Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The recorder clicked on. With the session over prematurely after her client had walked out, the only thing left to do was to make her notes. She walked over to the couch her client had just abandoned and laid down to stare at the ceiling. Taking a deep breath in and out, she let out some of her own stress from the difficult session and then she started talking.

“Client is an adolescent boy who has just recently started high school. Presents with abandonment issues deflected onto his sister, as well as poorly hidden depression and anxiety likely stemming from being subjected to parental delusions (see client folders for JF and MF). Besides ending this session early, the client has been showing a number of avoidant behaviors, spurred on by his underdeveloped frontal cortex, a lack of proper adult supervision, and his own denial of his troubled mental state.”

She paused here to gather her thoughts. 

“During this session the client discussed issues at school that could be related to bullying, though he engaged in behaviors to hide their impact on him. Client has long been subject to a phenomenon I believe is a mass hysteria started by rumors, but he has been ostracized due to a ‘bad vibe,’ since early elementary school. Ostracization later turned to bullying which had been an issue throughout junior high school, however, due to his burgeoning sense of identity and his need to mark his own worth against his peers, the client has begun to hide more elements of himself to fit in. Client has also recently started to doubt the possibility of a long held goal, in part due to his parents’ delusions. The perceived loss of this goal has also impacted his sense of self. This identity crisis has been compounded by a marked increase in abandonment by his parents, whose delusions have kept them in their work space. Their singleminded focus on creating a machine to interact with the dead instead of their own living son has lead to severe self-esteem issues. Unfortunately, these self-esteem issues have led to projection upon his sister, who the client calls arrogant (see my personal folder). 

“I have recommended, both to the client’s parents and to the client, that the entire family should spend time together outside of the house (and away from the parents’ place of work). Unfortunately, the client has been seeking validation from his parents by engaging in risky behaviors in their very not safe home laboratory, possibly indicating the client’s own self destructive tendencies and a very adolescent exploration of mortality while denying his-”

She had that feeling and cut herself off just before he spoke.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked. 

Jazz stopped the recorder and sat up to turn towards the stairs. He usually avoided eye contact, but he wasn’t, in just that moment, and neither was she, so she experienced that weird psychosomatic response where she briefly felt like she was staring into the vast nothingness of space before she looked away.

“Oh, Danny, I’m glad you decided to come back and talk to me more.”

“Is that a recorder? Were you talking about me?!” 

“Did you want to talk about yourself more? It’s really important to talk about your symptoms.”

“My symptoms?” Clear denial in his voice. 

“What’s going on in your life,” Jazz said. 

“That’s none of your business,” Danny deflected, crossing his arms in a classic example of body language indicating guarded feelings.

“I’m your big sister, of course it’s my business,” Jazz said. “More importantly, according to the latest research on adolescent trauma, your self isolating tendencies are the opposite of what you need.”

“What trauma? Actually, don’t answer that. I’m not isolating! I have friends, unlike you. You know the kids you tutor don’t count, right?”

Jazz took a deep breath in and out. When clients lashed out and projected it was important not to feed into it. “Playing video games online is isolating even if it’s tangentially with friends.”

“Psychoanalyzing people against their will is isolating, because no one wants to talk to you! Now stop being a freak and delete that.”

Jazz held the recorder up to her mouth and said. “Client’s avoidant behavior has increased and will likely stunt his emotional development leading to stunted adult social skills.”

“Oh my god! Give me that thing.”

Danny lunged at her, but Jazz quickly sprung off of the couch and held Danny off as he tried to reach for the recorder that she held over her head.

“Client’s lack of a significant growth spurt has also likely damaged his self-esteem.”

“I’ll damage your self-esteem!”

“The longer you bottle things up the harder it is to work through it,” Jazz said, struggling a bit. Danny was practically trying to climb her to get to the recorder.

“You need a shrink!”

“That term is terribly outdated.”

“Your existence is outdated. Just. Give. Me. The. Stupid. Recorder.”

Jazz toppled herself over onto the couch, with Danny sandwiched in between.

“Oomph.”

“Sorry, little brother,” Jazz said hurried to get up and away. “I just remembered I’ve got some errands to run. In my car. Since I’ve got my license now.”

She dashed for the front door. 

“Damn it, Jazz,” Danny wheezed.

“See you later,” Jazz said. 

Danny blew a raspberry at her. “See you never, if I can help it.”

“Client’s latent oral fixation indicates-” 

A pillow from the couch hit her head just before she got out the door. 

“I do not have an ‘oral fixation!’” she heard Danny squawk from the other side of the door.

Well, of course he didn’t, that was Freudian nonsense, but maybe he would think about the childish deflection methods he implemented to avoid actually talking about his feelings.

Admittedly, she had perhaps not handled that as well as she could have. Oh well. She’d bribe him with pizza later to get him down stairs. 

“What’s going on up here?” Mom asked, sticking her head into the living room.

“Oh, nothing, hey Mom, I thought you were still asleep. You were working pretty late last night.”

“Oh, actually we worked through the night, sweetie,” Mom said, and then sighed.

“Is everything alright?” Danny asked. 

“Oh, well, everything should be working, but it just didn’t turn on.”

“Wait, you tried to turn it on? I didn’t think you were there, yet.”

“Well, your father and I do some of our best work during all-nighters,” Mom said.

“I wanted to be there when you tried it,” Danny said.

“Well, it didn’t even work, Danny,” Mom said. 

“My whole life, pointless!” Dad exclaimed from the kitchen.

“It’s just, I’ve helped out,” Danny said. “A lot. I thought you’d want me to be there when you turned it on.”

“Danny, it’s been a very long night,” Mom said. 

Danny hid a frown. “So what are we trying next?” he asked. “Maybe take a break?”

“No sense in loosing momentum; it’s crunch time,” Mom said. “We might have to do a teardown, and then who can say where that will take us.”

That was going to take forever. It was always crunch time.

“Not even a spark!” Dad wailed. 

“I need to go console your father. We should probably get out of the house.”

“Oh, well, since you just got out of the lab, we could go to brunch or something,” Danny said. “It’s been a while since we’ve been to IHOP.”

“Oh, Danny, I don’t think your father and I are up for much company right now. You enjoy your Saturday.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Right, okay, be good,” Mom patted him on the head briefly. “Jack! Come on, you scavenged from the coffee maker so let’s go find some coffee.”

“Coffee’s for accomplished engineers!”

Mom gave Danny a look and went to wrangle him out the door.

Alone in the house, Danny huffed. It was supposed to be almost over. ‘Crunch time’ had been their excuse for everything over the summer and now here he was two weeks into high school and he couldn’t even wrangle a weekend trip out to Palos Park for some star gazing. 

Everything had just sort of sucked for the past however many months, ever since Dash had humiliated him in front of every one on the last day of junior high school, ever since his application for space camp had gotten ‘lost in the mail,’ ever since he’d found out that his body put out just a little bit of EMF because of his ectocontamination and NASA would probably never let him near a space ship… Danny was just sort of waiting for things to feel less sucky. 

So, he’d tried to get his parents, literally all summer, to make a trip out to Palos. He’d had it in his head that if they could just go out there it would feel like it had the first time they’d gone there as a family… Well, maybe without Jazz. She wouldn’t want to miss a weekend of studying. It didn’t have to be a long trip, now that summer vacation was over. It could just be a weekend.

He thought about calling Sam and Tucker. Sometimes their enthusiasm for everything had really helped over the summer. Except, after Dash had successfully gotten Danny all the way into a locker on Friday, the both of them were angry on his behalf and the last time they’d talked over Doomed, they’d both been acting like they were worried about him, which was stupid. Danny was more than capable of handling Dash without them worrying.

A part of him just wanted to go upstairs and stare at the stars on his ceiling, but Danny was sick and tired of crunch time. Walking into the kitchen, Danny put the code into the panel next to blast doors to open them. He wasn’t technically supposed to be down there without Mom and Dad, but that was a rule Jazz had made them put in place, so it wasn’t like it really counted.

The lab was a mess, of course, and Danny was annoyed that he had to do some cleaning (when it wasn’t even his turn) before he could go about figuring out what his parents had done all night. 

He cut his finger cleaning up a broken beaker and stuck his finger in his mouth, ignoring the green residue he picked up from the glass. What was a little more ectocontamination?

Probably a one way ticket to very definitely never getting into NASA, much less the space program. He should at least try to minimize further exposure.

Danny went and put on a bandage and then his HAZMAT suit, which was uncomfortable and hot. He looked over at the ectofiltrators. Oversaturated. He probably should have been wearing his respirator the whole time. Danny groaned as he threw on the hood and got the full face respirator out to strap onto his face. Nothing like wearing a sauna suit in September.

