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[schrodingersghost]

Who: Danny and Anyone
What: Danny realizes that yes, he did just give up on having a secret identity here. 
When: Catfish Day 12, Shortly after the bonus mission returns
Where: Luggage Car

While on the mission, Danny had given up the pretense of being a normal human and transformed in front of everyone. At the time he was convinced that there was no other choice. And there had been so many things to do, so many things to worry about, that he hadn't had time to think through the consequences of what he'd done.

He had time to think about it now.

Which was why he'd fled to the first place he could think of to be alone as he rapidly descended into a state of panic over what he had done. 

Comments

[enthunder]

The problem with the luggage car being seen as the place you could be alone, was that when this many people were crammed together in a relatively tiny space, more than one person wanted to be alone at the same time. Generally.

So it stood to reason that Lightning wasn't even surprised to see Danny when she entered the car. Her first instinct was to turn and leave, let him have his space, but with the combined forces of growing responsibility and the fact that he just looked miserable...

"You, uh, wanna talk about it?"

[schrodingersghost]

He twitches nervously at the company. Fretting over what ifs and trying to figure out the chances on whether his stay on the train was going to end in dissection and/or exorcism was not great for his nerves.

His first thought was to immediately say no. Talking about what was bothering him was kind of the last thing he wanted to do at the moment.

But on the other hand... He had some questions that he could really use answered. And who better to ask than someone he didn't know.

He shifts nervously, and finally blurts it out.

"What do you think about ghosts?"

[enthunder]

She's only moments away from dropping a 'forget about it' and making her escape when he answers her, and she blinks. It's not that she was expecting a normal question - not here - but even so. One eyebrow lifts, before she smooths out her expression again.

"Ghosts? Who knows. It's not as if I've met any to have an opinion of them."

Other than the apparitions pulled in with the Phantom Train, but that was more a memory of a memory than an actual... Ugh, she wasn't gonna try to explain that. "Why?"

[schrodingersghost]

"I just want to know what people think of them here." He frowns and hunches his shoulders, his worry obvious in every gesture.

"Back home lots of people are scared of them. Or they say that they're all evil."

[enthunder]

"You're talking about the remnants of people who've died... right?" She wasn't sure if perhaps the translation effect was muddling it. She'd not really thought much about it, but Yuna had talked about the Sending, once. Spirits becoming fiends? But that had been a quirk of her world, not some universal law.

She shook her head, dismissing her train of thought, and leaned against the wall beside the door. "You know, at least some of the group here think they're dead in their own worlds. If someone's got a problem with ghosts, I've got bad news for them about how outnumbered they are."

[dredefulchilde]

Joscelin is less than sympathetic when he tracks his (now former?) roommate back to the luggage car.

"You're not the only one with preternatural abilities on this train," he points out, taking a seat on a large duffel bag. "I gave up pretending I was human ages ago."

[schrodingersghost]

....Joscelin, that is the least helpful thing to tell someone in the middle of secret identity panic.

"I am human," Danny says grumpily. "Mostly. I mean, I don't know the exact percentage, but I'm probably still at least half."

[dredefulchilde]

“I was human,” Joscelin counters, “Until a vampire decided she wanted a pet. That was seven centuries ago.”

He leans back, stretching his small body. “What happened to you? Because—you smell perfectly human right now. Rather more so than when you went all...white and ghostly on us.”

[schrodingersghost]

There was no easy way to put this.

"I was inside a transdimensional portal to the ghost dimension when it turned on," he says bluntly. "I can go back and forth between being human and ghost."

He still didn't know whether he'd actually died or not. Whether he was a human with a ghost form or a ghost that had kept a living body. Or whether he was just somehow stuck halfway between.

And maybe it was something he didn't really want to know the answer to.

[dredefulchilde]

Joscelin blinks. “That’s...one I haven’t heard before.” He walks over to Danny and sits in front of him, looking up at the much taller boy.

“You seem quite alive,” he muses. “I can hear your pulse and the blood moving through your body. Had I not seen what I saw before, I would have assumed you were a completely average and thoroughly boring human teenager. How very fascinating.”

[azrthmtrnznthos]

Raven had met her new room-mates, even though her cabin hadn't changed. Then had carried her backpack, along with the blanket and pillow, to a quiet cabin. Fully intending to kidnap it and hermit there for a good day or so, other than coming out for food.

She needed it after the mission, with all of the people and emotions. Mostly because she'd done what she could do try and passively keep those emotions from turning hostile or combative. It had been tiring in a way she didn't know if anyone else would fully understand, and she didn't want to ask.

But that growing sense of unease, had been noted. And was continuing to get worse, with sharp spikes of fear and worry until it was this huge knot of panic. Which made her sigh; Raven didn't think she could ignore that--not after all they'd been through recently.

Homing in on the panic, huddled in her cloak and cowl and phasing through cars as needed via dark-energy portals. Straight to the Luggage car, and the now obvious source of that panic. "Danny...." Raven kept her voice quiet and soft, genuine concern obvious even though she was weary. Gliding over to come and sit beside him, offering company and waiting for him to start, if he wanted.

[schrodingersghost]

Absolutely nothing bad had happened. No one had even said anything to him.

That didn't stop him from tearing himself up in anxiety over what ifs and unnamed dread.

