from where he’d placed it on the windowsill, and flicks it open. “It’s the last one. See?”

It is. It feels like it’s been ages since he and Sam and Tuck stood around on Friday, sharing one—their silly, illicit-feeling ritual—but, too, it feels like everything should be right where they left it then: three cigarettes left. As many days. Of course, nothing is; the days have passed, and Danny has smoked since. So: there’s just the one.

His words make Jazz falter. In her hesitation, Danny plucks the cig from his lips and turns over his shoulder to blow smoke out the window, pointed, teasing. And Jazz—maybe because she doesn’t want to fight him on it, or maybe because of something else—relents.

“Every stupid decision you make takes years off my lifespan, Danny,” she says, with maybe more heat than she meant to put in it. But she comes to join their circle by the window anyway.

They settle in. Danny leans back against the windowsill, taking the brunt of the cold air that wafts in. Sam and Tucker join him, leaning into each other, half for warmth and half, Danny’s sure, for comfort; if they didn’t all need a little room to reach and blow smoke out of the window, he bets they’d be nudged up against him, too. But they do need that gap. So it remains.

Jazz and Dani complete the circle, standing together in front of them, Dani more curious than anything, Jazz shoving away her scorn.

“Do your parents smoke? Should I be worried about generational addiction?” Dani asks, mostly teasing, but also genuinely curious.

Jazz jumps in to answer. “Mom used to, but we haven’t seen her smoke in a long time.” She raises an eyebrow at Danny. “I can’t say I’ve ever had the urge to start, though.”

“Great excuse for cutting class randomly,” Danny says, waving a hand.

“Terrible excuse,” Tucker mutters, taking a drag of the cigarette.

“School admins loved it,” Sam agrees sarcastically. Then her face does something complicated. “Love it,” she corrects.

There’s an awkward beat. To escape it, Tucker pointedly passes the cigarette to Jazz—entertainment enough for everyone to ignore what Sam just said.

Jazz takes it gingerly, and for a moment looks like she’s just going to skip and pass it directly to Dani—but then she (Danny is sure) looks at Danielle, and her youth, and her familiar face, and hesitates. And she gets stuck.

“Come on, Jazz,” Danny coaxes. “Just this once.”

Maybe it’s bad of him, egging her on. It definitely was, getting Sam and Tucker into it. But he says it anyway. But he wants her to, for some reason he can’t name.

And Jazz looks at him for a moment, directly in that way she does, and she sighs. And looks like she’s going to say something—and then doesn’t. And she brings the cigarette to her mouth.

It’s satisfying, when Jazz blows smoke out (without so much as coughing—hidden depths, Jazz, damn) and reluctantly passes the cig to Dani, and she takes a drag, too, completing the circle. Though, in ghost form, Dani’s imitation ghost-lungs don’t particularly get anything out of it—Tucker leans forward and jokingly starts trying to inhale her wasted smoke, which makes Sam snort with too-loud laughter, which sets Danny off—and then they’re all shushing each other, giggling nervously, the absurdity of it all weighing. It’s only once the hysteria dies down that Danny realizes: in all their pausings and hesitations, and now with their snickered half-mirth, the cigarette has burned down. In Danny’s hands now, it’s nearing the filter already. The heat of it bites at his fingers in a way the cold never does.

His gaze darts to the digital clock on his nightstand. Bright green numbers stare back at him: 11:54 P.M..

Danny nods to it as the rest of them calm, getting everyone’s attention. “Almost time,” he says, bringing the cigarette to his lips.

Then he draws in one last inhale.

To put it into as explicit terms as possible, now that the snake is dead:

The Realms, Kingless without Pariah Dark, emerged from mourning and sought a new soul to hang its hopes on. And it found it.

So catches up the past with the present. The clock ticks over into October. The veil stretches sheer. Those called to the ceremony rise to meet it.

It’s time for Danny’s coronation.

The procession begins.

Danny leads it: at its head, ghost-white and glowing, he begins a chain of hands and spreads invisibility thinly down the line. Unseen, the five of them hold hands and sneak quietly downstairs to the lab, tiptoeing around Danny’s parents as the last minute of September ticks down.

Before the portal, that singing, swirling mass, Danny halts them. Not out of fear; at the other end of the line, Danielle stops too, waiting for the exact same thing he is. They pause—the seconds fly away, and—

It happens. That thinness which the Fenton portal punched through, that press-stretch of two neighboring worlds, it intensifies. Dimensions rub together. Old holes tear larger. Ghosts and spectres insubstantial enough to do so press, and slip through, the divide. The Realms hungrily reaches its tendrils into the Living—brushing lovingly past Danny on its way by—and behind them, unprivy to the shudder-thin sensation of it, Danny’s parents cheer as their devices print readouts of the fluctuations they’d been waiting for.

Anomalies dot the world. The calendar’s page flips. Death seeps through, as before.

Without meaning to, Danny had closed his eyes. He shudders—down the line, he can sense Dani shudder too—and everyone squeezes hands, for reassurance if not because they actually understand the way the world just changed.

