[ he should maybe like. question why. but it's danny so whatever, he will wander toward tiger dorm! i guess i can also mention that to add to full stupidity as he's approaching danny can. probably see there's a trail of black dahlia flowers blooming after each step that he is blatantly ignoring.
[ He's leaning against the dorm wall just outside, hands stuffed into a hoodie pocket, waiting to escort Nico! Sure enough, Nico can get into the common areas of it well enough on his own, but that's not where Danny is going. ]
Come with me.
[ he's gonna take Nico up into the more exclusive parts of the dorm! more specifically, his room. ]
[ again, he kind of hates this weird office dorm thing. he's only been here once (to see tiger, weirdly) and he's still not entirely impressed by it but he does follow. the flowers also follow. so i guess the dorm can deal with those. ]
Sure? [ like obviously he is going to follow and there's a brief ...? thought bubble for a moment as they traverse through the common parts of the dorm and head up to danny's room. he's trying to decide if he should be worried or if this is a normal thing and has settled on the fence of "curious." ] ...is everything okay?
[ danny opens the door to his room to let nico in. welcome to...whatever the fuck this is.
It's a mess, to put it lightly. There are multiple holes in the drywall, and dents where there's too much of a stretch of wall without a hole in it. All the furniture is trashed--some of it completely to splinters. Mounted on the walls are the remnants of shelves, now smashed in half with off-kilter splintered pieces still clinging to the wall. The mattress is half off the bedframe entirely, haphazardly spilling out onto the floor. One of the rumpled bedsheets on it is partially burnt.
On the floor is a sooty burnt spot, next to which Danny sits cross-legged. In one corner, close to some of the splintered furniture remains, is a small pile of his own cards--three, to be exact. One has the eyes X'd out and has been crumpled. One is torn apart, splitting Danny Phantom in two at the neck. And one has been violently scribbled out in black marker from head to toe.
A steel baseball bat lies in the furniture wreckage somewhere. Scattered elsewhere is a paintball gun and a t-shirt gun. And slightly off to the side is a giant pile of knives. Some are even sticking point-first out of the ceiling. Some have since fallen and are sticking out of the floor instead. But the rest are in that pile.
The only area left pristine, really, is the windowsill, upon which a single full remedy bottle sits.
Danny steps further in to sit down near the burnt spot, the knife pile just slightly out of the way but otherwise between the two of them. ]
he should be more perturbed about this but for some reason he's stopping in the doorway and just...calmly observing this. cataloguing all of the wreckage, the state of the cards, everything. maybe it's because he's still half-asleep from a lack of actual rest, or maybe it's because he's thinking a few things that his thought bubbles thankfully don't betray. but he's letting his gaze drift over all of the damage thoughtfully before he does take care to shut the door. nimona won't be here, likely, but he doesn't know about tiger or anyone else who might wander through.
again. probably should be a little worried about the state of affairs, but nico's usually on the line of flirting with danger and blatantly ignoring it, so it's fine. he is at least using his judgment not to sit directly under any of the knives in the ceiling in case they come tumbling down, kicking a few things out of the way to settle on the ground and face him. ]
I see we've been practicing the art of being ominous. [ a dry joke. ] Guess I understand why you guys were building the treehouse now.
...god. he takes a few moments to think about this, sort of staring at him blankly. he doesn't speak, and his expression doesn't give away much but there's a stray bubble of i think i knew before you said it.
he waves it away, and he stays silent again for a while longer.
I don’t care about this getting solved or someone being punished or heroes and villains. I didn't care about figuring it out. Don't beat yourself up. Stay focused and stay safe. Be kind.
it doesn't feel very praiseworthy it was either cooperate, or die
"For Reigen's sake... It's probably too much to hope it was some kind of freak accident, huh."
"It might've been. There's only a few answers that make the most sense, and...the thing is...when you know how to really use your powers, you know how much effort to apply when you want to. So. Now it's about figuring it out and going from there."
...the writing was on the walls, really. and eventually he sort of comes back from where he disassociated and looks at him again. ]
...why. [ there's a lot more he could say, but he wants to hear the explanation. ]
[ what else would he ask, danny? also, this answer does not seem to make him any happier, but his anger's...not quite landing on danny himself. not yet, at least. the lack of impulse control is really at war in his brain but he's doing his best to be calm about this. ]
By who...? Did you get the same note Ace got? [ a pause. ] Please tell me the truth.
