#this is very quickly being edited and posted on lunch break please bear w/ me
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Feet on the Ground
loose phic phight fill for @oldfashionedbattlehymn
warnings for: murder attempt, discussion of child death
********
Danny wakes up in a garbage bag.
It isn’t as gross as it sounds. Danny’s the only thing in there, and it’s not like the lack of air is going to kill him; he could rip his way out, but honestly, going intangible is just as effective and twice as easy.
And, of course, once he’s phased his way out of the dumpster behind the gas station, Danny is very, very grateful that he didn’t even try. Everything else in there is….eeugh. He shivers.
Well. It’s got to be early morning now—it’s dark. There’s no other cars on the highway. Even the gas station itself is closed, and the stars have already lost their spark.
Time to head home.
*
Danny wakes up behind the gas station. Again.
…Okay?
The first time, Danny had just assumed he’d fallen asleep somewhere weird while flying around the neighborhood, but a second time is a pattern. It’s definitely not his fault this time either, because there’s no way he would have duct taped his arms and legs together or slapped a gag on his mouth.
That’s kind of. Ominous.
Danny frees himself of the garbage bag first— and thank goodness he doesn’t have to breathe— he floats himself out of the bag and the dumpster, which had…thankfully been given a good scrubbing since last time? There’s some other trash, apparently, but nothing sharp enough to cut through his durable, tape-based bonds. It takes some finagling and some eye lasers for Danny to finally get his arms free.
And. Hoo Boy. There’s no more liberating a feeling than peeling tape off your mouth, even if your mouth skin kind of comes off with it and you bleed a little. But it’s fine! It’s green, which means it’ll heal.
Fabulous. Danny zooms off invisibly into the night, more than willing to put the night behind him.
*
…Okay, the third time is what makes it more than a coincidence.
Danny shucks out of the bruise-tight ropes around his wrists, torso, knees, and legs, spits out his gag, and flies home. He finally has to give into the inevitable, and attempts the last resort:
“Jazz?” he whispers, slowly rocking his sister in her bed. Jazz mumbles in her sleep.
“Jaaaaazzy…” Danny tries again, trying not to look either too spooky or too imposing. Jazz’s reflexes are such that—
The laser she keeps under her pillow goes off. Danny loses a few millimeters of hair, which means that her aim is getting better.
He doesn’t have any trouble seeing in the dark (or, uh, not anymore, anyway), but it’s easy to see Jazz’s sleepy squint as she pulls herself somewhat upright. More like a shrimp with scoliosis, but, well. You know.
“Whuh,” Jazz asks. “...Danny?”
“Hey,” Danny whispers, a ghost at her bedside. Jazz grunts. “Uh. What does it mean when you keep waking up in a trash bag behind the gas station?”
Jazz blinks. Jazz rubs her eyes. Jazz blinks again, looking more sleepy than coherent but at least somewhat aware of her surroundings.
“Garbage bag?” Jazz asks blearily. “You were in a garbage bag?”
“Yeah,” Danny whispers back. “My legs were tied down?”
“...Danny, were you murdered?”
Danny stops.
“Huh?” says Danny.
*
“So, if you look here,” Tucker points out, finger not quite touching the glass of his CRT monitor, “That’s when Danny gets murdered.”
There is a collective eeew from the assembled viewers— Jazz, Sam, and Danny, all crowded in Tucker’s room.
“Yeah, Tucker agrees. The light from the black-and-white footage flashes in the reflection of his glasses. “Here’s where he’s tossed in…there. And this is when they tossed him in the dumpster.”
There’s no sound on the gas station surveillance footage, but Danny imagines that his body clanged on the way in. What the hell. Danny got murdered behind a gas station, and he didn’t even notice?!
They watch the archived footage of a Ford F-150 driving off the property, and then Danny’s dead body being unceremoniously tossed in a dumpster. It’s kind of surreal. No one had noticed. There was no one to report the crime committed.
“I can’t believe that guy just clocked you over the head, like that,” Sam points out. “It’s just a regular car jack. It shouldn’t have gotten you in the first place.”
The observation isn’t appreciated.
“Be nice! My brother was just murdered,” Jazz scolds. Danny doesn’t think she sounds as offended as she should be. “Either way, it’s certainly an attempted murder, if not a successful one. We have to do something.”
“…Can’t we just call the cops?” Tucker asks, turning away from the computer. “I mean. Look. That’s proof. We have proof right here.”