When Mom and Dad had realized he was a little EMFey and realized how much ectoplasm was in his blood and cells, Mom had made this offhand comment, like, oh, maybe that’s why you’ve always been a bit odd. Which, gee thanks Mom, not like he didn’t hear it enough at school. The kids at school had mostly written him off as creepy when he was in Kindergarten, and the only thing that had changed since then was them deciding that this didn’t make him scary so much as it made him a joke.

Things cleaned up, Danny reviewed all the changes he could figure his parents had made to the blueprints since the last time he’d been down there. Nothing seemed wrong, but there was just so much there, it took forever. He kept telling himself he should take a break and go eat lunch, but… Like his parents, he didn’t like to waste momentum. He wasn’t really hungry anyway.

Review finished, Danny got a voltmeter and started testing connections and outputs on all of the external critical control elements, but everything was within the parameters listed. He took a bit of time to verify that those parameters hadn’t been written with any wrong decimal places. 

The portal did two things. When someone died and became a ghost (or a proto-ghost, rather) a micro portal opened up and took (most of) them to the Ghost Zone. Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill anyone, of course, so the first thing the portal did, was to artificially open that hole. Next, the portal was supposed to rip that hole wide open and keep it open.

Dad had said that there hadn't even been a spark. So the first place to look was the portal generator, itself, before the stabilizer. Danny eyeballed the chasm in the wall. Jazz had always called it a death trap, and Danny sort of felt a thrill walking into the thing when Mom and Dad weren’t even there. Voltmeter in hand, Danny started testing components, imagining the whole time that he was going to figure it out. Helping to build an inter-dimensional portal had to look good on a resume for NASA, right?

He was halfway through testing the leads on the J7 switch panel, when he looked at it in confusion. Why was there any switch panel in there? There weren’t supposed to be any controls inside the portal. He thought back to the blueprints and then ran out just to be sure. Yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be a J7 switch panel. It was supposed to be a K12 fuse box.

Danny felt giddy for the first time in a long time. He’d done it. He’d figured it out. Mom and Dad would be so happy. The project would be done. They’d want to go take a little break. He could talk to them about- everything. They would go for a little vacation (Danny would pick, since he fixed it).

He went to the supply room and started looking for the fuse box. All he had to do was shut everything down, wire in the fuse box, and then he could turn it on. Mom and Dad would come home and the portal would be working. Danny would just stand there as they exclaimed at how he’d fixed it. They’d…

Mom and Dad wouldn’t leave the basement for another week. At least. If the thing actually started working. 

A week? Try a month. Try a year. 

‘There’s so many discoveries to be made, Danno, we’ll go out soon, after we’ve published a few papers.’

Danny deflated, feeling dumb, and hot, and covered in sweat. Just a bunch of wishful thinking, like he was a little kid.

At least they’d be proud of him. At least they’d be happy with him.

Danny found the fuse box. He just wanted it to be done. He trudged to the portal opening, ready to be done with it. Kneeling down next to the switch panel, Danny got to work swapping in the fuse box. 

Jazz was rather surprised to see the awful RV her parents had modified gone when she got back home. Despite what Danny thought, she did have friends, and she’d spent some time with Spike who had needed a listening ear and some advice while he dealt with parents during a vulnerable time in his late adolescence. They’d gotten lunch together and watched a movie. Danny had probably calmed down and might have processed some of his emotions now that she was home. Though, with it being dusk, and Mom and Dad gone, then it definitely would be on her to handle dinner. All would be forgiven with Pizza.

“Danny,” she called when she got inside. “Hawaiian or chicken bacon?”

There was no answer, even though she knew he could hear her from his room. Oh well, he liked both of them, so he couldn’t complain. Well, no, Danny could complain about anything.

She should at least check to see if her parents were going to be home and would want dinner. She pulled out her phone.

“Jazz, honey,” Mom said. “I should have called earlier.”

“Yes, you should have,” Jazz agreed. “Are you going to be home soon? I’m ordering pizza.”

“Oh, honey, we’re heading up to the city right now; there’s some reference material we want to look at in the archives at the University of Chicago.”

“You’re going out of town? Right now?”

“You can drop your brother off at Hamlet tomorrow before you go to school?”

“Mom, we both go to Casper; Danny’s in the ninth grade now.”

“Right, of course,” Mom said. “He looked so cute in his picture day outfit.”

He’d come home from school with that outfit trashed.

“Anyway,” Mom said. “We’ll be back tomorrow before you kids come back from school.”

“Mom, this is a pivotal point in your son’s development. This sudden abandonment really-”

“Thanks Jazzy Pants, you and Danny enjoy your pizza.”

Jazz did not scream at the phone that had just disconnected. She went over to the fridge and looked at the Luigi’s Pizza magnet for the number.

She looked up when the kitchen lights dimmed suddenly, and a moment later she heard the most awful soul shattering scream. Jazz whipped around towards the blast doors downstairs. That was Danny. That was Danny screaming down in the lab. Jazz ran towards the doors, her heart in her throat. Danny’s gasping pained yell echoing in her ears. She was halfway through the code for the doors when everything stopped. The lights shut off, the panel went blank, and the screaming now only was an echo in her mind.

“Danny?!” Jazz yelled through the doors. “Danny, can you hear me?!”

Everything was off. There was nothing but total silence in the kitchen.

“Danny! This isn’t funny. Answer me right now!”

He could be dying down there.

She started pressing at the panel desperately, but there was no power. Why couldn’t she open it when there wasn’t any power? She took out her phone and turned the light on. The panel was supposed to have a backup battery in it. She ripped off the cover and… there was an empty spot for a nine volt battery. 

“Danny! I’m going to be right back. I need to get this door open. Um, if you can hear me, can you get to the breaker panel? There’s no power.”

There wasn’t a sound from the basement.

Jazz rushed to the closet and found AA and AAA batteries, but no nine volts. The thought of hauling the ladder out of the garage just so she could get a smoke detector down was just infuriating. She grabbed the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ from next to the door, ran and jumped, swinging the baseball bat over her head, knocking the smoke detector down. A minute later the door unlocked and she hauled it open, her phone light illuminating her way down. 

What if he was dead?

She felt that feeling she got when Danny was in the same room as her, except it was turned up to eleven. So, he couldn’t be dead. 

Except that feeling was just a dumb psychosomatic response, that she had never been able to train herself out of, so it didn’t mean anything.

“Danny?”

She swept her phone around the room. There was less clutter than she was used to and she couldn’t see Danny anywhere. Then there was a flickering in the corner of her eye and she turned towards the death trap her parents had built and there, lying on the ground, Danny popped into existence. A weird trick of the light from her phone.

“Danny!” He was on his side, clutching at his arm, silent tears streaming down his face. A burned respirator lying next to him. He looked up at her slowly.

“J-Jazz, I d-, am I dead?”

“Of course you’re not,” Jazz said, approaching him cautiously. Looking at the arm he was clutching. The arm of his HAZMAT suit was charred. Oh god, that had to be a massive burn. He was staying calm; he had to be in shock. “Danny, are you hurt anywhere else?”

Danny shook his head. “It’s… Nothing hurts.” He swallowed. “It should hurt, right?”

“Let’s just- We need some light. Don’t move, okay?”

Danny nodded. Jazz walked over to the breaker panel in the corner, the whole time looking over her shoulder to see that Danny was still there. That weird trick of the light happened again, and Danny seemed to flicker.

She turned towards the panel. Luckily the portal had its own breaker, which she left off, but… the other breakers weren’t just flipped, everything in the panel was melted.

“Well,” she said. “Better the breakers than the house burning down.”

She turned back towards Danny, and it was probably the material of his HAZMAT; it reflected light weird.

“Danny, no!”

“It feels fine,” Danny protested, gingerly pulling off the charred material of the glove, the charred material crackling. 

“You’re going to peel off your skin.”

“It’s fine,” Danny said. He held up his hand, which was pale, but unmarred.

“Oh, thank god,” Jazz said.

“Got to hand it to Mom and Dad, they make a good suit.”

He started laughing, sounding slightly hysterical.

Clearly he needed a hug, and he probably wouldn’t push her away. Her skin crawled a bit more than it normally did when she hugged him, but it was fine. Not for the first time, she cursed her parents for raising them to believe in ghosts and the supernatural. It had somehow infected her brain and when people had started commenting on Danny being odd, it had never left, no matter how rationally she looked at it. Sometimes, she worried that it had been her who had started the mass hysteria at school, that how she’d treated Danny when they’d been little had been the reason for all his misery with his peers.

Danny caught his breath for a while. “I think I’m okay,” he said eventually, pushing her away.

“What were you thinking?”

“I figured out why it didn’t work.”

“What?”

“Someone installed a switch panel instead of a fuse box. I- um- I forgot to turn off the power before I swapped them out.”

“Danny, it didn’t work because ghosts aren’t real.”

“Uh, yeah,” Danny said. “Anyway, I figured out what was mechanically wrong with it.”

“Danny you could have died! For Mom and Dad’s stupid obsession with these delusions.”

