InsaneJournal

WHO: Danny Ketch. Narrative.
WHAT: Realizing he's not as okay as he thought he was.
WHEN: Afternoon, right around lunchtime, 6/10.
WHERE: The Golden Dove, which for my purposes is a typical bar-and-a-couple-booths diner somewhere in Lawrence.
WARNINGS: This was supposed to be a dark narrative and still managed to get darker than I intended. Nothing graphic, but keep in mind who we're talking about here.

Light streamed in from the large windows on the back wall of the little diner, but Danny Ketch didn’t see any of it. Tucked away in a little corner of the hole-in-the-wall diner he sometimes went to for meals when he was feeling anti-social, Danny quietly munched on a late lunch of a cheese-steak and fries, his head down. The truth thing hadn’t been easy on anyone, but for Danny it had revealed a truth he’d been denying to himself since giving up the booze and getting back together with Jess. It wasn’t the first time he’d convinced himself of the lie, either. Back when he’d been dating Paula, one of the girls that came between periods of “on” with Stacy, he and Ghost Rider – then Noble Kale, though he hadn’t regained his memory yet – had come to an understanding. They’d both grown tired of the alternative, a war for control of their shared body that nearly killed them both on more than one occasion. That new understanding had made things easier on the both of them, but had also brought them closer together, mingling their personalities more than Danny realized. But he’d managed to pull it together then, and convinced himself that he wasn’t getting some sick thrill out of pursuing the Ghost Rider’s work as the living Spirit of Vengeance, after calling the cops on Paula’s abusive ex rather than beating him into a bloody smear on the pavement, like he’d wanted to do initially.

The same thing had happened here. Before Jess had come back, when Danny had just been a sloppy drunk drifting from bar to bar and fight to fight, it hadn’t been a secret. The fighting and the booze were all he had back then, and in some twisted way, in Danny’s head, that made it okay to enjoy it. Since then he’d cleaned up his act and Jess had come back into his life, a ray of hope into what was otherwise a pretty dismal, hopeless void of self-destruction. He knew all his problems hadn’t magically disappeared, but he’d done his best to convince himself that the façade of civility he was developing was real. He had rationalizations galore to explain away any doubts, and either he was just that good at lying or he was dumb enough to believe some of the worst excuses. Sitting alone in the shadows of that little diner, Danny was prepared to chalk it up to the latter. The truth, and given what was happening to everyone else it couldn’t be denied, was that he did still like it. He still liked it a lot, and that wasn’t a good thing. It wasn’t just an issue of morality. Once upon a time, when he still believed the Caretakers lies about the Ghost Rider, that’s all it would have been, but these days he knew the truth about what he was and no longer held to the same strict morality he once had.

No, there was a different reason his continued enjoyment of his duties as a Spirit of Vengeance troubled him now.

Mister Eleven and Zadkiel had lied to him about a lot of things. Zadkiel’s motives, the divine sanction, the reasons they needed Danny, those were all lies. But most of the things Eleven had told him about the Ghost Rider were truth, that much he’d seen with his own eyes, both in action and in the mystical archives of the Caretaker. The Spirits being heavenly weapons grafted onto, and passed down through, the souls of human lineages. The Caretaker’s lies, though there was every indication now that his lies had come on Zadkiel’s orders. The changing forms of the Riders corresponding to memeforms, and the ability of the individual Rider to make changes to them. Most importantly, though, was what happened to Riders who went bad. Danny had seen that even before the mess with Zadkiel, in a Spirit called Vengeance, an ex-black ops agent and ex-NYPD detective named Michael Badilino. Michael had always been a lot darker than Danny, even before becoming Vengeance. Hell, he’d been leader of a special police task force with one mandate: Bring down the Ghost Rider. For a long time, Michael spent every waking minute trying to kill him, and when he couldn’t, he sold his soul to the archfiend Mephisto for the power to do so. The irony of the situation was that Michael’s singular obsession with the Ghost Rider’s demise was created when Johnny Blaze, the first Ghost Rider of the modern age, powered by the demon Zarathos bound to his soul by the very same archfiend, had judged Badilino’s father with his hellfire. Badilino, like Blaze before him, took Ghost Rider to be Zarathos reborn, though Blaze was dissuaded of that notion far sooner than Badilino. At first thinking Mephisto had crafted him an alternate form in exaggerated mimicry of Ghost Rider’s own, it was during the true rebirth of Zarathos that Vengeance, Johnny, and Danny learned what they believed to be the truth, given to them by the Caretaker: They were all bearers of a shard of the Medallion of Power, each Spirits in their own right. Since then, Danny had considered Michael sort of a physical brother, even if they weren’t related by blood.

