Chapter Text
Danny loved his favorite pair of red sneakers. They molded to the shape of his foot after years of wear and for that same reason, they needed to be thrown out. Sam tossed them into a trash bin and Danny dropped to his knees in front of it.
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Sam said.
Tucker was snickering to himself from Danny’s bed. He snapped a quick picture on his phone.
“I’ll never forget you.” Danny sat on his folded legs. “I’ll get an identical pair, in your honor.”
“For your sake, no.” Tucker turned his gaze to his phone, listening but not fully engaged.
“What’s wrong with my shoes?”
“Besides the fact that they’re paper thin?”
Sam pointed a sharp finger at Danny. “Bright red doesn’t go with everything the way you think it does.”
“They’re good shoes! They’re like my signature.”
Tucker only looked up from his phone to side eye him. “And you’re okay with that?”
Danny squawked and scrambled to his feet. Tucker saw him coming and dived to the empty space between the bed and the wall. As an act of mercy, Danny didn’t use his powers to chase his friend and they half-wrestled on the floor.
Sam sighed, then walked over. She leaned forward to make eye contact with Danny, who had Tucker in a headlock. Tucker was biting his inner elbow but Danny didn’t seem to notice. “Are you done?”
“No.”
The boys kept at their roughhousing and Sam talked over it. “Let me pick out your new shoes.”
Danny grabbed Tucker’s wrist and yanked to throw him off balance. Tucker fell face first on the bed and Danny gave Sam a quick “sure.” He tapped his elbow and jumped, landing in a showy wrestling pose with half his weight on Tucker.
“Good enough for me.”
—
Sam came over to Danny’s house with a pair of thick brown boots that Saturday morning. “Your lack of style could use an update, dude.”
Danny set down a screwdriver he was using to alter one of his parents’ inventions and narrowed his eyes. “I’m still mourning.”
“Careful,” said Tucker. “Your shoes will start haunting us.”
“Tucker!” Sam and Danny started throwing small things at Tucker.
“You just jinxed it!”
Tucker shielded himself from pencils and stray socks with his arms. “It’s not like they’re gonna get up out of the trash.”
All three of them froze. They looked at the trash bin.
It didn’t matter that Danny was half ghost, Sam was the bravest of them. She lifted a boot over her shoulder as if to strike. She inched her way to the trash.
The ratty shoes were still there, motionless and buried under tissues. Sam lowered the boot and the boys relaxed.
Sam reunited the boots and set them down in front of Danny. “I’m not sorry for your loss.”
Danny glared at her. The brown boots were heavy and could classify as armor in a pinch. He took off his house slippers and tried them on. “These’ll look great with my black veil.”
Sam shoved his upper arm. “You punk.”
“You’re punk.”
“I’m goth.” Sam slumped onto Danny’s bed, where Tucker was watching them like a tennis match. “Unlike you, I wear my black veil year round.”
Tucker pocketed his phone. “What’s the difference?”
Sam made a face somewhere between contemplation and frustration. “Punks wear more color. And commit more arson.”
“And you think Danny is one of those?”
“I don’t intentionally set fires, you know.”
Sam shrugged. “If he let me pick out his outfits, he could probably pass as one.”
Danny focused and let his transformation take the boots with him. The brown stood out, like his green eyes. “How about now?”
Tucker and Sam shared a look. Sam smirked and kept it when Tucker asked, “What’s the difference?” She joined in on the wrestling this time.
—
Danny was bottling some ecto-dejecto when his ghost sense went off. He was having a good day up until this point and he groaned. Danny popped his head out his window and looked up. The Observants were hovering in a line by the roof.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Danny transformed and floated to about the height of the Fenton Works sign. He didn’t bother to greet them. “It’s August, how are you not hot in those stupid robes?”
“Enough chatter, Phantom.” The Observant second to the left had a gruff voice. His speech was clipped and impatient. “Your presence is required at Pariah’s Keep in three days.”
Danny crossed his arms over his chest. “For what?”
One of them muttered under their breath, “For your sham of a coronation.”
“Excuse me?”
The Observant furthest to the right interjected. “You defeated Pariah Dark in combat. The Infinite Realms cannot go another millennia without a leader. According to our laws, you are first in line to take his place.”
Summoned in the air between them was a perfect stack of parchment scrolls. Danny wasn’t sure which Observant cleared their throat—no mouths or throats to clue him in—but held out his hands. The scrolls lost their faint green aura and crashed into his palms.
“Let me guess—this is the itinerary.”
The center Observant said, “You are required to have working knowledge on the laws of the Infinite Realms if you are to be crowned. This is the briefest summary we could provide you in good faith.”
Another spoke, “Don’t feel bad if you can’t learn it all by your coronation day. Most kings have been as incompetent as you are anyway.”
A few scrolls fell to the floor and popped out of existence. They respawned at the top of the stack.
Danny felt his eyebrows scrunch up the way they did when he was moments away from punching someone. “You would know plenty about incompetence now, wouldn’t you?”
“Three days, Phantom.” The Observants faded into invisibility one by one, starting at the ends and moving inward. The center ghost floated alone. “If you fail to arrive, we will assume you abdicate the throne. And we will select someone else.”
