This is a tragedy. I have no idea where it came from, but the image stayed with me until I finally realized I would have to write it and get it out of my head before I could write anything else. So I repeat, this is a tragedy. If you don't want to read something that falls under that auspice, please close the window, or hit the back button on your browser.

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A Definition of Bad

It was going badly, he realized. If Tucker didn't find a way to get a clear shot at the ghost with a thermos, it could go very badly. Danny dodged another powerful blast from the offending ghost, and flew right into one of its many legs. The pointed tip drove into him before he managed to become fully intangible, and he bit back the scream as he moved through it.

An ectoblast later, he was clutching his side and dodging again, silently begging Tucker to hurry up. Another duck, another dodge, and another searing pain as he wasn't quick enough.

"Behind you!"

The scream from Sam was just what he wanted to hear, and he let himself drop through the air like lead as blue swirled above him, where he had just been, and the ghost was gone. Danny pulled up, clamped a hand to the burning pain in his side, and sighed. It wasn't that bad, he decided. It could have gone worse.

---

"It's not so bad," Danny said quietly as he drifted further up and away from Sam's outstretched hands. She was trying to pull him down, to see the open wound that was dripping bright green blood to splatter the ground beneath him.

She jumped, grabbed hold of a foot and gasped as he drifted higher. "Danny, come on!"

"It's nothing, Sam," he muttered as he dropped lower and she regained her feet. He landed lightly beside her, one white gloved hand reaching around to his side, his back, and coming back covered in green. "Just a bit of a cut."

"It's not," she said insistently as he closed his eyes and silver flashed around him, leaving Danny Fenton where Danny Phantom had stood. "It's bad," and her hands were trying to push his shirt up, to see the slash, to try and help him.

"Sam, stop!" he said firmly as she tried again, and he tugged p the one side of his shirt in exasperation. "See?" he asked as he exposed a short, ragged gash that was already beginning to congeal over with drying blood, red now without any hint that it wasn't completely human. "It's fine, I'm fine."

She sighed, let her hands drop. "I know. I just worry."

He gave her a crooked smile. "I'm a hero. We always get better."

She grinned at him. "Alright, hero. Go home. I'll collect Tucker and see you tomorrow, alright?"

Danny waved at her as he shot back into the air in another flash of light, Phantom once again taking to the air as Sam became a small dark speck against pale concrete. Further away he could see the dangling form of Tucker in the tree he'd been aiming the thermos from, caught up by the straps of his backpack and smart enough to not try dropping to the ground through branches without help.

He turned, high above Amity Park, zeroing in on the glowing Fenton Works sign of his home and flying swiftly without a hint of discomfort or concern. Nothing showing until he was Danny Fenton again, and leaning against his wall on one hand as the other clutched at his stomach, far away from the scrape that had concerned Sam so.

He made it to his mirror, lifted the front of his shirt and winced as he frowned. There was a small, neat, sluggishly bleeding cut. No more than an inch long, if that. An exit wound, and he shuddered as the stoicism he had vainly worn in the park fled him. An exit wound, and it hurt.

Blood stained his shirt, and he tugged it off and tossed it to the floor behind his bed, making a mental note to get rid of it before anyone could find it. The jeans were a loss, he realized as he saw the dark red stain spreading down the front, lower than his knees and still descending.

With as much stealth as he could muster, Danny quietly opened the door of his room and padded down the hall barefoot, retrieving an old sheet from the linen closet and retreating to his room as quickly as he could. He did make a single glance back as he realized the movement had made the blood flow faster, but there was not race of it on the floor, and he closed his own door quickly behind him.

The sheet was ripped into so many strips, wound about his waist as he grimaced, gasped and bit his lips against the pain, tears forming in his eyes as he wrapped it as tightly as he dared. When he was done he retrieved his bloodstained clothes and burned them with a flash of green ectoenergy that left not even soot behind as evidence. Drops of blood, smears and traces were mopped carefully with remains from the sheet, and those disposed of also before he finally collapsed against the bed, dizzy and weak as he tugged a blanket over himself.