“Hey, hey, I’m fine,” Danny said. “Somehow. You know, for a moment, I sort of thought-”

He laughed a bit again.

“Danny, you got electrocuted so bad your suit got charred. You shouldn’t have been down here. Mom and Dad shouldn’t have let you down here. Do you know how scared I was?”

“Hey, I thought you wanted to be an only child.”

“I was twelve, can you just let that go?”

“Never. What was wrong with the breakers?”

“You melted them. The power’s out for the whole house.”

“I can fix that,” Danny said.

“You’re not touching anything.”

“I’ll turn off the mains power first.”

“Danny, I almost just lost you. I thought you were dead. Danny, I thought you were dead.”

“Yeah, well, just wait till Mom and Dad get home, then I’ll be dead.”

“I’m going to kill them! Danny, this has gone too far, their extreme neglect almost killed you.”

“Jazz, I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking!”

“It was just a bit of a shock.”

He was pale.

“Can you stand up?”

Danny started to get up, but his knee went out from under him. Jazz tried to catch him. She thought she had caught him, but she must have just missed him.

“Nice catch,” Danny muttered.

Jazz reached down and helped him sit up. She brushed his hair back from his forehead. Besides being pale, his skin was clammy. She picked up his hand and checked his pulse. It was rapid, but thready. She pulled him up. Half leaning against her, she helped him get out of his HAZMAT suit. He looked shaken up, but he was… not burned to a crisp? Was he in shock? She was pretty sure he was in shock.

She hazarded a look into his eyes and the vast expanse of nothingness almost swallowed her. She had to explore it. It was so empty and so full of possibilities and- his pupils were dilated wide open and barely reacted when she shined her phone light in them. Yeah, he was in shock.

She dragged him upstairs, where she dropped him on the couch. 

“You’re in shock,” she said. She pulled down one of the back pillows and placed it on the foot of the couch. “Feet up, lay down. I’ll get you a blanket.”

“I’m really fine.”

“You’re really not,” Jazz said. “Danny, can you just try not to get yourself killed right now?”

Danny sighed and laid down on the couch. 

“Feet up,” Jazz said, moving towards the closet to grab a blanket and a lantern, if she could find one.

“Oh!” Jazz exclaimed. “Take off your binder.”

“Really, Jazz?”

“You’re in shock! You want to have trouble breathing?”

“There is no trouble breathing. I’m not in shock,” his voice shaking.

“Danny, so help me, I will ruin every constellation in your room…”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I’ve got the same exact glow paint, it would be so easy, you’d never sleep again until it was all fixed.”

“You’re the worst,” Danny said. 

Danny had been obsessed with the accuracy of his ceiling for years. When he’d been five, it had been enough to just have the stars, by the time he’d been seven it had needed rough constellations. When he’d been ten, he’d gotten the ruler out and learned proportionality and perspective. 

Jazz found the lantern and turned it on. Relieved to not be relying on her phone, she went back out into the living room where Danny was struggling with his shirt. She helped him get comfortable, put the lantern on the table, covered him with the blanket, and went to get a Pedialyte. 

Thud. “Oof.”

“Danny!”

She ran back out into the living room. Danny was on the floor, looking shaken. He looked up at her, eyes wide. “I- I’m still alive.”

“What happened?” she asked, kneeling besides him.

“I don’t know. I- I was lying down, and then I just- fell.”

She helped him sit up and made him drink some of the Pedialyte.

“Did you have a seizure.”

“Jazz, can you calm down? Of course I didn’t have a seizure.”

“People who are just lying down don’t fall off of couches. You got electrocuted. I’m calling paramedics.” She pulled out her phone.

“Jazz, no,” Danny said. “I’m fine. And besides, they said they weren’t going to come back here after the last time.”

The goo incident. 

The ability to call for an ambulance; another thing her parents had ruined.

She helped Danny get back up onto the couch. Made sure his feet were elevated. Made him finish the Pedialyte, and covered him back up with the blanket. Then she sat down in her dad’s recliner and settled in to watch Danny.

“So, where are Mom and Dad?”

“They’re probably in Chicago by now,” Jazz said.

“Oh.” 

He looked really upset about that, but shut down when she tried to explore it further.

Jazz was a super worry wart, and a control freak for the rest of the evening. She kept making him drink water. She insisted on keeping an eye on him. She did get him pizza, though. 

Mom and Dad were going to kill him. When Jazz finally fell asleep, Danny got up, grabbed the lantern, and went into the kitchen. The lantern illuminated the room and Danny eyed the doorway downstairs. 

It was just the basement. 

At the very least, Danny should have the power back up and running before Mom and Dad got home. He held on tight to the handrail and went downstairs. Everything mostly looked the same. The light of the lantern cast the room in an eery light. He didn’t look at the portal. He just went to the supply closet and grabbed as many breakers as he could carry and went to the breaker panel. 

The main breaker was still on, but all of the sub-breakers had tripped and melted. That was a few hundred dollars in breakers, but he was hardly the only person in the house who’d ever ruined a breaker with mad science, so they had plenty of replacements on hand. Danny put on electrical gloves, turned off the main power, and started pulling all of the melted breakers out. It was a bit tedious, but it wasn’t any more difficult than anything he’d ever worked on for the portal. 

He was still a bit shaky. He was fine, though, right? All that weird stuff had been in his head.  The portal definitely hadn’t turned on. Danny had just electrocuted himself, like an idiot. If everything had turned on, magnetically confined ectoplasm would have flooded the chamber. The graviton vortex would have squished the ectoplasm, and Danny himself, into the start of the portal. Danny could picture it in his minds eye. For a moment, he had thought it was happening. For a moment, when the electricity had arced through his body, he could have sworn he’d felt his blood boil in his veins. He could have sworn that he’d felt his body compress and contort.

Except he was fine. He’d had a weird hallucination of himself floating. He’d had a near death experience. Danny had been electrocuted, and he’d probably shorted something out, which was why the rest of the portal hadn’t turned on. If the rest of it had turned on, Danny would have died for sure, and he definitely wasn’t dead. 

He’d just fallen through the couch, but that had just been his imagination. Jazz might have kind of been right about him being a bit shaken up. He’d had vertigo, maybe, and just fallen off the couch. He definitely hadn’t gone through the couch, like a ghost. Danny was fine.

Everything wired into a new breaker (except for the portal circuits), Danny turned on the main power and then started switching on breakers. He really didn’t want to go near the thing, but he really should check to see if he’d fried anything in the portal.

“Danny?!”

He should have switched off the lights before he went downstairs.

“Hey,” Danny said sheepishly.

Jazz rushed downstairs.

“Seriously, Danny?”

“I’m feeling much better.”

“You said you were fine when you were in shock, what does better mean?”

“It means I was able to rewire everything, just fine,” Danny said. “So that probably means that I’m fine.”

“You could have electrocuted yourself again.”

“The food in the fridge was going to go bad.”

“The food in the fridge was already contaminated,” Jazz said. “Danny, please just come upstairs and stop doing dangerous stuff.”

There definitely wasn’t anything else he wanted to do downstairs.

Danny convinced Jazz to let him sleep in his own bed, and not to watch him all night. This was for the best, since it would have been embarrassing to have a little freakout at two o’clock in the morning over what was probably a fever dream of waking up floating over his bed and seeing a ghost in the mirror. Then he’d had that thing where he dreamed that he was falling, and jolted himself awake in bed. He’d woken up in a bit of a state.

It took him a while to fall asleep again. Still, a weird freaky dream was a whole lot better than being dead.

The next morning, his alarm never went off, because he’d never put his phone on to charge. Luckily, Jazz had actually called him out from school. She’d also called herself out from school. It must be nice to be the biggest brownnose in school. Unluckily, she called him out from school so she could take him to urgent care.

“Jazz, I’m fine,” he said for the millionth time. “I swear, if you check my pulse one more time…”

“You got electrocuted, you went into shock, and you might have had a seizure,” Jazz said.

“I did not have a seizure.” 

He also hadn’t phased through the couch.

Or floated.

Or looked like a ghost.

Or died.

He was definitely alive. Jazz had checked his pulse enough times to prove it.

“I just feel like we’re wasting people’s time here. I’m sure the guy who’s been throwing up over there probably needs a doctor more than I do.”

“Who’s been throwing up?” Jazz asked.

“That guy,” Danny said, pointing across the room, except… “Huh, I guess he got called. The point is we’ve been here an hour, so that means they’re busy, and I’m fine.”

And if he wasn’t fine, he didn’t want to know about it.

“How do you feel?” 

“For the last time, I’m fine.” He doubted it would be the last time.

“Emotionally.”

“Seriously, Jazz?”

“You had a big scare, there. I was reading up on responses to acute trauma. I really should have had you process it last night.”

“Jazz, I can’t believe I’m sitting here, literally dying, and you’re still psychoanalyzing me.”

“Danny-”

“Danny Fenton?” a nurse called out.