[ not that he thinks danny would automatically lie to him, but he's not interested in half-truths or anything less than the full story right now. ]
No, not that note. Ace got a separate one that if he didn't kill someone his world and all of the worlds of his teammates would be destroyed. That's why he had to follow through with it.
[ and now he's just...kind of concerned about this. for a multitude of reasons. he continues to stare at him though. ]
Can I ask why you can't say? [ are you in some kind of trouble...? ]
...it's not. [ particularly convincing, but...he just ponders on this for a moment as he seems to be entering his mind palace of bullshit.
"If there are those with a special role to play beyond what we see, then I would recommend that you don't seek them out. I know you may want to help them, but we have learned the hard way that there may be a very good reason things are kept secret. This isn't confirmation that such things exist, dear."
and it's been obvious there are other people playing roles in this stupid game, and he has suspicions he won't act on. so hearing this now...wow this sucks! ]
But I'll believe you for now if you can try to answer some other questions. [ ... ] Were you told to kill someone in general? Or was it Reigen specifically? What would have happened if you didn't?
Reigen specifically. I don't know why him. And I don't know for sure what would have happened if I didn't--other than "punishment."
[ he chews his lip hesitantly before he decides to be truly, fully honest. ]
I...honestly, I didn't ask too many questions. I thought it would help our team move up in the rankings at least a little. And frankly...killing people was a habit I thought I missed.
[ ...he's busy drawing his knees up to his chest, ignoring the way more dahlias blossom under the soles of his feet when he moves. he's propping his chin on his knees, still staring at danny and working through the static in his thoughts as he tries to sort everything out. ]
Given the way we've all been coerced into certain things so far, I am more inclined to believe that's also true. As I'm sure you know, Reigen was responsible for what happened with Yae Miko. Despite the fact it was a kill done out of self-defense. She went after him first. And then Adlet killed Whisper, and that still wasn't enough. I can only assume that perhaps someone asked you to remove him specifically because of those factors. [ this is a wrong assumption, but he doesn't have much to work off of. ] I can't think of any other reason otherwise why him and not someone else. Especially since Snake had just lost a team member the week before, unless it was simply because whoever it was knew how badly it'd impact people.
Strangely enough, doing it made you drop in ranking. [ his fingers pick at a hole in his jeans as he thinks on that last part though. ] ...do you still think that way? That it's a habit you miss.
[ he shrugs. ] I couldn't tell you. I think maybe something closer to the latter.
As for our ranking...I think us being down to just two had made it so that there was virtually nothing we could do but fall further. I don't know how many points a kill is worth, but in hindsight, I don't think we stood a chance in any regard.
[ he pauses over that last question ] ...I did. It's why I jumped at the chance to do it in the first place. But seeing how it affected you and Nimona and the others...it didn't feel good anymore. I don't know what changed. I don't...I don't know if I want to do that anymore.
Considering this whole time we've been turned against each other, yeah. That would make sense. [ frustrating all over again. he thinks the ranking thing is bullshit, and he thinks the excuse is also not great. it's visible now, the irritation in his features and the way he's really struggling to process what he's supposed to be saying, especially when danny admits that he had outright missed killing people.
how he'd jumped at the chance to kill reigen, and... you took away two of the people i needed the most.
his gaze finally drops to look elsewhere because he doesn't want to actually make himself readable right now. ]
Congratulations on learning how guilt works, Danny. [ ... ] So...what then. It felt good in the moment until we got to the trial? Or was it sometime after that? [ "what changed?" ]
...Reigen tried to talk to me. Tried to give advice to his murderer. I didn't like it. But it also made it hard to feel good about what I'd done. I thought it was just--the lack of a satisfying fight. But then on Friday when I saw how people responded to his death, I really started to...
...it felt like when I first killed my family. [ which is to say, awful. wretched. like he wanted to crawl back into that bed at vlad's and waste away into nothing. ]
...1000%. [ they had suspected that maybe reigen activated his power for his murderer, but hearing that really did happen kind of makes it harder. like being suckerpunched all over again. and he's trying really, really hard to see this from danny's perspective because he knows this is extremely fucked up.
but he keeps looping back to how he still went through with it, and then still sussed out ace, and still made people vote for ace. ace killed sigrun, yeah, but he had a note coercing him to do so. then again...danny was told to, but he still...and it...