It’s time.

Invisible to the others, Danny hesitates a moment longer. He turns to look over his shoulder, just once.

There, his parents stand facing a monitor on the back wall of the lab. They’re smiling, leaning into each other, discussing their new data with the same familiar fervor as ever. Their backs are to the portal, and to the procession.

Danny looks at them for a moment. Traces their hazmat silhouettes, still memorizing.

And then he turns and looks back at the portal: his other creator. come home! come home! the Realms nags, part of it still seeping into the Living, part of it receding back into itself, waves crashing out and pulling in. On his core it tugs and tugs and tugs.

Danny closes his eyes. And, finally, he gives in.

With him at its head, the procession steps through the portal.

And the Realms sings its welcome.

Since it chose him, Danny has been back here multiple times, and has felt its insistent tug—but always before, it had not yet been time. Now it is. Now, the veil is thin enough to drag all of him across it, human and ghost both, and he did not even need to be dragged.

The Realms this time of year—it feels different. It feels dead. Danny feels light, like he weighs and is nothing; his anchor to life has raised and he is afloat. By how tightly Tucker grips his hand, and by the aborted gasps of the other humans in line, Danny knows: they feel it too. Perhaps for the first ever time: just how terrifyingly free death is. And just how easy it would be, to give in and stay.

Danny tightens his grip on Tucker. At the other end of the line, Dani holds Jazz firm. Between them, they keep the humans from floating straight out of themselves, and not for the first time Danny thanks that his friends are all so deeply stubborn. He doesn’t fear that they’ll come undone. He holds onto them, still.

In the total embrace of the Realms, in the dead month, Danny shivers. He feels it: not just the tug, but the Realms knocking. Asking to be let in.

Obediently, Danny tightens his grip on the line and flies forward. It is the easiest thing in the world to finally start down the path the Realms has all this time been begging him onto: toward itself. Its center.

So they go: a handheld parade of ghost-and-human, the coronation procession, led by the Realms and Danny both. They lurch forward into deep and cloudy green, familiar landmasses rising before them and falling away. They pass Skulker’s island and Ghostwriter’s library and Sidney’s mirage of Casper, and then they come upon unfamiliar lands, and then nothing at all: just green, green, green. Sam and Tucker and Jazz haven’t plunged out into this, the Realms’ unpopulated sea, but Danny has. In stolen moments, over the years, he’s dared himself to dart further out into it, see how alone he can really get. He’s likened it to space before—but it’s not quite that. He’s been to both, so he can say: there’s a difference between a living vacuum and a dead expanse. This place, the latter, is full and pulsing. People liken death to stillness, absence—but it isn’t. Danny knows. Danny feels it. Death is utter and death is not alive and death is moving, energetic, swirlingly full, tugging, tugging, tugging—

To their left, the sea shivers and splits.

A jolt runs along the line as the humans, and Danielle, react, but Danny is unsurprised as Long Now asserts itself in present existence. He knew Clockwork would be joining the procession; could feel it, even, as their lair made room for itself before it ever emerged. The Realms reveals itself to him.

He can feel the expectation from his friends, as Clockwork, smiling in that small way that they do and yet so obviously radiant with joy, flies up to meet them. His friends expect that there will be some greeting, some explanation. But Danny does not open his mouth. Instead, he shifts just slightly left; as Clockwork comes up and starts the second line in the procession, Danny crosses the gap between them to form its true head. Clockwork settles in parallel to Tucker. Their hand finds Danny’s free one. And as the procession goes on, the shape of it solidifies: between Clockwork and Tucker is the distance of a casket.

Everyone feels it as a phantom Weight falls on their pallbearing shoulders.

The next to join them doesn’t unravel the world to slip into it—instead, they catch up to her already travelling, heading in the same direction they are. Pandora, in a chariot led by twin pegasi, as commanding as she was the day Danny first met her, turns to meet the procession as it arrives. She smiles beamingly, meeting their eyes. When she steps down from her vehicle to fall in line, her steeds peel away and leave them. Behind Clockwork, parallel to Sam, Pandora joins hands and takes on part of the Weight.

The humans rustle, nervous at the silence. But Danny does not turn to reassure them.

They go on.

They find their third and final ghostly participant: Frostbite, standing on an ice floe in the green sea, waiting for them just as Pandora had been, just as Clockwork had watched for the correct time to slip in and link hands. As the procession passes, Frostbite steps forward to fall in line, his ice melting the moment he moves from it. He slips a great hand into one of Pandora’s and his other into Dani’s, who shifts left to mirror Danny: the other bookend to the procession. It’s a reassurance, completing the circuit; it’s a shared Weight. The center space is encircled. The pallbearers bleed relief, bearing only their portion of the burden.