“Finally,” Danny said.

Danny wasn’t thinking and he accidentally made eye contact with the nurse who just froze and stared at him a moment. He looked at the ground.

They got taken to the back where Danny got his height and weight done, blood pressure, and then… The pulse oximeter didn’t register anything.

“Oh, let me see that,” the nurse said. He put it on his own finger and it lit up. He gave it back to Danny and… nothing.

“Well, I’ll just take your pulse the old fashioned way,” he said. “And we can leave the O2 a mystery.”

Then he got a myriad of questions, including embarrassing ones, in front of his sister. Of course, the things that Danny wasn’t sure about, Jazz just knew off the top of her head.

Finally, the doctor came to see him, and Danny tried to say what had happened, but the words didn’t want to come out of his mouth, so Jazz explained about him being electrocuted, and it felt all wrong to hear her say it, and then Jazz described all of his symptoms, and the doctor wanted to test all of Danny’s reflexes. He ignored the way she sort of flinched the first time she touched him.

“So, tell me about falling off the couch,” the doctor asked Danny, since Jazz had had to bring that up. 

“Oh,” Danny said. “I think it was just some vertigo. I don’t think it was a seizure.”

“Vertigo can be a precursor to a seizure, or the manifestation of a small seizure,” she said. “Though it can also be its own symptom of the after effects of electrocution. So we’re going to want to monitor that. I don’t want you riding a bike or scooter or anything like that for four weeks, and I don’t think you should walk around town on your own. Neurological symptoms of electrocution can pop up some time after the event itself.”

“Wait, that seems a bit extreme,” Danny said.

“We’ll make sure of it, Doctor,” Jazz said.

She was going to be a nightmare.

She put Danny through some dexterity and coordination tests, checked his memory, and asked a bunch of the same embarrassing questions the nurse had already asked.

“Was there a reason your parents couldn’t be here?”

“They’re traveling for work,” Danny was quick to say. “Jazz is old enough to look after me.”

And didn’t that smart to say, but Danny didn’t want the doctor to make a thing about it.

“And this accident happened in your home?” 

“Yes,” Jazz said, faster than Danny could respond. “And it shouldn’t have been able to happen.”

“The lab was locked,” Danny said. “I wasn’t supposed to be down there, but I knew the codes.”

“And when do you expect your parents to be home?”

“Sometime today,” Jazz said. 

The doctor nodded. “I’d like you to follow up with your pediatrician in a week, but if you experience any vertigo, discoordination, seizures, sensory issues, heart palpitations, or anything really, I want you to go straight to the ER. I’m going to ask the nurse to give you some printouts on seizures and heart arrhythmia that I’d like you both to read, and your parents to read, now, and not after something happens.”

Danny was currently in-between pediatricians, the last one hadn’t seemed at all religious until he had wound up a bit convinced that Danny was the anti-Christ.

“Sure,” Danny said. “But I feel fine, I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

“You went into shock,” Jazz said.

“Maybe,” Danny said.

“Your sister described the symptoms of shock pretty well,” the doctor said. “And it sounds like she treated it appropriately, though I would have liked to have seen you yesterday evening instead of this morning. But your symptoms now don’t warrant any immediate intervention. So I’ll just admonish you to stay safe, do your reading, and monitor for further symptoms. Okay?”

“Yep,” Danny said, eager now that it seemed the whole thing was close to being over.

On the way back out through the waiting room, Danny saw that man from earlier. The one who’d been throwing up constantly. He was trying to talk to the receptionist, but she didn’t even look up at him.

That sucked.

The man turned suddenly and looked at Danny. Danny looked away quickly. 

Had there been something wrong with that man’s eyes? Danny turned back to look but the automatic doors were closing. 

“Danny?”

Had that guy been sort of transparent?

“Nothing,” Danny said, turning back towards the parking lot. “I thought I saw- it was nothing. 

Jazz drove them home. The GAV was in the carport. 

He was so dead. He followed Jazz inside. Jazz went straight to the kitchen and hollered downstairs that they were home. It was time to face the music.

Mom came upstairs, followed by Dad. They both looked at Jazz.

“Why aren’t you in school?” Mom asked. “And would you care to tell me what happened down in the lab?”

Best to let Jazz explain it. 

“I’m not in school, because I had to take Danny to urgent care, because last night he decided to try and fix your stupid portal and electrocuted himself! Did you seriously just leave the power on? Do you know how lucky we are that Danny was wearing his HAZMAT suit? Did you see it down there? It was burnt to a crisp. Danny, somehow, wasn’t. Oh, and the emergency battery for the door was missing. So it took me forever to get down stairs-”

“Okay, enough, Jazmine, where’s your brother? Is he okay?”

“Danny was in shock and he might have had a seizure, and he’s…” Jazz turned and her eyes swept right over him. “He must have snuck upstairs. Because he thinks you care more about that stupid machine than you do about him.”

No one looked at Danny. He looked down at himself. He couldn’t see himself. Danny stopped breathing, afraid to draw attention to himself. 

Everything turned to static, whatever Mom and Dad and Jazz were saying, and then Jazz was following them down to the lab, yelling about something. 

Danny willed himself to be visible, and eventually he was. He felt for his pulse. Not like he couldn’t feel his heart hammering in his chest. Ghosts were invisible. The dead were invisible. That man at the hospital only Danny had seen…

Danny ran downstairs, desperate for proof that he was alive. He barreled into Dad, wrapping his arms around him. 

“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mess it up. I’ll fix whatever’s wrong.”

“Woah, hey there Danno, let’s have a look at you.”

Dad held him out at arms length.

After Danny had started to creep people out his parents had started wearing their HAZMAT suits full time. They never minded touching him or hugging him.

“Ah, see, he’s fine, Jazzy Pants. Now, what’s this about you finding something wrong in the portal?”

“Oh, there was a switch panel on the inside, it was supposed to be a fuse. You can see on the blueprints, section AD forty-five dash one.”

Mom was already looking over the prints. “Oh, there was a switch panel there?”

Danny nodded.

“Great catch, Danno.”

“Are we seriously focusing on that thing right now?! It almost got Danny killed.”

Danny cringed at that, deeply uncomfortable.

“Hey, now, us Fentons are made of sterner stuff than that. Danny’s fine, and he learned from his mistake.”

Dad slapped Danny on the back, knocking him forward. Danny was very solid, and very visible. He definitely wasn’t a ghost. 

“Hey, how about we get those last breakers swapped out and see if that switch panel was the only missing link.”

“I cannot believe you right now,” Jazz said.

“Well,” Mom said. “Danny, you really shouldn’t have come down here alone.”

“Oh, uh, sorry Mom.”

“Aw, us Fenton men like to handle things on our own, sometimes. Danno’s really growing up on us.”

Danny just gave Jazz a look, like, what did she expect?

Well, Danny had been expecting to be in a bunch of trouble, but he hadn’t expected his parents to stop working on the thing.

“Oh, Jack, look, the ecto tanks are almost empty!”

Danny looked over and felt all the blood drain from his face. 

“Hah!” Dad exclaimed. “There, proof it worked.”

“How is that proof it worked?” Jazz asked, aghast.

“Well, where did it go?” Dad asked. “The portal must have opened, but we didn’t manage to hold it open. Great work, Danno, but it looks like there’s more than one piece wrong about this puzzle, but us Fentons will figure it out.”

“Oh, it’s going to take so much time to replace all of that ectoplasm,” Mom said. 

“I- I’m sorry,” Danny said, not sure why no one was asking how he was still alive, if the portal had really activated and Danny had been inside at the time.

“Oh, honey, if we’d put the fuse in right, we’d have turned it on and the same thing would have probably happened. We’d still have needed to figure out why it didn’t hold the portal open and we’d still have had to condense all that ectoplasm all over again.”

“Are we seriously just glossing over Danny’s near death experience?”

Danny would very much like to gloss over it.

“I’m very glad that Danny’s alive,” Mom said. “And I’m so glad he was wearing his HAZMAT suit like a responsible young man.”

“Hey, Danno, since you’re alive and all, do you want to get started on those breakers?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“Unbelievable!”

Jazz stormed off upstairs. Danny sort of wanted to follow her. He wanted to go lay down on his bed and stare up at the ceiling for a while. The portal had turned on. The chamber had been flooded with highly charged ectoplasm. The graviton vortex had squished it all together to open a portal before it collapsed in on itself. And Danny had been right in the middle of it.

He was alive, though, he was definitely alive. Danny put on gloves and started working on the electrical panel. If things occasionally fell through his hands… no they didn’t. The work kept him from getting too close to the portal, and his parents. 

Chapter Text

“Hey dude,” Tucker said. “Were you okay yesterday?”

Danny turned away from his locker and found both Sam and Tucker had walked up on him. 

“Oh, hey guys, Jazz was just being a worrywart, I was fine. Did I miss anything?”