...gods. ]
...by then it was too late. He was already gone, and then we had to go through with Saturday. [ there's a pause...and there's then kind of a bitter, awkward laugh. ] You really sat there and let me put his heart back together knowing what happened. And you really let me thank you for not being responsible. I'm...[ stopstopstop is the immediate bubble he brushes away as he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling to refocus. ] I'm trying to decide what I want to say to you right now.
[ because in the end he can see both halves of this. that's the problem. ]
[ he flinches at nico mentioning the piecing the heart back together, and he can't help the outburst-- ] That wasn't--that was never supposed to--I didn't want that for you! Or anyone. I never meant for it to get that gruesome.
...but I know that probably doesn't really mean much now.
[ not with reigen dead. not with danny having thrown ace under the bus. there's nothing else he can really say in his defense, and he knows it. not that he thinks he should have a defense in the first place, really.
there's a reason why i brought you to a room full of knives to say this. ]
[ okay well. his gaze immediately snaps back down and straight at danny, suddenly affronted with that thought. hold on. he will go back to literally everything else in a hot second because: ]
I'm sorry, did you bring me here because you thought I would stab you? [ he vaguely wonders actually if it was more so danny could stab him if things got ugly, but he's still giving him the benefit of the doubt, for some reason. (he knows the exact reason, he's just not going to think too much about it.) ]
Maybe I should for you being so stupid. [ annoyed. ] I'm...stabbing you isn't going to fix anything. It's not going to change that this happened, and it's not going to change that you took them away. [ easy to say now, considering he was hellbent on stabbing kogi yesterday for lillium but that is neither here or there. ]
I need you to explain to me what exactly happened. You...literally removed his heart and broke it to pieces. Actually, maybe the exact details don't matter so much since it already happened. It's the aftermath I'm trying to understand. And why you didn't tell us sooner. [ there's a pause though, and he loops back for a second. ] ...this is why you ran away from me Friday, isn't it?
[ he is staring resolutely at the ground as he talks. ]
...yes. You treating me like I could still be Danny Fenton, like I still had that kind of innate goodness in me...it was too much, knowing what I did last week.
With all the ire floating around for Reigen's killer, I knew that if I said anything, I'd be killed this week without question. And I...I've dealt with so much, just to get to a point where I could exist again, that I couldn't bring myself to take that risk. And I didn't want to hurt you or Nimona even more by telling you later.
I didn't want to tell anyone at all, but...some people kept pressuring me to do it. And the more time passed, the more it felt like there was no benefit to keeping it secret anymore. What does it matter if I get another extra week out of having friends or not, when the end result is just going to be the same? When I hate myself day in and day out for it anyway?
[ i'm sorry that he's being such a rambling drama queen right now, it's the inner vlad jumping out.
anyway he considers leaving it there, but then after a moment, hesitantly, as if he's not sure if this will help or hurt even more: ]
...and for the record, I didn't mean for his heart to...fall apart like that at all. Or even be found. I was trying to phase it into the floor, whole. Quick and clean for everybody involved. I didn't realize that I'd phased my hand through to the floor below and dropped it. ...that doesn't mean much, though, does it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
w5, sunday
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[ he should maybe like. question why. but it's danny so whatever, he will wander toward tiger dorm! i guess i can also mention that to add to full stupidity as he's approaching danny can. probably see there's a trail of black dahlia flowers blooming after each step that he is blatantly ignoring.
where are you, daniel. ]
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Come with me.
[ he's gonna take Nico up into the more exclusive parts of the dorm! more specifically, his room. ]
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Sure? [ like obviously he is going to follow and there's a brief ...? thought bubble for a moment as they traverse through the common parts of the dorm and head up to danny's room. he's trying to decide if he should be worried or if this is a normal thing and has settled on the fence of "curious." ] ...is everything okay?
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[ danny opens the door to his room to let nico in. welcome to...whatever the fuck this is.
It's a mess, to put it lightly. There are multiple holes in the drywall, and dents where there's too much of a stretch of wall without a hole in it. All the furniture is trashed--some of it completely to splinters. Mounted on the walls are the remnants of shelves, now smashed in half with off-kilter splintered pieces still clinging to the wall. The mattress is half off the bedframe entirely, haphazardly spilling out onto the floor. One of the rumpled bedsheets on it is partially burnt.