Clockwork, Pandora, Frostbite. Ghosts Danny trusts. Ghosts he knows, and cares for; ghosts who answered his frantic pleas and did not lie to him. It would be untrue to say Danny picked them for this—he has not, truly, had any say in this at all beyond the choice—but the Realms did take his comfort into consideration, when it tugged on their cores, called them to the ceremony.

And—as if merely waiting for the group to fully convene, for Danny to acknowledge its completeness—suddenly, their destination blooms before them: the coronation hall.

The Realms’ center.

It looks just as the Realms whispered to Danny that it would, just as Frostbite told him, when he’d asked: that formless density, all-Realms, which shapes itself to the whim of its King. Here it rises: as tall-and-grand as he’d both imagined and mundanely dreamed. A hall. A sepulchre. A coronation room, a tomb. It fits all his expectations and exceeds them; the Realms shapes it for him.

As they approach, the Realms eases its great doors open, welcoming, beckoning them inside—but they can’t enter just yet.

Temporarily, the procession halts on the marble steps just before the doors. They touch down on the center’s surface, all ghosts respectfully forming feet; everyone’s hands are dropped, some more tentatively than others. The Weight they’d carried between them shifts and falls away, not gone but simply put down. And around him, Danny can feel the members of his procession looking at him, waiting for a sign.

He turns and faces the open doors. He knows as well as Clockwork, Pandora, and Frostbite do what has to happen. But he waits. He sends a slither of selfishness through his core toward the center—and the Realms croons, and curls around him, sympathetic. And it spares him the duty.

In his stead, the Realms announces:

It is not a voice or a vision. It is a feeling, a comprehension, a choice. It is the Realms in all its density. It is the center of all and everything. It gently warns: you cannot be human here.

Danny glances over his shoulder. He sees: Tucker staring into the dark mouth of the hall. Sam, lip bitten, quivering. Jazz with her eyes pressed closed, taking a deep breath. And beyond them, Danielle, the only one of them who makes eye contact with Danny, wearing a slightly uncomfortable smile as she shrugs.

They need no further instruction. In October’s liminality, already a little more inhuman, they know what needs to be done.

And Danny, of course, has to be the first to go.

He’s done it to them already, again and again. This time won’t be so hard.

Danny walks forward, and steps over the threshold.

And as he does—as he plunges into that center, submerges himself in it, makes contact, finally, with the Realms in its most direct and dense of places—finally, the tug in his core ceases.

The Realms, ravenous, Kingless, lunges for him. It’s like the portal again—in a moment he’s split in two, something great-and-terrible tearing him open, except without pain; the Realms pulls him from himself seamlessly, finally, as though all this time he has been a hangnail waiting to be plucked—there is a cool sucking, a separation, and then—

He is one.

It is not like the ghost catcher. It is not like who he was before the accident. It is—he is whole. He is all-of-himself.

And he is not human.

A Weight settles into his arms, one which he automatically supports, fingers curling protectively around his charge. Crossed into the hall proper, for a moment he loses himself in the feeling of it: being in the Realms’ center, the release of its tug, the lovely attention it now crowds him with. Just for a moment, he indulges. And then he opens his eyes and looks down.

And stares at his own face.

Human. Black-haired, certainly blue-eyed if he reached to pull open an eyelid, but he doesn’t have the hands for it and doesn’t want to, anyway, doesn’t particularly feel the need to meet his own eyes. If he were human, he might gasp—as it is he feels his core seize, feels the ghost of a snake sneaking up on him, feels—feels—

not empty. not regretful. you chose, you chose, you chose. The Realms curls into him, trying to coax his gaze away.

Phantom stares down at Danny’s face, still.

He never did end up looking much older than fourteen. A late bloomer, they’d all thought. Now, he wonders—but he’ll never know.

Phantom is holding his humanity bridal style, arms curled, possessive, around his back and beneath his knees. It’s not gravity Phantom needs to support him from; Danny’s head does not loll. The Weight is altogether different—but heavy still, and Phantom staggers forward, leaving room behind him for the next in the procession, staring, still staring—

Clockwork crosses the threshold and comes up next to him. They place a gentle hand on his elbow, a small support. Some of the Weight eases.

Phantom looks backward. Next, it’s Tucker’s turn.

Outside, Tucker is staring at the Weight in Phantom’s arms. His eyes are just barely wider than normal. He looks just barely like he is about to flee.

But he doesn’t. Admirably, with everyone’s gaze on him, he does not turn and leave. Instead, Tucker swallows audibly and steps forward, toward the threshold, reaching out with one hand first, and—

Sam dashes forward and just barely catches his body as it crumples.

Inside the hall, Tucker turns sharply around, and looks at his own body in Sam’s arms. Startled, she stares back up at him. The watching ghosts smile, amused.

Separate from himself, Tucker’s form shudders, seeking—and it latches onto memories: those moments as close as he’s gotten to ghosthood. His Desiree-granted wish, tamed and flattened, empowers him. Duulaman’s vestments, made mundane, bloom out and cover him. In his arms shimmer into reality two tablets: one ancient, etched-into; one modern, stickers adorning its casing. Looking down at himself, Tucker tries to take a steadying breath—but, spirit that he is, he cannot.