Danny dropped the scrolls and the second they hit the ground, they reappeared where he was holding them. They fell in a loop, unsatisfied to lay scattered on the concrete. He chased after the Observants’ shadows with a protest behind his teeth and under his knuckles.
—
In Sam’s home movie theater later that night, Danny recounted his misery looking over the teleporting scrolls. Half were written in languages he couldn’t speak and a handful were sentient. Most didn’t like him.
“I can try to google translate our way out of this,” Tucker said. He was laying upside down in a leather chair that cost more than a used car. The light from his phone six inches in front of his face reflected in his glasses.
“Please,” said Danny. He groaned and became boneless, slumping into a pile in his chair. “I might have to skip school for this and I can’t afford to flunk Lancer’s test next week.”
Sam was covered in scrolls and halfway to being mummified. She let out an abrupt “Aha!” that startled the boys. “I found the law they were talking about.”
Danny hovered so that his head was above her shoulder and the rest of his body poured over the back of her chair. Tucker grunted an affirmation but didn’t move.
“It says trial by combat applies to property, haunts, marriage, parentage, honor, titles, political positions, civil and criminal disputes, and indentured servitude, gross.” Sam extended the scroll as far as it would go. “I’m not seeing an outline on what’s considered illegal in a fight, but it looks like whoever wins a fight wins pretty much anything, by any means necessary.”
Tucker set his phone face down on his stomach. “I hate that.”
“Wait, so even if I outnumbered him, it still counts?” asked Danny. He lifted himself so that he rested on his elbows.
“Yeah, even if you recruit other people.” Danny didn’t need to see her face to know her lower lip jutted out. She always made that face when she was frustrated. “It looks like there’s an exception for fighting over ownership of cores, but it’s basically prioritizing whoever can say they won.”
“That’s like, below the bare minimum.”
“Is there anything about being king, specifically?” asked Tucker.
“Not here. It’s probably in Latin or something.” Sam grumbled a few curses under her breath.
Danny sighed. “Are we sleeping tonight?”
“Probably not, dude.”
“Kill me again.”
—
Danny wasn’t sure how he ended up down this rabbit hole. He had started by researching Sanskrit and now he was contemplating if he should invest in a twelve pack of enamel pins and a sewing kit. Procrastination was a drug.
He wouldn’t admit it at thermos-point, but something about what Sam said stuck with him. She called him punk and the percussive echo of the word ricocheted in the back of his brain. He found the dictionary definition on the first page of search results unsatisfying and down he went.
He had twelve tabs open, three of which were stores he couldn’t afford but circled back to stare at their overpriced clothes. There was a leather jacket at a shop with a pretentious French name he couldn’t pronounce. He could see himself covering it with patchwork and chose not to examine that feeling right now.
Danny scrolled through Tumblr on a secret account he guarded more closely than his identity. Someone posted about how they thrifted most of their clothes and he got an idea for how he could procrastinate tomorrow.
—
Amity Park had three thrift stores, one of which was too religious for Danny to feel comfortable walking into without a cross around his neck. He had two chances to find the perfect leather jacket, a mostly complete sewing kit, and some jeans he wouldn’t mind ripping to shreds.
Maybe against his better judgment, he didn’t bring Sam. She had more of an eye for fashion than he did, but that was the problem. Danny didn’t want Sam to dress him, he needed to find out what he liked for himself.
The thrift store was small but Danny got lucky. He found two pairs of jeans and some glorious gray cargo pants he fell in love with. They were made of sturdy material and had plenty of room for him to move. He ran his fingers over the fabric the entire walk to the next store.
Tucked in a corner of the men’s section of the next store was a hunter green leather jacket. It wasn’t the color Danny was looking for—it was better. He liked to think some employee hid it there trying to wait out the customers and buy it for themself. Danny snickered and walked his smug behind to the checkout counter.
When he got home, Danny didn’t wait. He put on his new boots and new jacket and new cargo pants. The smell of the spray cleaner the thrift stores used clung onto his skin but he didn’t care. He hovered in front of the bathroom mirror so he could see all the way down to his shoes.
He examined his reflection with a bittersweet smile. His red and white shirt didn’t match. Danny liked this shirt. He wondered if he would like a new one more.
Just for a moment, he hesitated. Danny hadn’t been shirtless for more than a shower in the past year. His death scar wasn’t all that visible in human form, but it made him nervous people would notice. The scar was a pale green across his wrist and chest, as if his veins were branching off to accommodate the path of the electricity that made him what he is now.
He shed the jacket, feeling smaller than he was. He hated that feeling. Danny looked himself in the mirror, covered and safe and angry. He tore off his shirt and almost ripped a seam.
So maybe Danny was being dramatic. His wrist had the worst of it and he could get away with saying his veins were quite visible. His chest was a winding estuary of pale green scar streams, banked by the sandy planes of his skin and his three proud chest hairs. The scars were expansive but not saturated with ectoplasm like he feared.
He put the jacket back on. Danny thought he looked stupid wearing a jacket without a shirt, but he breathed a little easier.