On the floor is a sooty burnt spot, next to which Danny sits cross-legged. In one corner, close to some of the splintered furniture remains, is a small pile of his own cards--three, to be exact. One has the eyes X'd out and has been crumpled. One is torn apart, splitting Danny Phantom in two at the neck. And one has been violently scribbled out in black marker from head to toe.
A steel baseball bat lies in the furniture wreckage somewhere. Scattered elsewhere is a paintball gun and a t-shirt gun. And slightly off to the side is a giant pile of knives. Some are even sticking point-first out of the ceiling. Some have since fallen and are sticking out of the floor instead. But the rest are in that pile.
The only area left pristine, really, is the windowsill, upon which a single full remedy bottle sits.
Danny steps further in to sit down near the burnt spot, the knife pile just slightly out of the way but otherwise between the two of them. ]
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he should be more perturbed about this but for some reason he's stopping in the doorway and just...calmly observing this. cataloguing all of the wreckage, the state of the cards, everything. maybe it's because he's still half-asleep from a lack of actual rest, or maybe it's because he's thinking a few things that his thought bubbles thankfully don't betray. but he's letting his gaze drift over all of the damage thoughtfully before he does take care to shut the door. nimona won't be here, likely, but he doesn't know about tiger or anyone else who might wander through.
again. probably should be a little worried about the state of affairs, but nico's usually on the line of flirting with danger and blatantly ignoring it, so it's fine. he is at least using his judgment not to sit directly under any of the knives in the ceiling in case they come tumbling down, kicking a few things out of the way to settle on the ground and face him. ]
I see we've been practicing the art of being ominous. [ a dry joke. ] Guess I understand why you guys were building the treehouse now.
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...look, Nico. [ sighs and looks down at the floor in front of him. ]
...I killed Reigen.
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well. hm. this is...
...god. he takes a few moments to think about this, sort of staring at him blankly. he doesn't speak, and his expression doesn't give away much but there's a stray bubble of i think i knew before you said it.
he waves it away, and he stays silent again for a while longer.
I don’t care about this getting solved or someone being punished or heroes and villains.
I didn't care about figuring it out. Don't beat yourself up.
Stay focused and stay safe. Be kind.
it doesn't feel very praiseworthy
it was either cooperate, or die
"For Reigen's sake... It's probably too much to hope it was some kind of freak accident, huh."
"It might've been. There's only a few answers that make the most sense, and...the thing is...when you know how to really use your powers, you know how much effort to apply when you want to. So. Now it's about figuring it out and going from there."
...the writing was on the walls, really. and eventually he sort of comes back from where he disassociated and looks at him again. ]
...why. [ there's a lot more he could say, but he wants to hear the explanation. ]
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...I was told to.
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By who...? Did you get the same note Ace got? [ a pause. ] Please tell me the truth.
[ not that he thinks danny would automatically lie to him, but he's not interested in half-truths or anything less than the full story right now. ]
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But I...I can't say. I really can't.
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[ and now he's just...kind of concerned about this. for a multitude of reasons. he continues to stare at him though. ]
Can I ask why you can't say? [ are you in some kind of trouble...? ]
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It's...something that I'm sworn to secrecy for. I don't know what would happen if I explained it, but I get the sense that it would be bad.
I know that's not particularly convincing.
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"If there are those with a special role to play beyond what we see, then I would recommend that you don't seek them out. I know you may want to help them, but we have learned the hard way that there may be a very good reason things are kept secret. This isn't confirmation that such things exist, dear."
and it's been obvious there are other people playing roles in this stupid game, and he has suspicions he won't act on. so hearing this now...wow this sucks! ]
But I'll believe you for now if you can try to answer some other questions. [ ... ] Were you told to kill someone in general? Or was it Reigen specifically? What would have happened if you didn't?
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[ he chews his lip hesitantly before he decides to be truly, fully honest. ]
I...honestly, I didn't ask too many questions. I thought it would help our team move up in the rankings at least a little. And frankly...killing people was a habit I thought I missed.
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Given the way we've all been coerced into certain things so far, I am more inclined to believe that's also true. As I'm sure you know, Reigen was responsible for what happened with Yae Miko. Despite the fact it was a kill done out of self-defense. She went after him first. And then Adlet killed Whisper, and that still wasn't enough. I can only assume that perhaps someone asked you to remove him specifically because of those factors. [ this is a wrong assumption, but he doesn't have much to work off of. ] I can't think of any other reason otherwise why him and not someone else. Especially since Snake had just lost a team member the week before, unless it was simply because whoever it was knew how badly it'd impact people.