Tucker’s form shivers. Spirit, now, he hears it: the Realms’ stage directions. With difficulty, he tears his gaze away from his humanity, and comes to join the procession again. He reaches out and latches on to Phantom’s other elbow, and the Weight eases more.

Pandora, before stepping forward to take her own place, gazes down at Sam, who clutches Tucker’s unbreathing body tightly to her chest. The ghost tilts her head sympathetically, and the rest of the procession watches as she crouches down, reaching out to pry the body gently away.

“No, no—!”

Sam’s voice breaks the thick silence. The ghosts wince slightly, but Pandora doesn’t falter. Kindly, she places one of her free hands on Sam’s shoulder and squeezes tight, breaking the silence herself to say, “Peace. He is safe, I promise.”

“But he’s—”

“He will be preserved until his spirit returns, just as yours will, and Phantom’s sisters’. No other ghosts will intrude on this place while we are here. This, I promise you.”

Sam looks up at Pandora, lost. Then she turns, and makes eye contact with Tucker. And beyond him, with Phantom.

This is where the procession leads, Phantom knows. This is how it has to happen.

Whatever Sam sees in his face, she looks back down again. And then squeezes her eyes shut, and allows Pandora to pull Tucker’s body away.

The rest of them know, now. They have seen it.

So the crossings continue. One by one by one, the procession rejoins itself in the hall. Pandora and Frostbite come easily enough—they, after all, have nothing to give up—but even knowing what will happen, the humans can’t help but hesitate some. They can’t not take a moment to adjust to it: being bodiless. Having nothing to anchor their spirit but their Selves.

Sam, peeled from her body, emerges as Tucker had: as a tamed memory, as close as she’d gotten to ghosthood. Evoking Undergrowth, plants bloom and wrap around her, vine-and-rose, but utterly controlled: not overgrown as they once were, and carefully pruned; the rosethorn vine that wraps her body is shaped, kept in line. Beneath it, a black suit petals out and adorns her, a sharp contrast to the leaf dress she’d once wore. And, in her hands, a single scabbarded sword shimmers into reality.

Following Frostbite, Jazz by contrast has no close encounter with death for her spirit to latch onto. Instead, it wobbles, and looks for something—her form shivers, unsure—and then it coalesces. It grabs onto what Jazz most tightly holds: she emerges into the hall in mourning.

Her spirit wears a dress of black and white: a mourning gown, its veil hiding her eyes, its corset a white ribcage. Beside her red hair, the only pop of color that adorns her is what shimmers into reality in her hands: a teal hair ribbon. One Phantom recognizes. It is an echo of the hairband that found him, back in that unwritten future. Next to him, Clockwork chuckles.

The last, Danielle had carefully tended to the humans’ bodies: caught them as they fell, limp and unspirited; arranged them gently on the marble floor of the entrance; carefully pillowed hands on chests. The flowers Sam had brought, Dani even saved; if she hadn’t snagged them, Sam’s limp hand surely would have scattered the bouquet. Instead, Dani hands them delicately over the threshold to Sam, who struggles—but succeeds in—grasping onto them with her spectral hands.

With her own body, Dani is only half as careful. She crosses the threshold into the Realms’ center unhesitatingly, without care for the way her humanity crumples behind her, though she does turn and makes sure to levitate it over to rest with the other humans’ bodies. Then, she comes to form, at last, the end of the procession.

The Weight, temporarily set down, burdens them again. Phantom, most of all.

At the Realms’ nudging, and thus Phantom’s motion, the procession starts forward into the dark.

The coronation hall is one long room. Its entrance is dimly lit by the green-glow of outside’s ectoclouds, which spills in as sunlight does—but as the doors shut behind them, the hall falls into darkness. The darkness, though, lasts only a moment.

In its stead, two things happen: first, from behind columns and from nooks and crannies, the dim glow of blob ghosts—amorphous, unsapient, friendly proto-ghosts—emerges. Perhaps hundreds of them, native to the Realms’ center and who have taken to the change in scenery without question, peek out of their hiding places to watch the procession go on. Their glow illuminates the edges of the hall and slowly the center of it, as the blobs swim forward, curious about the Realms’ guests.

Second, and so pleasing Phantom nearly stops in his tracks to observe it: pinprick lights flicker and wink into being.

Glitteringly, they sweep across the top of the hall, a wave of light unveiling, a starscape creating itself. It’s an imitation, an ectoplasmic mirage, but—Phantom’s eyes dart across it and he smiles—so carefully recreated. It’s the Milky Way. The Realms has peered inside him and brought out what he’d memorized: hello, Cassiopeia. Hello, Pegasus, Andromeda, Pisces. Hello, Cetus.

The blobs and the imitation starlight cast a dim gloom on the path ahead of them, just enough to see by. And there, at the end, the procession’s destination and the original object of Phantom’s tug lie waiting.