Then things went bad. Michael stood in for Danny during the period he was inactive due to his third death, but Danny’s return left him with no purpose and an increasing dislike of the unit he used to lead. Instead, Michael began chasing a specter from his past, one Anton Hellgate. Danny still wasn’t sure what had happened on that crusade, but it had changed Michael. Always intensely devoted to brutal vengeance, something pushed Michael over the edge into zealotry, and he had returned to New York. There he began killing people with hellfire and painting the message NO PENANCE in blood above their corpses. It took Ghost Rider and his allies awhile to find out that it was Michael behind the murders, but it all came to a head in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at a meeting of all the major New York crime families. Michael was lost to vengeance, pure rage and nothing more. Danny himself, Ghost Rider, Stacy, and even the normally gung-ho Blaze had all tried to reason with him, but to no avail. Ghost Rider would have had to kill him, if a moment of lucidity hadn’t given Michael the answer to how to finish off Hellgate and himself, once and for all. Giving in to the rage fully, Michael had created an explosion so massive that even the Ghost Rider could only refer to it as “going atomic”. At the time, Danny had thought that unique to Michael, some quirk of Mephisto being the one to activate the Spirit within him.

Years later, Eleven showed him otherwise.

All it took to send a Spirit over the edge was a little too much enjoyment of the job, or a little too much anger. Sometimes, all it really took was just a good solid knock on the head, though Danny wasn’t entirely sure whether that was fact or just Eleven’s odd sense of humor. He’d seen two other Ghost Riders gone bad thanks to Eleven, saw how much of a danger they were. The process was excrutiating. The Spirit within devoured your soul, leaving you an everburning spirit of rage and wrath. All there was left of you was blind, directionless vengeance of the most brutal sort. There was no humanity left in a Rider that went bad, only a total monster bent on nothing but purging all evil, no matter how small, from the world through the most brutal means imaginable. Nothing but that and the constant pain of your body being consumed in flames with all safeguards removed. That was what he had to look forward to if he got carried away. That was why he was so terrified of liking the vengeance. Because when you were that far gone, as Michael and the other two Spirits proved, there was no such thing as an innocent. Every single person on the face of the earth was guilty of something, in the eyes of a Spirit pushed too far, and nothing less than extermination would satisfy it.

Before, he’d been too drunk to be terrified of that. Too drunk to be assailed with nightmares of hurting all those he cared about, and too alone to really have any such thing anyway. But time had changed that, time and his sobering up. Now he did have people: Jess, Ruby, Sam, Felicia, Kitty, Booth… Friends and more, the most precious treasures someone who had lost so many could have, and he was just one step away from trying to tear through them all in a bloody swath of pointless, monstrous vengeance. He knew full well the monster he would become then, because he had almost become it once before. When he’d come across the body of Mary LeBow, the technopagan that had first exorcised the Ghost Rider for him and then taken on a sort of nurturing role to the drunken addict he’d become since. She had been a friend in his blackest hour, and maybe could have been more if he’d just pulled his head out of his ass, but any such possibility was cut short when Eleven, under orders from Zadkiel to get to Danny, murdered her. Just as the angelic mastermind expected, finding her corpse had driven Danny over the edge, leaving him no choice but to accept Zadkiel’s offer of salvation in Him. In that moment before he’d managed to stutter out the word YES, Danny had felt the monster he had been becoming, and had that YES not been enough it would have been too late, because with that YES went the last of his humanity. Had he not given over his soul to Zadkiel, it would have been wholly devoured. It could still happen here and here there were no scheming angels to save his soul from himself. If it happened here there would be nothing but blood and death, first for everyone around him and then for himself, when they finally figured out how to bring him down. And when he went, it would be with the very same explosion as Badilino.