Sure enough, there is footage. Right there. There’s Danny’s murder, in 240p black and white.
“Where’s the body?” Sam asks dryly, and. Uh. That’s a problem they’ll have to solve.
Everyone looks at everyone else. No one has a good solution.
“…Do we have to do this?” Tucker realizes at the same second as the rest of them.
Jazz looks at Danny. Danny looks at Sam. Sam looks at Tucker.
Tucker stares back at them, entirely unenthused with the conclusion they’ve come to.
“…Okay then,” Jazz exhales. “How do you want to do this?”
*
Sam ends up on top of the gas station, a cell phone in her hand.
Tucker, PDA in hand, sits in Jazz’s passenger seat. The camera feed is ongoing and recording for posterity.
Jazz taps her fingers on the wheel of her car. There isn’t anywhere better to hide than down the road and around the corner, so she does, hoping that they’re on the other end of the road from whoever’s killing her brother every night.
Danny is, of course, wandering through the neighborhood.
Losing her baby brother—on purpose—is the worst thing Jazz can imagine. She feels sick. She wants to throw him into the car and speed away, and break every speed limit law in the county on her way out. She wants to pack him in bubble wrap and ship him expedited to France.
But she does leave her brother alone. She lets Tucker look over the footage as Danny roams around town, just as unaware and unsuspecting as his last few outings.
Tucker sees the man first.
He bolts upright, eyes on his PDA. “Jazz.”
Her head whips around. They watch, silently, as someone approaches Danny’s lone figure on the doorstep outside the gas station.
They can’t hear anything. That’s the scariest part.
“Call,” Jazz demands. Tucker does.
Doubtlessly, on the roof of the gas station, Sam is dialing too.
*
So. Danny knows this guy.
And. Uh. It’s kind of embarrassing; he’d asked if Danny was okay walking home alone at night a few hours before his dumpster wake-up call, and Danny had said it was fine.
Apparently, no, it wasn’t fine. That being said, Danny hadn’t been expecting a guy in a button-up and khakis to be the guy murdering him on the down low. He kind of looks like the dude who sells you televisions and burner phones at a Wal-Mart.
The guy comes all the way over to where Danny is sitting on the thin concrete step of the gas station. His breath fogs up from the weather and his eyes rake over Danny, up and down; down and up.
“Hey,” he says, looking all the world like any other concerned citizen. Danny’s heart throbs. “It’s cold outside. You need a ride back to town?”
“…No,” says Danny, who doesn’t.
“Your mom okay with you comin’ home late by yourself?” the man asks nervously, hands going to his hair.
Danny thinks about how many times he’s woken up in the dumpster. He thinks about seeing his own body on the camera tape. Prone. Dead.
“You still keep a car jack in your passenger seat?” Danny asks instead.
The man freezes. An attempted murderer he might be, but he’s not exactly an Oscar-winning actor. “What?”
“The car jack,” Danny repeats. He doesn’t know if he’s mad the man keeps targeting him, or whether he’s grateful Danny’s the only one who’s died so far. “It’s got a lot of sharp corners. They hurt, you know.”
The man…carefully laughs the statement off, but he looks. Nervous.
Danny doesn’t really need to confront him; he only has to stall long enough that Tucker or Sam can call the cops, so that they can see this man’s face and get him on the record. But.
There’s a part of Danny…
The man looks so human. Flush with blood. Solid enough to break. Fragile enough to be made broken.
Danny still resents being made dead. This man didn’t kill Danny—not in any way that mattered, but he’s an easy target.
He doesn’t breathe. The man watches a boy sit in the shadows of a building where he’s been dumping bodies, and Danny can taste his fear.
“It hurt a lot,” Danny says, and he isn’t referring to waking up in the bags every couple of mornings in the last few weeks. “It hurt so much. I was screaming.”
The man is silent.
“Do you like to hear the screaming?” Danny asks, suddenly curious. Did he care, if Danny had screamed, or if he had been too unaware to notice he was dying? Would he have cared, if there were others more breakable than Danny that he had hurt?
He doesn’t answer.
“I don’t like it,” Danny confesses. In a horrible way, it’s easy to tell his would-be murderer about his death—unlike Tucker or Sam, who witnessed it, or Jazz, who loves him, this man can’t be affected by Danny’s take on his own death. In fact, if he is hurt by the thought of Danny’s death…good. It’s better if he is. If there is remorse in him. “I don’t like to hear screaming. I screamed for so long, and so loud. It felt like forever.”
