Mars
By JadeRabbyt
"I don't want to talk about it."
-Daniel Fenton (1)
The bricks clashed and clattered all around him as the walls caved in and the ectoplasmic canisters exploded, spraying shrapnel everywhere. Danny gasped as a piece of it nicked his arm while another buried itself in his thigh. He didn't understand. He'd just been goofing around… He heard screams like squeaks through the collapse.
"Tucker! Sam!" Danny zapped into ghost mode and faded intangible. Steel struts fell across him while rubble of brick and wood showered down like rain. The dust began to billow and the smoke began to rise and Danny couldn't see anything at all.
"Come on you guys, let me hear you!"
Every breath held the poison stench of burning paint and metal, every gulp of air choked down with hyperventilated panic. Danny zipped through the labs, ducking around flowering explosions of chemicals and sparking electrical jets, past and through the frying computers and bursting tanks.
"Guys!"
Danny's legs turned to rubber as his heart leapt to his throat. Metal groaned above and beneath him like a dying man, a groan that tilted and creaked and gasped and writhed, the remaining ceiling supports flexed like silver snakes, and Danny opened his mouth in a scream he never managed as the Fenton Works collapsed atop him.
His eyes closed themselves as the world erupted in a cataclysmic symphony of brick and wood and metal and wire, an orchestra of explosions and firey blasts of heat and gas that scorched his face and made Danny screw his eyes shut tighter. His fists trembled, clenched at his sides, and the world trembled all around him, the crashing cement damping out the sharp crack of concrete against brick as it buried him, buried him alive.
Danny couldn't focus. Visions of their terror-stricken faces flashed in his brain like lighting, overexposed pictures showing the startled sheen in her flying hair and her amethyst eyes opened wide in dawning realization, and Tucker—his hands reaching to clasp over his hat as he started to yell for help. Danny stood frozen, hands on his ears, eyes shut tight. He couldn't save them; there was nothing now to be done now, nothing…
And Danny's home tumbled down around him.
After a time, there was quiet. A few chunks rattled and scraped, settling themselves and coming to a stable arrangement, and then there was stillness. Danny opened his eyes. It was dark, and the darkness was thick and stifling, broken only by a few slivers of light that had managed to seep through the cracks, lighting up the dust to cut wispy tunnels through the formless darkness. Danny made himself move, resisting the urge to run, refusing to punch the panic button. He couldn't leave it to someone else. These were his friends. Besides, maybe they hadn't…
Danny unstuck himself from his place in the rubble, a ghost among ruins, and silently drifted through it, sifted through it.
"Sam. Tuck," he murmured. His voice rattled off into nothing. It was impossible to see anything. Danny lit up his hands, letting the soft glow illuminate the pockets in the rubble. Broken pipes plinked water, and a few live wires writhed. Danny's mouth fell open a crack. Numbly he moved through the rubble, guided by nothing, searching for nothing.
Time stretched on immeasurably, and he began to hear sirens. Sirens and voices, but he didn't want to go up just yet. Danny' eyes wandered over the ruins, over a jagged pyramid of twisted metal that swirled with green reflections under his light. He peered into a shadowed hole just beneath it. He bent for a closer look, brightening his plasma. He saw, and he jerked away only to creep forward and look again; his knees trembled. He blinked and tears streamed down. He spoke something softly, so softly, a question with no answer but silence.
The taste of acid seeped into his throat as realization broke through confusion, and then Danny did run. He raced through the dirt and into the sky, away from the city and across fields untamed, streaking out and above and across the world looking for an escape that did not exist, a ghost of the earth with his eyes on the untouchable stars.
(1) All statements presented to the NASA Board of Directors, circa 2015. Comment reported by Madeline Fenton.
A/N: Intrigued? Confused? Worried/hoping that this is another one of those hopelessly depressing fics? Drop a review, and don't miss the second chapter. Constructive criticism welcome.