Strangely enough, doing it made you drop in ranking. [ his fingers pick at a hole in his jeans as he thinks on that last part though. ] ...do you still think that way? That it's a habit you miss.
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As for our ranking...I think us being down to just two had made it so that there was virtually nothing we could do but fall further. I don't know how many points a kill is worth, but in hindsight, I don't think we stood a chance in any regard.
[ he pauses over that last question ] ...I did. It's why I jumped at the chance to do it in the first place. But seeing how it affected you and Nimona and the others...it didn't feel good anymore. I don't know what changed. I don't...I don't know if I want to do that anymore.
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how he'd jumped at the chance to kill reigen, and... you took away two of the people i needed the most.
his gaze finally drops to look elsewhere because he doesn't want to actually make himself readable right now. ]
Congratulations on learning how guilt works, Danny. [ ... ] So...what then. It felt good in the moment until we got to the trial? Or was it sometime after that? [ "what changed?" ]
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...Reigen tried to talk to me. Tried to give advice to his murderer. I didn't like it. But it also made it hard to feel good about what I'd done. I thought it was just--the lack of a satisfying fight. But then on Friday when I saw how people responded to his death, I really started to...
...it felt like when I first killed my family. [ which is to say, awful. wretched. like he wanted to crawl back into that bed at vlad's and waste away into nothing. ]
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but he keeps looping back to how he still went through with it, and then still sussed out ace, and still made people vote for ace. ace killed sigrun, yeah, but he had a note coercing him to do so. then again...danny was told to, but he still...and it...
...gods. ]
...by then it was too late. He was already gone, and then we had to go through with Saturday. [ there's a pause...and there's then kind of a bitter, awkward laugh. ] You really sat there and let me put his heart back together knowing what happened. And you really let me thank you for not being responsible. I'm...[ stopstopstop is the immediate bubble he brushes away as he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling to refocus. ] I'm trying to decide what I want to say to you right now.
[ because in the end he can see both halves of this. that's the problem. ]
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...but I know that probably doesn't really mean much now.
[ not with reigen dead. not with danny having thrown ace under the bus. there's nothing else he can really say in his defense, and he knows it. not that he thinks he should have a defense in the first place, really.
there's a reason why i brought you to a room full of knives to say this. ]
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I'm sorry, did you bring me here because you thought I would stab you? [ he vaguely wonders actually if it was more so danny could stab him if things got ugly, but he's still giving him the benefit of the doubt, for some reason. (he knows the exact reason, he's just not going to think too much about it.) ]
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Maybe I should for you being so stupid. [ annoyed. ] I'm...stabbing you isn't going to fix anything. It's not going to change that this happened, and it's not going to change that you took them away. [ easy to say now, considering he was hellbent on stabbing kogi yesterday for lillium but that is neither here or there. ]
I need you to explain to me what exactly happened. You...literally removed his heart and broke it to pieces. Actually, maybe the exact details don't matter so much since it already happened. It's the aftermath I'm trying to understand. And why you didn't tell us sooner. [ there's a pause though, and he loops back for a second. ] ...this is why you ran away from me Friday, isn't it?
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...yes. You treating me like I could still be Danny Fenton, like I still had that kind of innate goodness in me...it was too much, knowing what I did last week.
With all the ire floating around for Reigen's killer, I knew that if I said anything, I'd be killed this week without question. And I...I've dealt with so much, just to get to a point where I could exist again, that I couldn't bring myself to take that risk. And I didn't want to hurt you or Nimona even more by telling you later.
I didn't want to tell anyone at all, but...some people kept pressuring me to do it. And the more time passed, the more it felt like there was no benefit to keeping it secret anymore. What does it matter if I get another extra week out of having friends or not, when the end result is just going to be the same? When I hate myself day in and day out for it anyway?
[ i'm sorry that he's being such a rambling drama queen right now, it's the inner vlad jumping out.
anyway he considers leaving it there, but then after a moment, hesitantly, as if he's not sure if this will help or hurt even more: ]
...and for the record, I didn't mean for his heart to...fall apart like that at all. Or even be found. I was trying to phase it into the floor, whole. Quick and clean for everybody involved. I didn't realize that I'd phased my hand through to the floor below and dropped it. ...that doesn't mean much, though, does it.
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