Three platforms rise from the floor of the hall.

The largest, the middle platform, they see from the side. It is a stone dais, intricately etched and rectangular; Phantom knows before they’ve even reached it that it will be just long and wide enough to lie on comfortably. He knows: this is not just a dais, but a burial slab. The Weight in his arms is meant for it.

The other two platforms, pedestals more than anything, flank the dais. Upon them, the two expected artefacts rest.

This procession, the silent stupor Phantom has found himself in following it—it felt as though it could last forever. He almost hoped it would. Hand-in-hand-in-hand with his living, his people, he wanted to forever feel the muted heartbeat in the dormant half-of-him; wanted again to feel his stomach heave, and drop. It might have been eons that the actual procession went on—might have been forever that he wondered, half-regretted, and yet failed again to change his mind—but of course it couldn’t have been. Eyeing Clockwork’s Amity-local watch, it’s proven: since they crossed into the Realms, barely a few hours have passed. It is only three A.M..

So short a time. And already, it ends.

At the end of the hall, just before the dais, the procession finally ceases. The lines pull apart for the last time. For this last leg, Phantom supports the Weight alone, and he stands, arms trembling, as he waits for the first of the Gifts to be bestowed.

It is Frostbite who steps forward. The yeti’s great ice claw cups Phantom’s back, so gentle in its enormity, and his rumbling voice breaks the thick ceremonial silence to Offer.

“To protect your life and afterlife eternal,” Frostbite says, reverent, the words low but audible to the entire hall nonetheless.

Accompanying his words, Phantom feels something featherlight fasten around his shoulders. Simultaneously, before him, another appears splayed out across the surface of the dais: a long cloak, its outer fabric star-specked, its collar yeti-furred. The inner lining—and, open as it is across the burial slab, this is the color that is most starkly visible—is the bright red of blood. To protect your life.

Phantom does not turn his gaze from the dais. But later, when he can, he will see: the cloak Frostbite had laid on his shoulders is the same. Star-specked, yeti-furred, and different only in its inner lining: this, the bright green of ectoplasm. To protect your afterlife.

In battle, long after this moment, Phantom will learn that the cloak he wears is utterly impenetrable from its space-side. In a very vulnerable moment long after that, he will learn: this holds true, too, for the one his corpse lies on.

For that is where he is going, with Danny in his arms: to the dais, the burial slab, to let his humanity finally down. There it will rest, preserved and, as Frostbite said, eternal—but never his again.

Frostbite’s Gift in place, Phantom approaches the dais.

At the edge of the slab, he stills. And looks down at his humanity again.

Danny Fenton. Seventeen. Black-haired, blue-eyed, thin despite the battles and so scarred despite his healing. For all his life, this is who he has been: for thirteen years, only human, unquestioningly. For the last four: a human, who sometimes played at being a ghost.

He was naïve. He was so good at turning away. He was as enamored with being alive as everyone is, and so scared of looking straight at what his death meant—and that fear had held him far before he was ever meant for this.

Half-human. Half-ghost.

He had a choice in this. When the Realms reached out and latched onto him—he could have said no. He thought about it, even; seriously, he sat down alone and gave weight to either side of the coin. If he said yes? If he said no?

For all of eternity, the Realms’ King has had a simple and brutal choice to make: accept the Weight offered, or dissolve. Accept a bond with the Realms more close and intimate than any other ghost might dream of—or reject it utterly; give up your core-connection to the world; end. For all of eternity, very, very few ghosts have decided to reject.

For Phantom, the choice was gentler. There was no end involved. He simply had to, in one direction or another, step off the precipice he’d been teetering on since that day in the lab.

Choose: accept the Weight, and give up humanity? Or reject it, and give up ghosthood?

He thought on it. He did.

And this is the choice he made.

Looking down at his humanity in his hands, Phantom acknowledges: as much as this is him, as much as his people hate to see him go—this is the choice he made.

If time were undone and he were sent backward to fourteen, Phantom would walk into that portal and press that button again. He would relive, and re-die, that pain: again, he would arc with light.

Humanity was his first home. But ghosthood—ghosthood is a gift the world gave him. And no matter how much he will miss living, he will not give his ghost up.

Phantom leans down and rests Danny on the dais. The red cloak spills out behind him like a wound. He is preserved, like the bodies outside, and looks to be merely resting—but his chest does not rise. And adorning him is not the T-shirt and jeans he wore to school today. Instead, Phantom looks down at his mirror: at the hazmat he died in, white-and-black. Just peeking out of the suit, Phantom sees his death-mark spidering up Danny’s throat: lightning remnants that, on anyone else, would fade.

He has made his choice. He has put down one Weight for the Realms to bear (and so lovingly does it take; the Realms preserves Danny with a fond attention, will do so for as long as Phantom reigns), and turns now to the room, to his guests and fellows in this ceremony, ready to take on another. He puts his humanity behind him. And for the Weight of Kings to be conferred, he waits.

