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Sometimes, a girl needed a midnight snack to go with the book she was reading into the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes that girl was Jazz Fenton, and sometimes she would walk into the darkened kitchen and be startled by her little brother's eyeshine. The first time that happened, she thought a bobcat had somehow gotten in the kitchen and ended up whacking Danny over the head with a broom.
That time was not this time. This time, Jazz heard the sink running in the kitchen, and Danny's back was to her when she entered. If she squinted through the darkness, he seemed to be hunched over the sink washing something. Jazz flicked on the light and he turned his head way further than he ought to, staring at her like a deer in headlights. "I can explain."
Jazz stared at the object in his hands. It was vaguely ellipsoid, and a weird sort of gray-pink color. "Danny, whose brain is that?" she asked calmly, mentally composing a checklist for disposing of the rest of Vlad's body.
"Uh. Mine."
Jazz's checklist fell out of her head and scattered all over the floor. " What ?" Now that she was looking for it, she saw the pale tendrils linking the brain back to his torso: his spinal cord and several peripheral nerves. "How did-" well, he phased it out with his ghost powers obviously , and his ghostly physiology must have had redundancies keeping him from suffering from the pack of blood flow to his brain. "Why the sink ?"
Danny shrugged, looking sheepish. "I dunno, it seemed like a good idea when I started." He turned his brain over to get his cerebellum under the faucet. "I couldn't sleep, so I was online-"
"That's why you couldn't sleep-"
"I already couldn't sleep for like two hours before I got online, screw you. Anyway, somebody made a post joking about taking their brain out and washing the crazy off in the sink and I figured that couldn't possibly make things worse , so…" Danny shrugged. “Maybe I just gotta rinse out the insomnia.”
Strangely, Jazz would have preferred if he had finally lost his temper and killed Vlad the rest of the way. That would make sense, that would be a scenario she had planned for, that… "That water isn't sterile , Danny."
Danny stared at her blankly, and shifted his grip so he could use one hand to gesture at the rope of nerves trailing out of him. "I'm pretty sure germs are a moot point by now."
"...Touché."
"If you don't stop staring at me like that I'm gonna do my kidneys next."
Jazz looked away. She did not, in fact, want to see her baby brother's entrails. Actually, she didn't really want a midnight snack either. You know what? Better if she just turned the lights back off. "I'm going back to bed."
Danny chuckled in the dark. "Nighty night."
Jazz laid in bed and realized that there were dishes in the sink. She could never eat off of them again.