And it was already starting.

A noise from one of the booths in the little diner pulled Danny from his frightened reverie. Glancing up and back, Danny spotted the disturbance: One of the diners was apparently unhappy with some aspect of his order. Looked like some half-drunk hood from the neighborhood Danny lived in during his first tour of Lawrence. The guy had slammed his plate down and was berating his companion, probably his girlfriend, some waif of a thing that looked like she probably made her money on the streets. So maybe not his girlfriend. It didn’t take his sin-o-vision to know that this wasn’t the first time the guy had gotten heated, even physical, with the girl sitting across from him, but it helped paint the full Technicolor picture across Danny’s neurons. Danny sighed inwardly but turned his eyes back to his food. It wasn’t his business, and with this new fear consuming him, he couldn’t afford to get involved in some fight where no innocent had really been hurt or stood any real, current threat of it. Eat your sandwich, Ketch, he mentally growled at himself. It’s none of your damn business. Trying his best to ignore the sharp pang of guilt that struck him then from that little voice in the back of his head that still wanted to be a boy scout, Danny lifted his cheese-steak and prepared to take another bite.

”Hey, stop, you’re hurting me!”

Only to drop it in disgust as the familiar anger flared up in his heart and the fiery thing grafted to his soul started to tug on its leash. No, damnit, no! Someone else will take care of it. Not everything’s a job for the goddamn Ghost Rider! He could hear the argument growing more heated behind him and chanced a look around. No one else was doing anything. Most of them were burying themselves in their own meals or conversations. The cooks were just pretending they didn’t hear anything. The lone waitress, a crone probably a year shy of retirement age, was busying herself with nervously checking her order receipts. A few of the patrons were quietly putting down money and preparing to leave. Apparently no one was going to do anything. Danny squeezed his eyes shut tight as he felt the familiar dryness overcome them. He knew that if he opened them, there would only be hellfire there. His hands balled into white-knuckled fists that he pressed down hard into the counter, struggling against the primal, fiery need to give in and intervene before things got worse.

SLAP!

And that was it. Danny’s eyes popped open, and while there was no literal hellfire raging in his sockets, there was a figurative fire raging in each of them. A little voice in the back of his head, a voice he dimly recognized as his own, screamed at him to stop, to simply get up and leave like a few of the other diners were doing, but his body was enacting a mutiny against his mind that he couldn’t, that he didn’t truly want, to stop. Turning slowly on the flimsy little stool, Danny saw how far the argument had progressed. The woman had stumbled out of her seat and clutching her cheek, where a thin red line was beginning to well up, and the thug was on his feet, screaming at her. Though he was speaking English, the words washed over Danny without leaving an impression. This was going to get worse if someone didn’t intervene, and no one else in this godforsaken place was going to do a damn thing to stop it.

Fine. Then maybe it was a job for Dan Ketch.

Rising from the bar stool, his lunch forgotten, Danny advanced casually on the “couple”, looking for all the world like he was on his way to the men’s room at the other end of the diner. It would be enough to keep the angry thug from noticing him, though everyone else in the place turned their eyes to the tall man with the beard and the dark coat. He felt patrons slide out of his way as he passed, but took no notice of them other than that. With the Spirit came a strange sort of tunnel-vision, though maybe that was just Danny, these days. He continued walking, his heavy motorcycle boots thudding against the ground with each step, until he reached the couple. Then he interposed himself between the thug and his terrified, bleeding companion, forcing the thug to take an involuntary step back against the table. “I think you need to calm down, guy,” Danny told him, his tone deceptively calm. “Some of us are trying to eat in peace.”

