Chapter Text
Danny was so close to being finished with high school forever. Barely a semester left, and then he would be free. He rolled his pencil up his desk, watching it roll back toward him before flicking it back up again.
Free to do what, he wasn’t sure, but at least he wouldn’t be stuck in this interminable hell anymore.
His coursework this semester actually wasn’t terrible. He had gotten most of the requirement classes out of the way by now. So no gym, thankfully. He did have to take an English class to make up for the setback of failing one his Freshman year, but honestly, the class-list could be worse.
The rest of his classes were more focused on science and engineering. Even if he knew he could never pass the physical requirements to be an astronaut, maybe he could at least end up working as an engineer to help design and plan such missions.
It would get him that much closer to the stars, at least.
Speaking of which, the highlight of this semester was the astronomy class he had been trying to sign up for since sophomore year and finally had both the prerequisites for, and the seniority to be among the first group of students to sign up before it filled.
One more flick of his pencil.
It rolled up.
It rolled back, as if pulled by a gravitational force. But it was just the desk, slightly tilted. Probably. Danny didn’t think too much about it as the bell rang, freeing him from the English class for lunch.
He met Sam and Tucker by their lockers. The three of them hadn’t spent a lunch at the school itself since becoming Juniors and being allowed to leave during the period. A few years of maturity and the option to get away from each other had mellowed the A-listers, so the trio was rarely bothered as they left the school for lunch.
Tucker drove them. He had gotten his driver’s license as soon as he had been allowed to, and had modified his car with some sort of AI that greeted them by name whenever they rode with him.
Danny wasn’t sure how it worked, aside from the fact that he had helped Tucker get the car running on ectoplasm, and that Karen occasionally exhibited behavior just on the suspicious side of sophisticated.
Oh well.
It wasn’t like she was going to try and take over the world.
Probably.
And if she did, Phantom would deal with it, and then apologize profusely to Tucker about the loss of his car.
But that was a problem for future them, if it ever happened.
For now, they pulled into the Nasty Burger, paid for their lunch, and seated themselves at their usual booth.
“So how’s your last class with Mr. Lancer going?” Tucker asked, already halfway through his burger.
Danny rolled his eyes. “I’ll pass it, but I don’t think I’m going to like it. I’m just glad I have that astronomy class to look forward to in the afternoons.”
Their lunch went on as usual, uninterrupted by ghost attacks or ghost hunters. Honestly, Amity Park had become almost boring since Danny formed a general truce with most of the more troublesome ghosts.
It left him feeling restless, un-tethered.
Often, he found himself on the roof of the Ops center at night. A few years ago he would have been flying patrol at that time, but now he would just stare at the sky and lose himself in the depths of space.
If only the stars were a little closer… or human technology just a little more advanced, so he could see them in person.
Back at the school, the day progressed as high school does, with vague interest interspersed with actually interesting highlights. The astronomy class was alright so far, even if they weren’t learning much he didn’t already know. Danny might not be the genius that the rest of his family members were, but he already knew how to calculate simple orbits, had most visible stars of the Northern Hemisphere night sky memorized, and most of the Southern Hemisphere ones as well.
He could also set up a telescope, and find just about any point in the sky based on angle and vibes .
Still, it was a class he could look forward to through the day, and the teacher was going to try holding a star-gazing event that weekend at the observatory, where the class could put into practice many of the skills they were learning.
FentonWorks was quiet when Danny got home that afternoon. His parents were away at a scientific conference, working on spreading the updated information they had amended in their studies and trying to reverse some of the damage their “research” had previously caused in regards to the livings’ perceptions of ecto-entities.
Jazz was off at college, pursuing a psychology degree.
Which left Danny home alone.
He pulled a can of soda from the fridge, poured it in a class, dropped a couple of ecto-ice cubes into it, and went to his room to do his homework.
Everything was normal.
Everything was boring.
Halfway through his homework, Danny was distracted by an update from NASA’s social media feed. It was a new James Webb Telescope image, showing a galaxy in its infancy, the disk just forming the distinct arms as the central core glowed with a young brilliance.
He added it to his folder of rotating desktop backgrounds.
He wondered if stars knew that their deaths gave birth to new existences, and that the most violent of deaths among them fostered the most new creation, forming the cores of galaxies as supermassive black holes.
Did black holes exist in the Infinite Realms?
Were there portals at the hearts of black holes in the Overworld, with a corresponding white hole in the Realms?
Or did they simply exist as a black hole on both sides of reality, forming a bridge between them with the density of their existence? Finally merging the two sides of reality into one.
Or perhaps stars were sentient enough to have Realms counterparts.
Somehow, he didn’t think that was the case.
After all, if cities could develop Genius Loci, then surely the stars could develop identities from the life fostered in orbit around them, looking up at them, nurtured by the nuclear reactions that supplied elemental fodder for the universe…
Danny checked his clock.
It was nearly 9 o’clock.
Later than he expected, and dark in his room except for the faint glow of the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, long infused with ectoplasm so that they continued to glow for hours after being exposed to light.
He didn’t notice the faint extra glow from his own skin, and the constellations of glowing specks speckled across his cheeks. They had faded by the time he stood, stretched, and made his way to the bathroom.