Jazz had given him strict instructions to tell Sam and Tucker about the whole electrocution and seizure thing, so they could keep an eye on him, but that wasn’t happening.

“Nah,” Tucker said. “Don’t worry. The test in math was only twenty-five percent of our grade.”

“Ha ha,” Danny said.

“What was Jazz worrying about?” Sam asked.

“Just a little accident in the lab, no big deal.”

“An accident?” Tucker asked.

“Minor electrical shock,” Danny said, swallowing a bit thickly. “Jazz insisted on calling me out from school so she could take me to urgent care, where, surprise surprise, the doctor said I was fine.”

“Dude, just be careful, man; your parents work with some crazy stuff.”

They looked worried.

“You guys, it was fine. I was wearing all my protective gear, even.”

“Well, we didn’t see you all weekend,” Sam said. “Want to go bowling after school?”

“Hey, it’s Creepy Fentina!”

Danny took a step back against the lockers, while Sam scowled and got right up in Dash’s face.

“Leave it, Baxter.”

“Oh, Fenton, you’ve got your girlfriend sticking up… Hey, where did he go?”

Danny looked down at himself. He was invisible again.

Danny ran for it. He didn’t want anyone seeing him pop back into existence. The boys restroom was empty when he got to it, and Danny tried to look at himself in the mirror, but he wasn’t there.

“No, no, no,” Danny said. “I’m still here. I’m alive.”

 There was something in his chest, it pulsed and somehow he reached for it, mentally, and there was a bright flash of light. Suddenly, Danny could see himself in the mirror, except…

“Oh, no,” Danny moaned.

The colors of the Hazmat suit had been inverted, but the faceplate and hood had a black charred streak through them, and most of the left sleeve from his glove to his shoulder was also charred, glimpses of blackened flesh with streaks of glowing green poking out.  Behind his darkened faceplate he saw two green glowing orbs of light. He was glowing. He was floating. He looked just like he did when he’d…

He couldn’t be dead. NASA would never accept an astronaut who bled EMF, but if he was dead then it really was over. There wouldn’t be any decontamination. It would just be over. Ghosts couldn’t be astronauts. Ghosts couldn’t go to space. Danny had to go. He had to float in that vast wondrous expanse. He’d looked alive before. He just had to look alive again. They’d let him go to space if he looked alive.

No one could see him like this. The door creaked open and before Danny really registered moving, he was in a bathroom stall. 

Someone gave a shuddering gasp. “F- fuck this,” they choked out followed by the squeak of sneakers on the run.

He couldn’t be dead, though. He couldn’t. He’d definitely been alive just a moment ago. He’d gotten checked out at the hospital, even. The doctor would have noticed if he was dead, right? He was alive. He was definitely alive. He couldn’t be a ghost, because he was still alive. He couldn’t be a ghost, because Mom and Dad wanted to experiment on ghosts, and they’d never experiment on Danny, so Danny couldn’t be a ghost. 

He heard the bell ring. He had to get to class. He was alive, so they’d expect him to be in class. He just had to change back first. He couldn’t go out like that. 

“I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive,” Danny chanted like it was a spell, and like magic, there was a flash of light, and gravity took hold of him once more. He almost rolled his ankle landing suddenly on the floor. He examined his totally normal hands, and touched his totally normal face. 

Cautiously, he opened the door to the stall he was in and peered outside. No one else was in the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was still normal. Okay, time to get to class, which he was probably late for.

The hallway was empty as Danny headed off for English class. 

“Help!” A small but desperate voice said. It was muffled. “I can’t breathe. Please, let me out. I can’t breathe. Help me! Let me out! Let me out! Please!” Everything they said was followed by a raspy gasp of breath.

Danny turned around, trying to find the source of the voice. It took him down the hall and to a locker. He felt chilled to the bone suddenly, and he thought the school thermostat must be broken or something, because his breath fogged up in front of him.

“Let me out! Please, I can’t breathe!” The gasping breaths sounded so strained.

Danny almost felt guilty. He’d run off and Dash had shoved someone else into a locker.

He opened the locker and stumbled back.

“Please help me, I can’t breathe,” the boy with the glowing pale white face said. 

“I-”

Black eyes turned to look at him. 

“Let me out. Please. Please, I can’t breathe!”

Danny shook his head, and before he’d made the conscious decision, he’d started running.

When he made it to class, late, out of breath, and probably looking- like he’d seen a ghost, Danny got a laugh from the classroom and a detention from the teacher.

“Where’d you disappear off to earlier?” Tucker asked later.

“I didn’t disappear!”

“We need to find some way to get Dash off your back,” Sam said. “Everyone acts like he’s so great because he can throw a football.”

“Dash is hardly the only person who gives me a hard time at school.”

“He’s the one getting physical,” Sam said.

“The most physical,” Tucker added. “Cause, you know, he’s not the only one.”

“And others are taking cues from him.”

“Hey, have you guys ever heard of someone dying at the school?” Danny asked.

“Danny, don’t change the subject, this is serious. He can’t treat you like that.”

“Everyone seems fine letting him, so maybe he can,” Danny muttered. He looked up to Tucker, but Tucker had always held eye contact with him like it was a challenge.

“Dude, really laying it on, aren’t you?”

Danny shrugged and looked away.

“I heard a rumor,” Tucker said. “About a kid dying here, but it was supposed to be, like, back in the fifties, or something.”

“What happened?” Sam asked, sounding morbidly curious.

“Well, now don’t think I’m just making this up because of-” he looked at Danny. “Uh, recent events. But, the story goes, there was this kid who was bullied a lot, and one day he got shoved in a locker on, like, a Friday after school, and no one found him until the next week.”

Danny felt an icy pit in his stomach.

“Do you think it’s true?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. Remember when we started junior high and Jeremy Spatz convinced you the detention hall had literal bars on the windows?”

“I mean, a kid could have died like that,” Sam said. 

“Sure,” Tucker said. “But unless you want to go through the Amity Park Gazette’s archive, I doubt we’re going to find out if it’s true or not.

Danny was pretty sure that it was true.

“That must have been awful. Can you imagine, being stuck like that? For so long?”

“Dude,” Tucker said, eyeballing Danny.

“Well, it’s just all the more reason to deal with Dash.”

How long had that ghost been stuck in that locker?

“I’ve got to go,” Danny said. “I wanted to get something from my locker.”

“We’ll go with you,” Tucker was quick to say.

“Dash is right over there, eating lunch, I’m not going to run into him on my way to my locker. Go ahead and finish your mystery meat.”

Danny walked off. A horrible energy thrumming through him as he tried to muster up something inside of himself to actually go and… He wasn’t sure what.

Between the feeling that he’d plunged into an ice bath, and the muffled pleading, Danny didn’t have any trouble finding the right locker. 

“My asthma, I can’t- please let me out. Please. Come back. Please come back. It wasn’t what you think. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Someone help me. Let me out. Oh, please let me out.” Their struggled gasps for air certainly made them sound like they were dying.

He wanted to run away again. He wished he’d never heard that pleading voice. It was a ghost. Ghosts were dangerous, but Danny didn’t think he felt as much terror as was in the voice of the boy who had died trapped in a locker.

The hallway wasn’t empty, but it was clear that no one else could hear the boy inside. Danny looked up and down the hall. No one was paying attention to him. Heart pounding in his chest, Danny cautiously reached out and opened the locker.

“I can’t- I can’t breathe. Please, just open the door. Please. There’s no air in here.”

“It’s open,” Danny whispered.

“Someone, please, I can’t get out. I can’t breathe.”

“It’s open,” Danny said a little louder.

“Help me, please help me. I can’t get out.”

Danny reached out, his arm trembling, and-

Danny didn’t see the boy move, but before Danny could touch the ghost, the ghost had reached out and grabbed Danny’s wrist. Danny jolted back, but the ghost’s hand didn’t budge. Where the boy gripped Danny’s arm he felt it as pins and needles on frostbitten skin. Danny froze, half expecting the ghost to lunge at him and tear his face off, or something, but the boy just kept pleading with Danny. .

“Help me, please, help me. I can’t breathe. I can explain. Please. It wasn’t what it looked like. I can’t get out. My asthma. Don’t leave me here. Come back. Please, don’t leave me. I can’t breathe. Don’t leave me alone.

“It’s okay,” Danny said. “I’m here. The door’s open. You can come out.”

“Please, help me!”

Danny turned his wrist to grasp the boy’s forearm, and braced against the side of the locker with his other arm, and he pulled the ghost out of the locker. The boy didn’t so much fall to the ground as one moment he was coming out of the locker, and the next he was on the ground, cowering, looking for all the world like he was expecting Danny to hurt him.

“I’m not what they say I am,” the boy said. Sounding scared but no longer out of breath.

“What?” Danny asked. 

“I’m not. Please.”

“It’s okay,” Danny said. “You’re out of the locker. You can- you can go. Um, move on?”