The man’s hands curl. He steps back.
Danny can’t help but to frown. If he leaves, the whole point of calling the cops will be for nothing, and he’ll be warier of coming back to where Danny’s body was dropped. “Where are you going?”
The man takes another step back. Danny rockets upright. He’s on his feet in seconds. “Weren’t you here for me?” Danny asks, genuinely confused, arms outstretched. “We’re here. You dumped me here over and over again.”
“Shut up,” the man snaps, startling the both of them with his volume. “He—you’re not real. You’re… Be quiet. I have real things to get done tonight!”
Danny’s dead heart throbs. Is there another dead kid? Did Danny let another kid get killed in Danny’s place? “Do you?”
The man loses his voice.
“We’re already here,” Danny points out. He steps closer—closer to the truck that drove his dead body around town, further from the dumpster where his body had been dropped. The disposal hadn’t been a funeral, but it’s closer than anything Danny’s ever had. “You’re here. I’m here. Aren’t you here for me?”
A choked breath. Danny gets closer. The ectoplasm in his skin is too warm and too cold—but he has no idea what he looks like from the outside. Is he glowing? Is he see-through? Does he just look like any other dead kid: a little too cold, a little too pale?
They’re eye to increasingly shorter eye. Up close, the man just looks like any other guy. Shaved in the face. Wrinkles around his eyes. A nose. A mouth.
Danny’s not afraid of him. His head tilts. “You’ve already killed me three times. What are you going to do now? I’ll just come back again. I won’t even notice. I died. I know what you look like—I know how to find you. It’ll be easy.”
The man’s pupils dilate—
And then there’re hands on Danny’s neck. And. It’s kind of painful, but Danny doesn’t have to breathe. So. He just kind of…pretends to be hurt?
He’s meant to be stalling for time. The cops are coming. All he needs is time.
So Danny makes some somewhat dramatic sounds and kicks out with his feet, because a fight lasts longer than a passive victim. He lands a hit to the man’s stomach, and another to his chest—he doesn’t drop Danny the way Danny might have expected, but Danny isn’t going to run out of air, so this can last forever until the man lets go. Or does something.
“Stop— coming— back,” the man snarls, and suddenly sounds nothing like the dudes who man the tech counter at the Walmart. “I got you— you should be gone!”
Danny is gone. But he’s also here. And he’s also been gone for a very long time, and he’s also getting choked out by a guy in a gas station parking lot. It’s been a rough few hours of waiting for this dude. He might as well make it worth it.
So maybe his body turns a little translucent. Just a little. Just enough to see the streetlight through his skin, probably, and the hazy road behind them.
Getting thrown to the concrete hurts, but, you know, not as badly as getting tossed into a wall by Skulker on a rampage. Danny’s barely going to be bruised after this.
The guy runs to his car, and Danny frowns, scrambling back up, and, wait. Wouldn’t having bruises be better? As evidence? They better not heal too quickly, or else that’ll be it of his physical proof.
“Where are you going?” Danny asks, more perplexed and angry than anything. Isn’t he supposed to try to kill the witness??
But the guy hauls butt into the cab of his truck— and then the lights go on and the tires start spinning, the engine roaring to life.
If Danny wasn’t actively on camera at the moment, it would be easy to fly after the car. As it is, he’s pretty fast, but he’s not quite quick enough on his feet to chase after a pickup truck careening down the highway in the dark.
The man’s gone in a few seconds. Honestly, Danny’s kind of annoyed about the whole thing. It would have been nice for it to work.
Sam climbs down from the roof of the gas station, phone in her hand. “No, I just— he choked out my friend and drove off! Send someone over here already!! You— do you need the license plate again?!”
Danny just looks at her. Sam covers her phone’s mic with a hand: “They’re saying five minutes,” she mouths.
Great.
Danny hunkers down, throat bruising, and Sam sits down beside him. They wait.
By the time the cops pull into the gas station, the guy’s more than out of sight. Sam’s the one who takes the lead on dictating their story. Danny sort of doesn’t realize how out of it he is until someone tries to throw a shock blanket on him. He almost hits the guy square in the face— and Sam’s the one who has to catch his arm.
Uh. Oops.
Jazz and Tucker roll in, hardly pretending to have not been nearby; Jazz wraps her arms around him, and Danny lets her.
Sue him. It’s late. He’s tired.