Before him, Phantom’s guests arrange themselves: three ghosts, three humans, and Danielle, his fellow in liminality. Each of the first six bears a Gift. Danielle, one-of-each, anchors them. Was her presence planned from the start, Phantom wonders? Was it the Realms who reached out and nudged her home?

A satisfied whisper in his core says yes.

He looks out over them: at his living, somber, in-mourning; at his dead, whose faces are split with joy. For the former: an ending. For the latter: a daybreak, after Pariah’s storm.

It’s time for the conferral to begin.

Frostbite is the first to approach Phantom and the dais. There, ceremonially, he kneels—and with two great paws, he reaches forward and freezes Phantom’s feet to the ground.

Frostbite’s role in the ceremony is thus: to be his same-soul, to anchor him in this moment and in individuality, to remind him who he is, lest the Realms subsume him entire.

“May ice ever hold you steady, Great One, King,” he murmurs, though that murmur rings clear.

Phantom smiles down at Frostbite. The cold soothes. He does not begrudge it that it keeps him still; it keeps him.

Now anchored, Clockwork moves forward next. They don’t rush. In time with the steady tick of their myriad timepieces, Clockwork approaches the first of the pedestals, atop which one of two artefacts rests. Thus is their role in the ceremony: ringbearer.

The ring in question, Pariah Dark’s Ring of Rage, floats just above its pedestal, encased in a fragile bubble of energy that dissolves as Clockwork reaches for it, obediently baring itself. It looks just as it did the last time Phantom saw it: bright green and angry, a mark of Pariah’s rule. Clockwork cups it in their hands and brings it forth from the pedestal, but does not actually touch it.

Instead of to Phantom, Clockwork moves past him, to the slab he has turned his back to. Facing his audience, Phantom cannot see what Clockwork does, but the Realms whispers visions of it to him: of them reaching out and arranging Danny’s hands comfortably together over his torso; of them lifting one limp palm up to slide the Ring on his finger.

“To ground your life and afterlife eternal,” Clockwork says, their voice slicing through the hall as Frostbite’s had. “May time take from you only as much as it gives, King.”

Phantom laps up the vision the Realms offers then: the Ring, kept safe by his humanity, transforming from Rage into something new. The green is kept—but the skull is wiped away, Ring morphing, rearranging itself to suit its new bearer. As Clockwork’s hands pull back, the last that the Realms reveals to Phantom is this: a time-stilling, a Gift from Clockwork, that the Realms’ own preservation of his body may be bolstered by their power.

Clockwork retreats into line with Frostbite, and… does not kneel, certainly; Phantom hadn’t expected them to, but—they do close their eyes, and bow. And, from a ghost Phantom has long been awed by, this is a show of deference he does not know how to take.

So it is a relief, then, when Pandora steps forward to fulfill her role.

In a mirror of Clockwork’s actions, she approaches the other pedestal, atop which floats in another bubble the second artefact: Pariah Dark’s Crown of Fire. Ominously, destructively, it flickers. Pandora’s hands cup it as Clockwork’s had, making no contact, but bearing it safely forward. Unlike with the Ring, however, Pandora does bring the Crown to Phantom. Thus is her role in the ceremony: crowner.

“To empower your life and afterlife eternal,” she says, looking straight into his eyes, her helmet lifting upward so that he might read her full expression. So serious. So trusting of him. “May light guard you always from corruption, King.”

Pandora reaches up and lets the Crown fall into place, hovering just above Phantom’s head. Then she backs up and, too, bows before him.

But he barely notices, too caught up in being complete.

His Crown thins and sharpens. Light erupts from it, an eternal aurora, and frost fractals spiral across its metal. Behind him, those same fractals coat the remade Ring, which he knows without looking, without the Realms even whispering it to him, because he can feel it; it is him; in a way he had not before understood, these artefacts are King and the King is the Realms and the Realms is Phantom, now, Phantom, Phantom—

Together his artefacts shift and shine, eagerly shedding the anger that had before characterized them, unnamed, now, but they will be; they are, after all, his—

And so are the Realms. And so he is the Realms. And so the Realms are him.

Phantom understands now why Frostbite is here to anchor him, why ice is fracturing up his calves and holding him, reminding him; the Realms fills him. Gleefully, wholly and all-consumingly; it enters a hole he hadn’t realized existed, curls into his core and tugs open the web-connection they’ve always had, widens it, opens him to so much sensation he had never known, never thought to want or miss, and he—he is overwhelmed with it—it is not power, not like everyone says, but there’s no other word that comes close—it is the whole of the taste he’d been given—he said it before—to be offered the opportunity to hold all of Death in your palms—no, not in your palms; in your core, your Self—it is indescribable.

Phantom’s mouth falls open. His eyes do not see. The Crown’s aurora flares; the room drops in temperature; an oxygen wind borne all the way from the portal blows open the doors of the coronation hall—

And then, in addition to Frostbite’s ice, three insubstantial pairs of hands fall on Phantom.

And again he sees.

