Ever since the accident, Danny felt like he was surrounded by a thin veil.

It surrounded him, wrapping around his limbs and torso and head, following just behind his every movement, pulling into and out of his mouth and nose with his every breath. It shaded his vision, dulling colors and dimming light, flattening the world to a two-dimensional screen surrounding his very being. Smells were made dull by the veil, the wind only just able to touch his skin when it should have tied knots in his messy hair.

It was a barrier between him and the rest of the world.

Crossing over that barrier felt like breaking through a thin layer of ice.

He pushed, and world cracked around him, then gave way; and everything turned upside down, inside out, cold and muffled and calm as he let go of his ties to the living – all but the last of them, a corner of the veil just off-center from the middle of his core, where his heart no longer beat. He wondered how it would feel to let go of that last tie – wondered what it would be like to be free of the veil, to float endlessly in the vastness beyond the cracked ice.

He thought of the farewells he'd have to make. The people and places and dreams that tied him to life, that made life worth living. Some were smaller than they once had been. Some had lost some of their wonder. Some might just be better off without him.

But they were there, and they brought color and depth and light to a world as thin and shadowed as the veil that surrounded him when he was human. And so he clung tightly to that veil. He didn't tug – not just yet, not while he was still reveling in the feeling of floating in a world turned inside out, still marveling at the ectoplasm flowing through his core. But he held tightly to the veil, to his humanity, to everything and everyone that made him human.

Maybe one day, he'd let it go. Maybe one day, he'd know what it was like to live without the veil.

But not yet. Not until his people, his places, his dreams – his humanity – faded away.

For now, he sat above the Ops Center, watching as the dark sun set in saturated blues and brilliant cyans and mottled greens.

It felt real. Almost as real as a sunset from before the veil had settled around him.

It was beautiful.

Prompt: Thin Ice, Crossing, Farewell, Barrier, Ectoplasm

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