The ghost’s black eyes seemed to focus on Danny for a moment and the boy started to reach out to him before he cringed back.

One moment the ghost was there and then the next it was gone.

Danny stared at the empty locker for a while until the bell rang. 

He wasn’t like that. Danny couldn’t be a ghost. He wasn’t like that. 

Numbly, Danny started walking to class.

“Danny?” It was Jazz.

The world just couldn’t give him a break.

“Have you been crying?”

Danny touched at his face. He had teared up a bit. It wasn’t like he’d been sobbing.

“None of your business,” Danny said. He walked past her and went to go splash water on his face. He’d rather be late for class than walk in with tear tracks.

“Client is an adolescent boy who recently had a near death experience. Danny said it was an accident, and I think it was, but no sooner had he gotten back on his feet, he was rewiring the electrical panel… After getting electrocuted. I’m worried about these high risk behaviors.

“This past week, the client has been jumpy, appearing more anxious than he had previously (see tapes DF three and four). He’s been so skittish there are times where he runs off so well it’s like he just disappeared.”

Jazz had had a couple of nightmares the past week where Danny had died down in that basement, but that odd optical illusion she’d experienced when she’d been relying on her phone’s flashlight kept haunting her. Danny’s ghost flickering in and out of view. 

“The client is still showing clear signs of depression, and seems to have withdrawn further from his friends. In fact, Danny has spent most of his time at home in his room. His initial appetite to help his parents when he thought he was in trouble with them has disappeared and he’s taken to avoiding them, even when they aren’t down in that horrible laboratory where Danny almost died.”

“I’m worried that Danny’s internalized Mom and Dad’s dismissal of the severity of what’s happened. I don’t know what to do. Mom and Dad are just making things worse, and Danny won’t let me help him, and…”

Jazz shut off the recorder. None of that had really sounded clinical. She took a deep breath in and out and exited her car. Danny had run off as soon as they’d parked at school. He’d completely refused to engage with her on the drive over. She’d thought she could handle this on her own, but she was starting to get so scared that Danny needed help he wasn’t willing to receive from her.

Danny had said it was an accident, but… 

Jazz stopped by the nurses office.

“Mrs. Hansen?” Jazz asked.

“Oh, what can I do for you? You’re Jazz, right? Jazz Fenton?”

“That’s right,” Jazz said. “Well, I’m fine, actually, but I’ve been worried about my brother. Does the school have any mental health resources?”

“Oh, Ms. Mendeleev can talk to him.”

Jazz was hoping for something more than just the school counselor.

“Can you tell me what you’re worried about?”

Professionals got a second opinion sometimes. It was fine.

“I think he’s been depressed,” Jazz said. “And he’s really withdrawn, and… And I had to take him to urgent care on Monday because he’d been in this accident with some high voltage equipment, and it was just an accident, but I’m worried, and he won’t talk to me about it.”

“Oh, dear, I see. I’ll take to Ms. Mendeleev, but I’m afraid the district doesn’t have many resources. Have you talked to your parents about this?”

Jazz didn’t want to be late for class, so she didn’t take ten minutes to explain why that had been a pointless exercise. 

“They refuse to believe that anything’s wrong.”

“Well, if Mrs. Mendeleev has any concerns, she’ll probably try to do a conference with them.”

Jazz nodded. She didn’t want the buck to stop at asking her parents to do their jobs, though. 

“Thank you, Ms. Hansen." 

“You get to class now,” she said.

Jazz didn’t see Danny until the end of the day.

“Jazz, what the hell! Did you tell the counselor I’m suicidal?”

“What? Well, no, I didn’t say that,” Jazz said. “I just said I was worried.”

“I’ve told you fifty times, I’m fine. Do you know how embarrassing it is to get called out of PE to go talk to the counselor?”

“You hate PE.”

“Just stay out of my business!” Danny said, storming off.

“Hey, wait up, I’m supposed to drive you home.”

“I’m walking,” Danny said.

Jazz picked up the pace to keep up with him.

“Danny, please talk to me for a moment.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You’ve been upset.”

“Upset that you told on me to the school.”

“You’re not in trouble.”

“It was an accident, Jazz. I was upset, I was in my head, I forgot to turn off the power. If I wanted to kill myself, there’s fifty different things down there that would have done a better job.”

“What were you upset about?”

“That’s none of your business!”

“I’m worried about you,” Jazz said.

“Well stop worrying. I’m not going to kill myself. Just because everyone makes it clear they’d rather I did doesn’t mean I’m going to give them the satisfaction.”

“What? Someone’s been telling you to kill yourself?!”

“Jeez, Jazz, calm down.”

“That’s literally a crime.”

“Okay, can you stop acting like everything’s worse than it is? I- I just meant that people act like that.”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not.

“Danny-” 

“Just forget I said anything.”

“Danny, just talk to me, we can find a way to deal with your classmates. Even if you’re not planning to hurt yourself, it doesn’t mean that everything’s fine. I’m still worried about you,” she said, reaching out her hand to grab his shoulder. She just wanted him to look at her and see how earnest she was, but she didn’t grab his shoulder. 

Her hand went right through it, like it wasn’t even there. Like Danny was a…

She stopped in her tracks. Danny kept walking. A part of her felt like if she lost sight of him just then she’d never see him again.

“Wait,” Jazz said, rushing to catch up. “I’ll give you a ride. We won’t talk about anything.”

“Leave me alone, Jazz.”

“We can stop for ice cream.”

“Just fuck off!”

“Language.”

Danny turned towards her just to roll his eyes, the briefest of eye contact stopping her in her tracks, and then he took off running.

“Crud.”

Jazz got into her car and rested her head on the steering wheel. 

It was just a weird trick of her brain. Her depth perception had misfired, or something. Oh, maybe she had a neurological disorder affecting her visual reality. She should go home and research that.

On the one hand, trying not to do weird stuff, like turning invisible or intangible, wasn’t working. On the other, Danny really wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. He sort of figured, though, that if he practiced, he’d get better at not doing it involuntarily. He was getting better at being able to do it on command. He was still working on the involuntary part. 

There had also been three times when he’d woken up floating over his bed. A look in the mirror had shown that he looked like he had when… Danny could somewhat reliably turn back alive. He had no desire to deliberately turn into that thing. He was just going to have to find some way to keep that from happening without actively practicing it.

One thing that had gotten better with practice was helping the guy in the locker. Danny wanted to do something for him. He felt drawn to that locker every day. 

His name was Sidney, and he was a ghost.

“Sidney, you can come out,” Danny said, holding his arm out. He’d asked Jazz to get him to school early so Sidney could get out earlier.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Come back, please come back. You don’t understand.”

“It’s me, Danny, remember? I’m right here,” he said. “I’m going to help you. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Sidney latched onto his arm and Danny winced, but he pulled the boy out. It was the fifth time he’d pulled Sidney out of the locker.

“I’m not what they say I am,” Sidney said, his eyes focused on Danny.

Danny was better at blinking back tears this time.

“Okay,” Danny said thickly. “It’s okay if you are, though. I’d still help you.”

“Is school over? I felt like I was in there forever.”

“School’s out,” Danny agreed. “You can go home. Why won’t you go home? You said you would, yesterday.”

“Did I?” Sidney asked, sidling up closer to Danny. “I mean, of course I went home, but today’s a school day, where else would I be.”

“You don’t have to come back,” Danny said.

“‘Course I do,” Sidney said, his mood already changing swiftly. “I couldn’t go playin hooky.”

“They’re just going to keep hurting you.”

“My momma didn’t raise a coward,” Sidney said easily. “Can’t get into a good college far far away if you’re cutting class. Now, buck up, chum. Three more years and I’m outa this town.”

“New Orleans?”

“That’s right,” Sidney said, a gleam in his ink black eyes. “How’d you know?”

“Just a guess,” Danny said. They’d had a similar conversation the day before. “Hey, Sidney, you know what day it is?”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know.”

“It’s the last day of school. Summer break. You can go home, Sidney. You don’t have to come back.”

“Oh, golly, is it? Isn’t that a boon?! I’d better get going. No time like now to get a head start on the library’s summer challenge. Maybe I’ll see you over break.”

“Hah, yeah, I’ll see you around, Sidney.”

Sidney looked reluctant to leave, but he popped out of existence and Danny felt his presence go.

Maybe Sidney would go and haunt the library. He’d probably be happier there.

Sidney was back in the locker the next day. By matter of coincidence, Danny himself was almost crammed into a locker, but he managed to ‘slip’ out of Dash’s grasp. A couple periods later, Dash got back at him by punching him from behind in his kidney and then just walked away while Dale laughed. At first, Danny literally thought the sharp pain had come from a knife and he threw up, collapsing on the ground. 

He was lucky the hall monitor sent him to the nurses office. He probably wouldn’t have had a good time in class after that. Unfortunately, the hall monitor just hadn’t seen what happened. Not that Danny told him. He was handling it.