He looks down. He finds there, clinging to him with their shivery spirit hands, his people: struggling in the presence of the Weight to remain themselves in the first place, and yet so stubbornly holding onto him, too.

The Realms calm. He calms.

Himself again—himself-and-more—Phantom smiles fleetingly down at them: his friends, his living. They have already, he knows, been making noise about a schedule to come visit him; Jazz is brainstorming all kinds of excuses to feed their parents. His people. His friends-and-sister, who—even if he cannot anymore reciprocate—will never let go of him, ever.

He loves them. He is so happy they came.

“You can get up now,” Phantom says softly. In this hall, no matter how quietly he speaks, his voice will ring.

For all but himself, the Weight lifts.

There are still Gifts to be bestowed, but the ceremony itself is over. The King has been crowned. The Realms, satisfied, purrs happily all around them. From the corners of the room, the wary blob ghosts emerge, creeping forward in their curiosity until they swim and dart about the procession’s participants.

Phantom, exhausted after it all, sinks to the floor with his back to the dais. His Gifted cloak pools around him.

Pandora, risen smoothly from her bow, looks sympathetically down at him. “We’ll make this quick, hmm, King?” she says, teasing. And then she steps forward to give her Gift.

“Were the third of you here, I’d feel very conflicted whether to bestow upon him the same Gift,” Pandora says, amusement in her words. “So I am glad you did not invite him. King: may I touch your Crown again?”

A flash of indignation ices Phantom’s insides. But he resists it—he trusts her. The Realms do too; if it didn’t, it would not have called her to bear forward the Crown in the first place. He inclines his head.

As she’d warned him, Pandora reaches forward with one hand and skims a finger along the surface of the Crown. When she pulls away, two slivers of frosted metal follow her: cupped in the rest of her hands, the slivers shape and engorge and form two silver circlets, simple in design, without the power of the Crown but with a connection to it all the same.

She turns to Dani, one hand holding out the first circlet, hovering above her palm. “For you, young one.”

Dani ducks her head and allows the circlet to nestle into her hair. The connection is instant. Phantom’s eyes snap to her; hers snap to his. It’s undetailed, indistinct, easily-forgettable—but it’s there. The thing they share, the thread connecting them: intangible, real.

The second circlet, Pandora moves behind Phantom to bestow. Everyone’s eyes but his track her movements as she leans down, gently lifts Danny’s head with one set of hands, and places the circlet snugly upon him with the other.

Dani doesn’t react, but Phantom feels that connection, too. Morbidly, it makes relief bloom in him. Humanity cannot again be his—but he can keep track of it. Always, in the back of his mind, will be this connection. He need only look.

“Is it to your liking, King?”

Pandora steps back into his field of view. He looks up at her, feeling out the connections she’s granted him like a tongue examining something new in the mouth, and he says: “Yes.”

All those Gifts from his ghosts have been given. Now, Phantom turns to his living.

They all look like they want to say something—but the ceremonial silence has gotten to them by now, and none of them do, shifting awkwardly, wondering, Phantom imagines, if it’s really over, if they’re permitted to speak, which body they’re meant to look at—

And then Tucker breaks their huddle, stepping forward, his shimmery tablets in hand.

First, he makes eye contact with Phantom. Then, after a moment of holding it, his eyes cast beyond him: to Danny, laid out on the slab, there forever. Tucker’s grip tightens on what he holds. And he walks up, behind Phantom, to the body that bears the Gifts.

The Realms whispers it to Phantom: that the humans didn’t plan for this. That they hadn’t known a thing of the ceremony—of course not; Phantom didn’t tell—and hadn’t known to bring Gifts, hadn’t intended to, but that they carried the sentiment of Gifts with them all the same. When they stepped out of humanity, the Realms kindly helped them: shaped that sentiment into these shimmery things, unreal-and-real. More real, perhaps, for the beating emotion within them.

Behind him, Phantom cannot see and does not turn to look at what Tucker’s expression is as he bestows his Gift. But Phantom doesn’t need to. After these last, tense weeks, he can guess.

“To give you context in your life and afterlife eternal,” Tucker says quietly, the Realms helping him with the words, holding records of antiquity and modernity in his hands. “May you never be out of step with the present.”

Phantom feels it, when the tablets are laid out on his burial slab. They are not objects in truth, but a nudging. A reminder. An anchor.

Sam follows Tucker’s lead next. With both her bouquet of flowers and the sword in hand, she lurches forward, passing Phantom without any lingering eye contact. He doesn’t blame her for it. She doesn’t need to—she has been staring at him all this time.

He cannot feel it, but the Ring takes note as Sam lifts Danny’s hands and carefully places the bouquet beneath them. And Phantom hears as she says: “To give you confidence in your life and afterlife eternal.” Her voice is not tentative; she speaks the offering as if to imbue it with all the confidence she herself can muster, which is no small amount. “May you race into the future without fear.”