“...And I can’t believe you weren’t able to get down the road in time to catch a man who choked out my best friend,” Sam snaps, which, aw! Danny’s a best friend. The cop she’s attempting to strip down for parts looks less sympathetic than Danny feels. “You’re barely a ten minute drive up the highway! What were you doing, meandering?”
“No,” the cop grits out, eying Sam like a bug on his shoe. “We were telling the officer down the road what to look out for.”
Apparently, jamming the gas down hard enough to bust your speedometer gets you pulled over at the speed check.
The night is over before Danny knows it. Someone gets him to the station, someone takes photos of his bruises and takes his statement. Someone calls Mom and Dad and then Danny’s in the GAV, half asleep and exhausted beyond belief.
He falls asleep on the couch, Mom’s fingers in his hair.
*
It’s not like the Amity Park police tell them anything, but Jazz is the one who finds the report on the news.
She records it on the TiVo for him.
“Eustace Miller, from Tennessee,” Sam reads aloud, knee to knee on his couch. Tucker adjusts his glasses. “Looks like he was already on the run.”
“Or as good as,” Tucker agrees quietly. “Looks like they’re pinning a couple of cold cases to him.”
They watch; there’s pictures of him from his hometown, and from the towns he would visit on his joyride across the country. There were pictures of his family. There were pictures of kids Danny would never meet: kids who were already dead, and who had been for months. Years, even.
They’d looked so happy in the photos from when they were alive.
…Danny could relate.
Jazz turns the report off that night, thumb on the power button. And that’s all it takes for Danny to stop waking up in a trash bag.
#phic phight 2024#tw murder#tw child murder#tw death#I think that covers it???#wait#tw choking#there we go#Danny works out some of his feelings about dying young#danny phantom#phic phight#this is very quickly being edited and posted on lunch break please bear w/ me#faer fic#sam manson#tucker foley#jazz fenton
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WE DID IT.
Well, I did it. I moved to the PNW, and I thought you guys might like to see some of the photographs we took along the way. Fair warning though, most of these are unedited, or straight off my insta, and I will be creating more posts to share the better quality, properly edited photographs off my DSLR.
We packed SO MUCH into our six day journey from Texas to Washington. The Best flew down from Washington to help me make the drive, as the husband is set to follow a few weeks from now.
The last few weeks in Texas flew by. Time became my most precious commodity, and as it dwindled, I began to feel anxious, nervous, and dare I say it…excited? My mom and I spent as much time together as we could; I cuddled my dogs as closely as possible and visited the rest of my local family. My husband and I attempted to steal private moments together, because even though . Previous to now, at most I have lived four driving hours away. This wasn’t goodbye forever, but it was still the biggest “see you later” I have ever experienced with my family. Now, situated in North Western Washington, I find myself thirty one driven hours, or four flown and two and a half driven, away from my little home town in Central Texas. I never realized that I could miss a state so much that I had spent so many years trying to get away from. Of course, it’s not really the state that I miss, it’s the people. But I digress…back to the pictures!
Walmart parking lot as I picked up a few things on 03/21/2017 in Abilene, TX. Taken using my iPhone 7 zoomed in on the horizon.
My final night in Texas was filled with rolling thunder clouds and this rich, vibrant sunset. After leaving my grandparents house, I decided to stop at a Walmart on the way back to Cisco and happened to look over and capture the skyline at just the right time. Early the next morning, we headed out.
DAY ONE: CISCO, TX TO ROSWELL, NM-5.5 HOURS/356 MILES
INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM
ROSWELL, NM 03/22/2017
Day one began at 5:00 AM CST, with the Best arriving about an hour and a half later. We were on the road soon after her arrival, my goodbyes fraught with my mother’s tears and my pups’ confusion at my leaving so early in the morning, my own tears briefly coming only after I was already on the high way. We stopped in Abilene one last time and said our goodbyes to my aunts, my Mini-Me, and my grandparents. With each goodbye, the finality of my actions began to sink in a little more and settle heavy on my heart. Luckily, the Best was there with humor, hours of us catching up, and a killer playlist. We travelled to Roswell, NM, via 380, a road that officially exists as one of the most mind numbing and soul crushing drives of my life, second only to the Mojave Desert, but oh, don’t you worry, we will get to that later. Arriving in Roswell, we decided to check in and then moseyed (do people even still use the word “mosey”? If not, let’s bring it back, y’all!) on over to the International U.F.O. Museum downtown. Cheesy, yet charming, little green men seemed to pervade every shop window and adorn every front entrance along our way. The Best purchased our tickets and lucky for us, the museum graciously gave military discounts as a thanks for her service. We sandwiched it for dinner in our hotel room and made an emergency Walmart run to pick up some athletic pants(okay, fine, boot cut yoga pants) for our next day’s stop, as the weather along our route was showing snow and rain for the next couple days and most of my clothes were sealed in vacuum pack bags in the back of the Jeep.