With Sidney, though, Danny didn’t know what to do. Sidney was a ghost. His parents had a lot of things to say about ghosts, and none of it involved how to help them. Sidney didn’t act like his parents said ghosts acted. He wasn’t evil, or vengeful, or malicious, or deceitful. He was just sad and scared.

Sam and Tucker sure acted like Danny was sad and scared over Dash, they kept bringing it up. They usually didn’t, though, when they were gaming.

“Hey, Sam, you’re into that occult stuff, right?” Danny asked later that night as they chatted over discord while they played doomed.

“I know a thing or two.”

“What’s up dude, you want to put a curse on Dash’s bloodline?” Tucker asked.

Why did everything go back to Dash Baxter? Danny was dealing with it.

“I was wondering about ghosts.”

“Danny, your parents are ghost hunters,” Sam said.

“Oh, you’d rather I use some shiny metal machine instead of a book of spells?”

“Well, what do you want to do with a ghost? We could do a seance. You know, you’ve always had the vibe of someone who would be good at that sort of thing.”

Danny ignored that. “What if I want to put a spirit to rest?”

“Oh, like Sixth Sense stuff?”

Danny had of course watched the movie. His parents had shown it to him and Jazz when they were younger, but they always stopped it right before the kid realizes that the ghosts that were tormenting him could be helped. They didn’t want them to get the wrong ideas about ghosts. Danny did, though, have a rough idea of how the movie resolved.

“How about something that isn’t Hollywood?” Danny asked.

“Well, you can always salt and burn their remains,” Sam said.

Danny was hit with a wave of nausea.

“Dude, that’s just Supernatural,” Tucker said.

“They pull it from real stuff,” Sam said. “And the Sixth Sense didn’t exactly get it wrong. There are stories about spirits waiting for something to happen so they can move on.”

What was Sidney waiting for? Danny had already helped him out of the locker.

“Soooo,” Sam said. “Are we dealing with any ghosts?”

“What? No,” Danny hurriedly exclaimed. “No ghosts here. Just curious.”

“Oh yeah?” Tucker asked. “This have anything to do with locker kid?”

“Don’t call him that!”

“Okay, is this about- the kid that died at Casper?” Sam asked. 

“This has nothing to do with any of that,” Danny said.

“Well, why are you asking?” Sam asked.

Danny didn’t have an excuse ready.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Using the Casper High ghost as an example.”

“I never said there’s a ghost at Casper High.”

“As an example,” Sam said. “Someone dies after getting locked in a locker at school over the weekend.”

Danny felt claustrophobic just thinking about it. The controller went through his hands and he fell out of his seat as he went intangible and someone killed him while his avatar froze.

“What was that?”

“Leaned too far back,” Danny said, scrambling to get back into the game.

“Dork,” Sam said.

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Danny said. “Let’s use the Casper High thing as an example.”

“Well,” Sam said. “Someone killed him. Did they ever catch them?”

“I’m supposed to solve a murder?” 

“Are you?” Tucker asked. “Because you said there wasn’t really a ghost.”

“In this hypothetical,” Danny corrected. “Hypothetically, in that situation, I’d need to solve the murder.”

“I mean, it could be anything, but that’s some pretty big unresolved business there.”

Maybe Sidney knew who had shoved him in that locker, but what was Danny going to do with that?

Danny was- weird. 

He wasn’t just acting weird, he was weird. Of course, he’d always been weird. Not in a bad way. Never in a bad way. Danny just sort of gave off that odd vibe. You’d forget he was in the room with you and get startled. Or else he had a presence to him, he’d walk in and you’d feel dread for no reason. There were a dozen psychological reasons to explain it. Danny just vibed weird, but he was really a good kid. A weird kid. Really, it was a psychosomatic thing that probably said more about the people experiencing it than Danny himself. She’d been convinced as a kid that something was supernaturally wrong with Danny and she’d never managed to logic her way out of it.

Ever since the accident, though, it was like it had been turned up to eleven. He was sitting next to her in the car, staring out the window, and Jazz wasn’t sure if he was breathing. Some part of her, for no reason, was sure something bad was about to happen.

“Hey, Danny,” Jazz said.

Danny didn’t respond. He was giving her the silent treatment. So, him not saying anything could be because of that, as easily as the whole, maybe, not breathing thing.

It wasn’t very rational to think that someone holding their head up and staring out the window just wasn’t breathing. Then again, it wasn’t very rational to think that maybe she had seen Danny disappear. It wasn’t very rational to think that maybe her hand had gone right through him.

Jazz reached out and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Jeez, what is it Jazz? Want another heart to heart?”

Danny was solid. He turned up the radio.

Now Jazz had to raise her voice over the radio. “I should have talked to you before I talked to the school nurse.” 

Nothing had even come of it. No one had wanted to talk to Mom and Dad.

“No duh, you shouldn’t have talked to the school nurse about me.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Why do you think there has to be something wrong with me?”

Because he’d been upset before the accident, and he’d been all the more off since then.

“I don’t think anything’s wrong with you,” Jazz said. 

“Pfft.”

“I just think you might need some help dealing with things that are going on.”

“I’m dealing with everything just fine.”

“Danny, I’m sure that all the things you’re going through are things you could handle on your own, but when you’re young, sometimes it feels like there’s a whole bunch of things happening all at once, and maybe all those things you could handle on their own get to be too much.”

“So I’m not as good at multitasking as you.”

“That’s not what I said. Everybody deals with different challenges. You don’t have to handle it all on your own.”

“Yeah, well, I do.”

“Like when you decided you had to fix Mom and Dad’s death trap by yourself?”

“I just wanted the thing to be done.”

He had gone down there and he’d been different ever since. She turned off the radio.

“Danny- Did something else happen downstairs?”

“I didn’t try to kill myself, Jazz.

“No, I thought- after…” When he’d flickered in and out of her sight.

Jazz stared straight ahead, but she could feel Danny’s eyes boring into her. There was a roaring in her ears, the sound of the empty nothingness between life and death. She felt like if she looked to the right that she would see; the box would be opened and the waveform would collapse, and then Danny would either be alive or he would be dead.

She came to a stop at a light. The passenger door opened and closed, and when she looked, Danny was gone.

Danny wasn’t dead. That wasn’t something she should have to tell herself when she’d just been talking to him. Jazz drove the rest of the way to school, hoping to see Danny walking down the street, but she never did. 

She wanted to record something, to make a note of what she was observing, but she wasn’t even sure if she could trust what she was observing.

“Oh, hey, Jazz!”

Jazz turned around to find Sam and Tucker.

“Hi there,” Jazz said. “Um, Danny decided to walk. He’ll be here in a bit.”

“Oh, yeah, okay,” Tucker said. “Hey, Jazz, by any chance, did your parents capture a ghost? Danny’s being tight lipped about it.”

“My parents haven’t caught a ghost, because ghosts don’t exist,” Jazz said. “And what is Danny being tight lipped about?”

“Well, Danny was asking Sam about occult stuff last night.”

“He already humors our parents; please don’t get him into more of that stuff.”

“Aw, he didn’t even want to curse anyone,” Sam said.

“Not like you know how to curse someone,” Tucker said.

“I do, too,” Sam said. “I just don’t want to deal with the consequences.”

“Uh huh,” Tucker said.

“What did this have to do with ghosts?” Jazz asked.

Tucker shrugged. “He was asking about helping a ghost move on.”

“What?”

“We figured he’s either found a ghost here at school or your parents were tormenting one and he wanted to put it out of its misery,” Sam said. 

“I- I need to go,” Jazz said.

She broke away from them and walked to class. Normally, she would organize her notes for the day before the bell rang, but instead she just stared at her hands, clasped together on the desk. 

Ghosts weren’t real. Danny couldn’t be a ghost. So it wasn’t any big deal that Danny wanted to know how to help a ghost move on. Danny didn’t need to move on, because he wasn’t a ghost, and even if he was, why move on? Why not just stick around, go to school, and bother your big sister? He was acting different, but he was acting different because of what had happened, not because he was different. So why move on if he was just the same old Danny? Except, he thought people wanted him gone. That’s what he’d said. So, she just had to convince him that he should stick around.

He definitely wasn’t dead, though. Ghosts didn’t even exits!

Everything she wanted to say to Danny flew out the window when she saw him over snack period. 

“Who hit you?!”

“Don’t worry about it?”

“You have a black eye. That’s a big deal. Did you go to the office?”

“What’s the office going to do?”

“Why do you think the office isn’t going to do anything?”

“Because no one ever does!”

“Fine, forget the office, tell me who hit you and I’ll deal with it.”

“What are you going to do?”

It might involve the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™.

“You let me worry about that.”

“Jazz, no, can we pretend this didn't happen?”

“You are my little brother, and no one is allowed to hit you.”

“I think you forgot to send out the memo,” Danny muttered.