The sword is laid, then, at his body’s side. A nudging, a reminder—but not an anchor. This one is instead a motivation, pushing him forward.

Finally, Jazz. His sister.

Before continuing on behind him, Jazz stops and crouches down to Phantom’s level. Sitting next to his burial slab, he feels small—and when Jazz crouches before him, still (after all this time!) taller than him, he feels even smaller. But not in a bad way. No matter the fullness of the Realms within him, no matter what he has become, Jazz will always be his big sister.

She doesn’t smile. Her eyes are blooming with tears as-yet unshed. When she leans forward and lifts her veil to press a kiss to his forehead—not a Gift but a mark of affection, and allegiance—love is writ deep into the action. I love you, little brother.

Then she stands, her veil falling back into place. And she steps beyond him, to Danny, with that teal hairband in her hands.

“To give you connection in your life and afterlife eternal,” Jazz Offers. “May you always remember, and cherish, your past.”

The Realms does not whisper to Phantom that she has let her tears fall. From the thickness in her voice, he can guess.

Jazz lets her ribbon flutter down to the slab. Another nudging and reminder blooms: this, a pocket of pulsing memory.

Ahead of him: the coronation hall, long and stretching, lit with ghost-glow and imitation stars. To one side, his ghosts: those the Realms chose to facilitate his coronation. Hovering curiously all around: the blob ghosts, his own court. And behind him, out of sight but a presence always felt: his friends. His sister. His living.

The Weight has been conferred. The Gifts have been bestowed. The ceremony is over.

“Are you happy with your choice?” Phantom quietly asks the Realms.

The false stars brighten. Another warm wind gusts through the hall. The very atmosphere compresses on itself—not dangerously, but like an embrace—and all the ghosts’ cores light with giddiness; all the human’s spirits shiver.

yes, the Realms is saying. yes.

Outside the hall, a series of chariots are waiting.

They’re more of Pandora’s. Kindly, she had ordered them here and prepared one each for everyone’s destinations: to bear Frostbite home to the Far Frozen, herself to her island, Clockwork to Long Now, and finally, the humans and Danielle home to the portal. The pegasi which pull the chariots snort and rustle, restless, uncomfortable here in the dense sea, eyeing Phantom out of the corners of their eyes.

“My steeds know where to go, and once you leave them, they know to return to me,” Pandora explains to the humans as the group—no longer a procession—approaches again the threshold of the hall.

The ghosts cross seamlessly out onto the marble front steps, politely keeping a wide berth around the resting bodies of the humans. Danielle is the first of them to cross back out again, her form hazy and indistinct as she emerges from the hall, magnetized again to her body. As it seeps back in, her eyes fly open and she gasps; coughs a few times; rolls over to support herself on her hands and breathes—but once she reaccustoms herself to having lungs, she sits up and smiles reassuringly at the humans still waiting inside.

One by one, they leave the Realms’ center. Jazz, then Sam, then Tucker slide back into themselves; they cough, heave; they breathe. And rest for a moment on the marble, feeling that—the Realms whispers this secret into Phantom’s ear—even though they have reunited with themselves, something is still missing.

Phantom walks out of the hall last. And nothing changes.

Clockwork, Pandora, and Frostbite in turn bow to him, and go. Their chariots bear them off; quickly, into the dense ectomists, they disappear. Only the last remains, its steeds whinnying, waiting for their passengers.

“Aren’t you going to come?” Sam asks, after a long moment. “See us off?”

Phantom smiles sadly at her.

“Not this time,” he says, soft.

He was able to lead them here, sure. And they are not barred from the Realms—they can come back again, any time they like, for as long as they are able. He hopes they do. Knows they will; they never have been easily kept away from him. They can come and go as they please; Phantom will offer them safe passage every time.

But he can no longer lead them home.

Tucker stalks forward and, with utter disregard for Phantom’s Kingship (just as he expected, just as he likes it), throws his arms around him. He hugs Phantom with all he’s got.

“We’ll see you soon, Danny,” Tucker says into his collar. “Promise.”

Like they were just waiting for a cue, Sam and Jazz and Dani barrel toward him, joining the hug and sneaking in individual ones of their own once everyone pulls away. They all echo the sentiment: they’ll come back for him. Again and again, even if they cannot undo what has been done, even if they can’t change this decision now that it’s been made, they’ll come back for him.

Phantom squeezes each of them as tightly as he can without hurting them. On their souls, he leaves a touch of the Realms: a little protection, a claim. No one will hurt them without him knowing. And very, very few will try.

“I love you guys,” is what he says last, before the final chariot bears them away.

Phantom watches them go. He meets their eyes (ever looking back) as long as he can distinguish them, and then tracks their silhouettes, and then stares into the distance until he can no longer recall where their distant pinprick disappeared. Above his head, his Crown’s aurora ripples. Far behind him, a Ring weighs heavy on a finger. Frosbite’s Gift curls lovingly around his shoulders, its stars twinkling as though alive.

And he is King.

And there is no chariot for him.

He’s home.