There was a moment between consciousness and overwhelming darkness where he pressed a hand to his stomach, sighing as he saw it come back into his rapidly diminishing field of vision glittering bright red. Maybe it is bad. The faintest trace of thought, and then he slipped backward, losing himself in the dark.

---

It hadn't occurred to Jazz that the silence from Danny's room was something wrong. Not even when she was finishing her breakfast and grabbing up her backpack before she realized that Danny hadn't been down, hadn't been moving in his room, and certainly hadn't managed to be up and gone before Jazz had woken up.

Thinking that he'd overslept Jazz climbed the stairs, yelling for him to get up, and when she opened the door of his room she wasn't surprised to see him lying on the bed with his eyes open. Good, she thought as she continued out loud, "It's time to be up. You're going to be later than usual."

The lack of response was what got her attention.

The way her brother's eyes didn't move at all was what had her heart pounding inside her chest.

The limp hand covered in drying rusty red blood, dangling limply from the side of the bed was what had her rushing to the bed, reaching a hand out to touch him, and screaming when he was cold. Not just cold, but cold.

She tried to shake the hands off her as they dragged her back and one desperate wrench freed her, sent her stumbling against the bed and ripping the blanket back to find out what was wrong with Danny, to try and help him. Blood. Everywhere there was blood. The bed soaked with it, that was why he was so pale. And her hand fluttered against the bandage at his stomach ineffectually.

"He's not breathing," she cried frantically, and was finally pulled away to collapse blindly against her father.

---

"He wouldn't have wanted this," Tucker was saying quietly to the still form lying across the bed. There was no movement, and he tried again. "He'd have wanted you to keep going."

There was a muffled, choked laugh from beneath the blanket, and Sam pushed it back far enough to shoot a weary, pained glance at Tucker. "He's dead. Dead. He doesn't want anything anymore."

With a sigh Tucker sat, a hand patting Sam's leg as if she were a child. "You should at least go. Even if it's just to say goodbye."

The tears came then, and Sam buried her face back under the blanket. "I don't want to say goodbye," she whispered weakly.

"But you need to," was the only answer she got.

---

"I should have made you stay. Let me help."

The cemetery was quiet, his grave was undisturbed. She looked along the lines where the grass was beginning to merge seamlessly with the greenery around it. It had been that long since he'd died, that long to take her to his grave for the first time.

That long to learn how to say goodbye.

She sat down on it, barely noticing that it was damp as she tucked her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. She reached out, traveling the edges of the gray headstone, fingers avoiding the letters that had been engraved there. Like if she did, they'd be more real than they already were. She closed her eyes and wished they weren't there.

One day, they wouldn't be. They'd be erased by the hands of time, faded and worn in the only way stone could be. It made her sick to think of it that way. Danny gone, Danny forgotten. Eyes opened and tears traced the curve of her cheeks as Sam reached out again, this time letting slim fingers trace the letters, making them real inside her head, underneath her touch.

Daniel Andrew Fenton

July 18 1990 – March 5 2007

Beloved Son, Friend

She yanked her hand back with a violent shake, like it had burned her, and buried her face against her knees, letting them become damp. He was dead. He was really dead. There was nothing to be done. She wiped wet eyes with the heels of her hands, rubbing at them until it ached. There was one thing she could do, and she tugged at the metal spike she'd tucked into her boot.

A search of the grass turned up a rock, and she scraped, chiseled, cried for hours as she sat there doing what she could. And when she was done she sat back again, the grass around her now dry, her fingers flecked with dust and blood from where she had slipped and cut herself instead of the unforgiving rock. A nod to herself, and Sam stood, pressed a kiss to her fingers, pressed them then to the top of the headstone.

"Goodbye," she whispered, and turned, walking off and not looking back. She had already said what she had to.

Sun glinted against the headstone, and caught in the unpolished chips below the fine chiseled words Danny Fenton's family had wanted. It caught, burned and died against them, wearing itself uselessly into the dust left behind. A single word, painstakingly etched until one day it finally wore away.

Hero.

---

I am sorry, but I had to write it. The picture was in my head, of Danny on the bed, eyes glazed with a blood-dry hand dropping over the edge. It was killing me, and not leaving me alone.

Edited: 09/18/2006.