“I think you need to mind your own fuckin’ business,” the thug snapped, already trying to shove passed Danny. Danny’s large hand on the shorter man’s chest stopped him cold. “Take your damn hand off me, pal, or I’m gonna teach you how to mind your business.”

“You’ve got one chance here, pal,” Danny replied in the same calm, cold voice. “Walk away now. Leave the girl here. Do that and we can save everyone here a world of trouble and you a world of hurt.” Danny knew the chances of the angry thug taking that offer were slim, but all the same, he couldn’t help sending up a silent prayer to a God he didn’t really believe was up there. Please let this guy just walk out the door. Please don’t let him push this. Danny knew what would happen if the thug made the wrong choice, and he desperately, desperately wanted to avoid that if at all possible. To that end, he maneuvered around the thug so that he’d have a clear shot to the door. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease-

The soft whisper of metal scraping against plastic accompanied the thug’s overconfident tone as he drew and clicked open a switchblade, the blade end pointing right at Danny’s guts. “Think maybe you just missed your last chance, chief.”

The last thread of resistance in Danny’s mind snapped. He let out a melodramatic sigh, accompanying it with a roll of his eyes. “Oh, you’ve got a little knife there. How very frightening,” he said, in a tone that spoke of exasperation rather than fright. Already predicting the thug’s first lunge, Danny brought his right hand up and around, smacking into the thug’s wrist on the inside and deflecting the blow harmlessly wide to his right. On the downside, he grabbed the thug’s wrist, squeezed, and twisted mercilessly, smiling at the sound of bone snapping. The knife fell from a suddenly useless hand as the thug cried out, but the cry was silenced a second later, as Danny’s left fist came up in a punishing blow to the middle of his throat, leaving the thug breathless and stumbling backward. Danny pursued, no longer able to let the thug go without the vengeance he deserved for all the merciless beatings he’d given his girlfriend. Danny’s right came up in a punishing haymaker that sent stars dancing across the thug’s vision, and before he could recover Danny brought his left hand up, open palm grabbing the thug’s head and slamming it brutally down against the bar. The thug nearly lost his footing, but managed to shove Danny away and continue back, though much slower than before. Danny closed the distance without even picking up his pace and delivered a vicious blow to the thug’s gut with a rising left knee. Doubled over and clutching his aching guts, the thug was in no position to dodge Danny’s next attack, a savage forward kick with his right foot that he slammed into the man’s chest like a piston. The thug was off his feet then, sailing back several feet before slamming into the ground, and Danny was there to meet him, looming over him and jamming a his left knee viciously down into his chest to pin him there. He lifted his right fist and brought it down in a brutal hook, and did the same with his left, and then his right, and then his left…

Then things got hazy.

Danny wasn’t sure how long the beating lasted. A minute, maybe more? What he did know is that when he came back to himself, he was being bodily dragged off the man by two cooks and three patrons, and the guy’s face looked like nothing more than tenderized, ground up beef. There was a dent in the tile underneath the guy’s head that was roughly headshaped, and despite the mess that was his face the guy was clutching his chest amidst pained, wheezing sobs. Danny easily broke free of the stunned mass of bodies trying to hold him and quickly held up his hands, palms out to show he meant no harm. He looked from horrified face to horrified face in the diner, eventually settling on the pale, stunned face of the bleeding waif. “You should find a new boyfriend,” Danny grumbled, then turned and headed for the door. As he neared the bar, he tossed a $100 bill out to cover the trouble and, hopefully, halt any potential call to the police anyone was thinking of making. As he stepped over the prostrate thug, he couldn’t help adding just one more half-assed kick to the ribs that sent the thug to wincing all over again. He managed to make it to the bike and halfway down the street before he lost it, pulling jerkily over to the shoulder, slumping over the handlebars and burying his face in his arms. He didn’t want anyone passing by to know.

He didn’t want anyone to hear him crying.