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“That wasn’t so bad,” Danny was saying as he, Sam, and Tucker were leaving the movie theater.
They had finally had a weekend off — all three of them free from school work, chores, parents, and ghosts (well, as free as three teenage ghost hunters could be) — and they were seizing the day. It was overcast and gusty despite being late May, so they’d opted for a movie over the pool or an amusement park.
“Oh come on, Danny! It was awful!” Tucker wasn’t looking were he was going, instead walking half a step behind Sam and Danny so that he could scroll the internet on his PDA, reading the reviews and behind-the-scenes trivia about the movie. He had one hand in the air, alternating between tapping the screen and gesticulating wildly to emphasize his point. “They’ve completely ruined Superman! And don’t even get me started about Batman! Man, everyone in the whole movie felt like a villain. Who were we even supposed to root for? I cannot believe we paid good money for that.”
Danny tucked his head forward slightly to avoid a flinging arm and smiled back at his friend as Sam crossed her arms and stuck up her nose — an impressive, if performative, feat to achieve while walking. “All those movies are the same anyway,” she cut in, just as opinionated if not quite as exuberant as Tucker. “They’re just an excuse to romanticize violence and put old, white men on a ridiculous pedestal while exclusively portraying women simultaneously as weak and the emotional saviors of said men.”
“WHAT?” Tucker jolted to a stop, and the other two turned to look at him. “Excuse you? It’s about good versus evil! And companionship! And emotional honesty!” He seemed to have forgotten that he hadn’t stopped complaining about the movie since they’d left the theater. Sam scoffed in the back of her throat. “Emotional honestly? What are you on? Without even mentioning the mediocre dialogue, they all have secret identities! What’s honest about that!” Her volume had slowly started to raise to match Tuck’s and some people gave the trio side-eyes for making such a scene, though none of them noticed.
Danny hid his smile at his friends’ antics. The day wouldn’t have been complete without the two of them getting into a screaming match about something neither of them should care so much about.
Tucker waved his arms about as though shaking the air would rattle Sam’s head. “Danny’s got a secret identity, are you saying he can’t be honest?”
“That’s different and you know it!”
“Oh yeah? How!”
“He keeps his identity a secret from his family, otherwise he wouldn’t even care! It’s not like Skulker and Johnny and The Warden don’t know who he is.”
Tucker yelled something in response but it buzzed through Danny’s ears.
His secret identity. He’d always seen it kind of like Spider-man or Superman having an alter ego; sure it didn’t help his social life or with school or work or anything like that, but it was a necessary evil. He was doing good, he just couldn’t let people know.
He couldn’t let people know.
Because it was dangerous.
Someone could get hurt.
Except. Except Clark Kent and Peter Parker... those “superheroes” didn’t tell anyone about their abilities or the truth of how they spent their time because some crazy billionaire would go after their families. Or a mad scientist would try to dissect them.
Molecule by molecule.
Danny felt dizzy.
He hadn’t ever really considered it before, but he’d hardly tried at all to keep his human half a secret from the ghost world. A lot of the ghosts he fought knew that he was a Halfa even before he met them, and even against the ones that didn’t he’d never really considered pretending to be a full ghost before. In some ways, it’s what separated him from them. It justified why he would fight so hard to defend Amity Park and all the people living there. He’d rarely ever associated himself with ghosts, even though technically he had almost as much tie to the Ghost Zone as he did Amity Park by this point.
He tried to swallow around the lump in his throat.
Danny’s parents had always been against ghosts. Since he was a child, they had talked about how evil and dangerous and bad ghosts were, despite not having definitive proof that ghosts existed until fairly recently. Danny grew up terrified of what lurked in the dark, convinced his parents were the only things keeping him and probably the whole world safe from the horror of ghosts.
He’d grown out of it, of course. When Dash would bully Danny for still believing in ghosts and even Tuck looked at him funny when he was too scared to go out on Halloween, he’d grown out of it.
But Danny’s parents... the Fentons still firmly believed in the evil that ghosts represented by merely existing. It wasn’t a theological belief — Danny had never known either of his parents to be any form of religious — but a deep-seeded hatred that was derived from bad science and worse logic. The sort of hatred that couldn’t be reasoned with or compromised from. The sort that haunted Danny Phantom.
Part of Danny had always known that the reason he couldn’t tell his parents was because he was scared of them, but it was hard to have the thought hit him so boldly and unexpectedly.
Superman kept Clark Kent a secret from Lex Luther because he didn’t trust him, feared him on at least some level.
Danny Fenton kept Danny Phantom a secret from his parents because he lived with his Lex Luther.
“Yo, earth to Danny?”
Danny jolted and realized Sam and Tuck had stopped arguing at some point and were now starting at him with concern — they’d probably called his name several times without him realizing.
“You okay, Danny?” Sam asked tentatively, like she was dealing with a spooked animal, her hand hovering a couple inches away from her body as though she wasn’t sure if she would touch him or not.
“Huh? Yeah of course I am.”
“You sure man?” Tucker asked, bumping Danny’s arm with his elbow. “It’s just, you look like that time we were at Floody Waters and you got sick after eating that hot dog.”
Danny gave his head a slight shake, banishing the last of his disturbing thoughts, and pasted on a smile. Looking at his friends — seeing their concern and trust — it practically felt like a genuine one. “Yeah guys. I’m good, no worries.”
They both still had suspicion in their eyes, but let the issue drop. They continued on their way, Tucker and Sam having moved onto an argument about the ethics of child actors in Hollywood and Danny walking beside them.
Maybe it was foolish to have a secret identity that all his enemies already knew about and maybe he feared his parents a little more than he wanted to admit to himself, but Danny wouldn’t trade this moment, with two of the best people he knew, for anything.