After three years, he's still playing the good guy.

The ghost theory, which he finds fairly accurate, is simply that he's never died. He doesn't know what it's like to lose everything in one moment, especially at a young age. He lived and is still living a cushy life, with close friends and a loving family. Vlad once told him, during a moment of impasse, that there are mortals who understand suffering better than any half-ghost. He couldn't find it in himself to disagree.

However, he could say that he knows what it is to die.

He had been five years old at the time, visiting grandparents in the country. He wandered off on his own, because Jazz told him not to.

He'd made it into the woods, where he was forbidden to go, and which of course made a walk into an adventure. He stumbled over roots and loose stones, through the undergrowth, and, without warning, fell through the ground into the center of the earth.

Truthfully, the hole was no deeper than four feet, but that was quite a bit taller than him. He sat there for a few seconds, sorting out up from down, crying only a little because he'd scraped his chin and bit his tongue and could almost taste blood. The surface was a disk of dusky light and a fraction of a canopy. The air was damp and smelled like dirt and he wanted to leave immediately. He palmed the walls, tugging on the hairy ends of plant roots for leverage, and met a shower of bugs and dirt and mold and confusion.

The fear took all of a minute to set in. It wasn't until he realized he couldn't leave that it was suddenly too hard to breath.

He sat in the hole for days, weeks, certainly well past supper. He began to cry, hiccup and drip at the thought of never being found. As it grew dark, and the hole grew cold, he wondered if he would die there, like a bug in a cupboard: all flat and dried up and curled in on himself from trying to keep warm.

Crying made him sleepy. The cold made it worse. He figured he'd fall asleep soon and only cried harder. If the tears stopped, he was afraid he'd fall asleep. Then the sun fell away completely, and the hole grew darker and colder. He hadn't thought about trying to climb out again until that option disappeared: even if he made it out of the hole, he'd be lost amongst the shadows of trees.

It was then he it dawned on him the meaning of death. He was told it meant going away, falling asleep and never coming back to the real world. Now he felt what it meant to die young. Anyone could say that he was obviously too young to understand, that death was more complicated, that death was too sophisticated for a toddle's logic, but he knew.

He knew it then and he knows it now, after three years of ghosts and near-death experiences. An untimely death is being left in the cold and the dark, and realizing, in the end, that we all go in it alone.

He died once. When he was five years old, sitting in a hole in the ground for all of two hours. His grandparents had fallowed the sound of a toddler's inconsolable despair, took him from his natural grave and into their one story house, gave him warm milk, a kiss of the temple, and "Christ, Danny, never again, Danny, thank heavens you're okay."

He stopped feeling fear in battles. It's made him reckless, heroic even. But at night, after a particularly close call, he still thinks of dead insects and the smell of dirt. The shadows of trees and the bone-tired feeling of crying because you're too afraid to stop.