What if there was someone on the train likes the Guys in White or Vlad and they heard? What if his parents or Val somehow showed up here now and found out?

And even if there weren't any ghost hunters or ghost scientists here and he didn't have to worry about being dissected... If the whole train came to know he was half ghost, would everyone still treat him the same way?

People had told him that it was okay here to be someone with powers. But there was a difference between hearing that and believing it.

When Raven comes in he seizes onto the distraction.

"Hey, Raven," he says quietly. "Everyone going all right everywhere else?"

[azrthmtrnznthos]

"Aside from the fact that the train switched rooms on several of us, things seem to be fine." Raven responded. "I don't want to think about how high your blood pressure is right now, considering the panic I can feel you're under."

[schrodingersghost]

"I'm trying not to think too hard about that right now, thanks."

Denial and distraction was a perfectly valid coping strategy.

[azrthmtrnznthos]

"Then talk to me about it instead." Raven offered. "No judgement, no laughing. Because I can feel it eating at you, and I want to help."

[so_dark_a_road]

Curufin had been one of those people who had seen Danny transform, but he hadn't had time to ask him about it. But now he comes into the luggage car to look for a bag he could use for project purposes, and the first thing he sees is Danny sitting amongst the luggage looking very worried indeed.

"Danny? Are you all right?" he asks.

[schrodingersghost]

"I'm fine!" he blurts out. "Completely fine! Why would I be upset?"

From the way his gaze was flickering nervously around the car without every looking straight at Curufin, it couldn't be more clear that the opposite was true.

[so_dark_a_road]

"I'm sure you're fine," answers Curufin, quietly. "But you do look worried. I saw you change your form, and so did everybody else who was on that mission to get the last holdouts off the planet. Don't worry about what I think. I also have the capacity to revert to a ghost-like form, but I hardly ever talk about it. I certainly won't judge you or see you as monstrous."

[schrodingersghost]

And that shocks Danny into staring straight at Curufin.

"You're a halfa too?" he blurts out. "I thought I was the only non-evil non-clone one."

[so_dark_a_road]

"What's a halfa?" Curufn asks. "I'm an Elf, and in my world, we differ from mortals in that we are bound to the earth unto its ending. When we die, our spirits don't depart from the earth. We either linger in the world in ghost-form, as I did for a time, or we go to our death-god's dim halls and remain there awaiting the gods' approval for our reincarnation. They may or may not bestow it. Only, what most Elves don't know is that we don't need to wait until the gods re-embody us. We can do it ourselves, though it's a little tricky. I refused the summons of Mandos and wandered the earth as a spirit, and I figured out how to re-embody myself. I can also revert to spirit form, though that's as difficult as going the other way. But I didn't get much practice before I was seized by a great power and taken to a world that resembled mine but was not my era. And then I went to yet another world. In both, I reverted to spirit form at one time or another. And now I'm here. That's my story in a nutshell."

He notes Danny's qualifying language. "I'm not evil, though I made some terrible mistakes during my lifetime. I've spent all the time since my death rectifying them. And obviously, you're not evil. But what's this clone thing?"

[myblueskies]

Romeo had seen Danny change and fly up into the sky with Raven but hadn't thought twice about it. After all he knew lots of people with strange and wonderful abilities. He himself had done his invisible spell earlier to get past the adults to the kids.

What he did notice though was that Danny ran away once they were all back on the train! That wasn't good. Was Danny scared? The planet had been very scary at the end there. Still Danny had been nice so Romeo wanted to help him keep his spirits up! He followed him to the luggage car.

"Are you okay Danny?"

[schrodingersghost]

Danny glances up at Romeo and makes an effort to calm down. He rather liked the kid, from their meetings so far, and the last thing he wanted to do was freak him out.

"Fine," he manages. "I'm just, you know, thinking about stuff."

Like all the very, very good reasons he'd had for hiding his identity over the last two years and how he'd just thrown all of that out. Admittedly, for a good reason. He didn't regret shielding everyone from the debris in the sky.

But, it still meant that for the first time in two years (that hadn't been an incident immediately wiped from existence), he'd openly revealed himself as a living human who was also a ghost.

[myblueskies]

Romeo got closer, hopping up to perch on some luggage as he looked at Danny. It looked like he had been thinking really hard and needed some help keeping his spirits up.

"There's a lot of stuff to think about!" Big questions, big grown up thoughts. "It was really scary watching the world break like that, I never knew a world could just break and stop and all go to fire. Volcanoes are really scary! But you were really brave! You flew and stopped all the rocks from hurting anyone."

He smiled, everyone had been very brave but it had to have been scary flying up into the sky in all that ash and fire like that!

[schrodingersghost]

"Brave, huh." Danny was never entirely sure what to say when people told him things like that.

True, he'd never been that close to a volcano before. But he'd also known before volunteering for the mission that he'd probably be able to survive it. Was that really being brave or was it just knowing what he could handle?

"No one got hurt, right? Nothing got through from above?"

[myblueskies]

"No no one got hurt! You blocked everything!" He grinned, "How did you do it? Is it magic that you got?"

There's a lot of people with magic here! Different worlds had lots of different magics! It was good that Danny was so good at his magic and that he had been brave enough to help everybody!