Lights out came fairly early, but sleep was hard to come by. When it finally graced me with its’ presence, rough dreams woke me more than once throughout the night.
DAY TWO: ROSWELL, NM TO WILLIAMS, AZ-8 HOURS/555 MILES
Day two began with a complimentary breakfast buffet at our hotel, both of our tired eyes puffy from fitful sleep and dearly wanting to put off driving for just a bit longer. Post-breakfast, our caffeine and food infused systems gave us the push we needed to get back on the road. This time, the Best was driving while I was able to take some pictures. Not that there was really much to photograph for the first couple hundred miles, except the vast rolling expanse that seemed to be New Mexico. I could see the solitary beauty in it, but even attempting to imagine living in that land filled me a sense of fear and trepidation. To those that do live there, you are a special kind of folk and I salute you for your bravery. I do not think that I could live somewhere so lonely as that.
Two wooden Cowboys guard the road, with nothing else to see for miles and miles and miles.
Our morning GPS input as we headed out of Roswell.
As we neared Albuquerque the landscape finally started to get interesting, the flat expanse began to turn into foothills, and eventually, actual mountains. The road seemed to be disappearing faster beneath our feet, which could be the anticipation of leaving the flatness, or it could be that we were finally able to go a decent speed one we turned onto 40, which would be our home for the next couple days as we headed out to California.
We decided to stop for lunch when we reached Albuquerque, and having run out of time to stop while in Texas, we decided to make the most of our lunch stop and hit up the last Whataburger on our route. Even though I very, very rarely ate there while I lived near to one, I miss seeing those big orange and white W’s along the highway. It’s funny how you take a place for granted until you can’t have it anymore, right?
Best’s Whataburger-ception moment
All eyes were on Amanda as we ate our lunch, grateful for the break from the Jeep. As much as we love her, being crammed into any vehicle with your belongings gets old really, really, really fast. After the hour break, we hit the pavement and left Albuquerque in our rear view.
Coming into Arizona, we went through several different types of weather, ranging from hot and dry, wet and rainy, and we even encountered snow. Flagstaff ended up being one of the most beautiful places we drove through, what with the snow capped trees and the general mountain town feel. Unfortunately, we didn’t stop, but we DID manage to snag some on the road pictures, even capturing Jiji and Luna the travel cats. Please bear in mind, these ARE road pictures, taken from cell phones, so please don’t look too harshly upon any blurring, lighting, etc. Thanks, loves!
So yeah, that was our little quick trip through Flagstaff. We arrived at our hotel with enough time to go get something to eat, and since we were just off of Route 66…we figured we might try out a classic diner. Thanks to Google, we found a local shake shoppe/diner that was supposed to be open for another two hours and wouldn’t you know it? We get there, and their lights are off! Immediately next door to our planned dining choice, was another little diner, Goldie’s Route 66 Diner.
We ordered drinks to start, and I was so excited to be able to purchase a glass bottle coke. I don’t drink coke very often, but when I do, glass bottle is best. Trust me on this one, okay? We enjoyed the kitschy decor, the cute little booths, and the friendly people. Our onion rings were the highlight of the meal, because we had a little snafu with our actual meal. Luckily, no harm, no foul, and they were nice enough to rectify the situation quickly. FANTASTIC CUSTOMER SERVICE, seriously, our waitress was a gem. We made our way back to the hotel, attempting to get to bed early, because we knew that the next day was our biggest adventure day of all.
We dedicated an entire day to exploring and visiting the South Rim entrance to the Grand Canyon. SO. WORTH. IT. So much so that I’m going to save the Grand Canyon for the next post! Honestly, we would have gladly spent more time there, but we wanted to get to our destination by Monday night, so bear with me on the photo overload coming your way.
As always, stay safe and much love, y’all!
-Jess
Journey to the PNW: PART I WE DID IT. Well, I did it. I moved to the PNW, and I thought you guys might like to see some of the photographs we took along the way.
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