“Was it whoever told you to kill yourself?”

“I told you no one actually said that.” He told her a lot of things that weren’t true.

“Well, whoever made you feel like that is very wrong.”

“Sure, okay.” 

“Did you go to the nurse?” 

“Look, I’m hungry. I’m going to go eat with Sam and Tucker.”

“Danny, just, you don’t deserve to get hurt.”

“Um, yeah, I know.”

“Okay,” Jazz said. “Go eat.”

“Oh, cool, I have your permission.”

Little brothers were so difficult.

Jazz went to the nurses office and got an ice pack, but when she got to the cafeteria, Danny wasn’t with Sam and Tucker.

“Do you know where Danny is?”

“Uh,” Tucker said.

“Danny walked off a bit ago,” Sam said.

Jazz took a breath in and out.

“Do either of you know who hit him?”

They both shared a guilty look.

“Well, he didn’t say who it was,” Tucker said.

“Does that mean you don’t know who did it?”

“Um, well-”

Sam elbowed Tucker.

“Uh, Danny doesn’t want us to…”

Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Okay,” she said. “Just- has someone been telling him to kill himself?”

“Uh, not- exactly?” Tucker looked very uncomfortable.

She’d already ‘told on him’ to the school nurse. Danny would probably hit the roof if she bullied his friends into telling.

She’d just have to deal with it another way. First things first, though, the benefit of being a Junior was that she was pretty sure she knew all the places a Freshman would go over lunch to be alone. She found him under the stair well by himself, though she could have sworn she’d heard him talking to someone when she’d gotten there.

“Hey there, little brother, I’m not going to lecture you. Just- here, you can use this.”

“Oh,” Danny said, taking the icepack. “Uh, thanks.”

“Just let me know if you need anything,” she said and left him to himself.

Next, Jazz wandered the cafeteria until she found who she was looking for.

“Kyle,” Jazz said. “Hi there, how was your summer? I haven’t seen you since last year.”

“Oh, hi Jazz, uh summer was good, since, you know, I didn’t have to do summer school. So, yeah, uh, thanks for the tutoring.”

“You’re welcome,” Jazz said. “You’re in the AV club, though, right?”

“Oh, yeah, is this about the spirit assembly? We’ve been helping out with all that.”

“That’s great,” Jazz said. “But I was wondering if you had any access to the school security cameras.”

“Well, um, not technically.”

“Great, let’s talk.”

That was mostly taken care of. 

At the end of the day, Jazz stopped by the office. She knew most of the front office staff, and liked to help out, now and then. 

“Ms. Chaplain,” Jazz said. “I just had a quick question for you.”

“Oh, Jazz dear, what’s bringing you to the office?”

“I just wanted to see if anyone sent my brother, Danny, to the office today?”

“Oh, let me see.”

There was a system that was supposed to be used to log any time a student was sent to the office. 

“No, dear, it doesn’t look like it. Any reason you think he might be in trouble?”

“Oh, no, I just haven’t been able to find him, and he wasn’t answering his phone. He’s been a bit moody lately, and I was worried he’d gotten himself a detention or something.”

“Well, I hope you find him soon. You let us know if something happened.”

“Of course,” Jazz said. 

That was disappointing. She’d hoped one of his teachers at least had done something. 

Danny let her drive him home from school. She just had to promise not to ask him about his face, or about the accident, or literally anything else about his life.

“So, Danny,” Jazz said, when they were underway. 

“Jazz?” Danny said guardedly, like he was reminding her she’d promised not to bug him about anything.

“I’m not going to ask you any questions, and I’m not going to lecture you,” Jazz said. “I just want you to know that I love you, a lot. You’re my little brother.”

“Uh, yeah, Jazz. I know. Um, I love you too, most of the time.”

“And, I just want you to know, that I want you to stick around. I don’t want you going anywhere. I’d be pretty upset if you were gone. Mom and Dad, too. I know they aren’t the best at- parenting, but they love you, and they want you here, too.”

“Jazz, it really was an accident. I didn’t try to kill myself.”

“I believe you,” Jazz said. “I just needed to say that. You don’t need to say anything, and we can leave it there, but I needed to make sure you knew that.”

“Oh, well, thanks, I guess.”

She chanced a glance at him. He looked conflicted. She wanted to ask, but- There was no chance he was a ghost. He wasn’t trying to find a way to move on. He wasn’t dead, and the accident had probably just been an accident, but she was glad she’d told him.

“How’s homework look tonight?” Jazz asked when they pulled up at home.

“What happened to no questions?”

“The ride’s over,” Jazz said. “And how’s the homework is a pretty tame question.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “You know how it is, every teacher thinks they’re the only one who’s assigning homework.”

“Well, if you want any help, I’ll be downstairs.”

“Yeah, okay,” Danny said, getting out of the car.

Jazz followed him in and settled at the kitchen table to do her homework. Usually, she waited till at least six thirty to see if her parents were going to remember to do something about dinner, but when five o’ clock rolled around, Jazz started pulling things out of the pantry. The one and only good thing that had happened since Danny’s accident was that Mom and Dad weren’t doing any experiments whatsoever with ectoplasm. They were saving all of it up for their death trap. Which meant that there hadn't been any experiment samples in the fridge at all.

Jazz pulled out some chicken thighs, got some rice cooking, and set about making a stir fry. She even made a salad. When the table was set, she went downstairs. For the past eight days, Jazz had been beyond furious with her parents. Whatever the accident had been, there was a through line from Danny’s ‘almost’ death straight to their parents. Their abysmal safety, what they’d done to Danny’s self-esteem, allowing him access to their lab and their death trap, not even pausing when they’d almost lost Danny.

Danny listened to their parents more than he did to her, though. He had a black eye that had swollen shut by the time they’d gotten home. She hadn’t been lying about Mom and Dad caring. She just had to put it right in front of them.

Her parents were inside of the damned thing.

“Mom, Dad, I made a special dinner. It’s on the table right now. Time for a family dinner.” Jazz had to cover her face, because her mom was welding.

“Oh, thank you, sweetheart,” Mom said, barely looking up from what she was doing. “It’s not a good time, though. Could you be a dear and bring us down something?”

“No,” Jazz said. “I can’t. You can come upstairs. You haven’t eaten with us in over a week. It hasn’t been a good time for the past four months, and I’ve been handling upkeep this whole time. If you can’t be bothered to come upstairs now and eat with me and Danny, then I don’t think I can be bothered to eat with you ever again.”

“Oh, Jazzy, don’t you think you’re being a bit dramatic?”

“Dad, what did you always say about Grandma?”

“Stubborn as a mule, and twice as strong.”

“You either care about your relationship with your kids, or you don’t,” Jazz said. “Dinner’s in five minutes.”

She didn’t wait to see if they’d put down their tools.

So, as it turned out, Sidney’s memory wasn’t great. He didn’t know who had shoved him in the locker the day he had died. Not that he seemed to know he was dead. Danny had to ask, ‘who shoved you in the locker today?’ Not ‘who killed you?’ But even though Sidney looked like he was really trying to remember, he eventually just laughed it off and said, ‘those bullies all blend together.’

Danny had told Sidney that he was worried about getting bullied himself, and that he’d feel safer if he knew who the bullies were. He got three first names, zero last names, and the impression that there were probably more. Danny wasn’t sure where to go from there.

He did his homework, he practiced a bit on his space shuttle simulator, and then he tried listening to one of those true murder podcasts. It left him feeling sick.

Someone knocked on his door.

“Yeah?”

Jazz stuck her head in. “Dinner time, I made chicken teriyaki.”

“Oh, um, maybe later, I’m not too hungry.”

“Please, Danny, you can have ice cream and soda for dinner if you want, but could we please just have a dinner together?”

She had a bit of a look on her face.

“Jazz, are you okay?”

Jazz sighed. “Not really.”

“I can have soda?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Okay, yeah, I guess.”

“Thank you.”

Maybe Jazz was more upset about Danny’s accident than he’d thought.

Danny went and washed up and went downstairs. Looking at the table, he thought that maybe he could eat a bit. He went to the fridge and pulled out a can of ginger ale.

Jazz sat down next to him, and that’s when he realized that there were four place settings at the table.

“Uh, is this family meal?”

“Is that alright?” Jazz asked.

The door to the lab slid open and Mom and Dad were there. He focused on not turning invisible. It was fine, though, they loved him, and he wasn’t a ghost, so they wouldn’t hurt him.

“Oh boy, look at this,” Dad said. “Jazzy Pants, you’re spoiling us.”

Mom zeroed in on Danny, though. “Oh, baby, what happened to your face.”

“Hey now, that’s quite the shiner,” Dad said.

“Uh, PE accident,” Danny said. He had never been good at lying to Mom.

“Daniel Janus Fenton,” Mom said. 

Danny cringed as much as he could with his face not liking movement at all. 

“It was just a bit of a scuffle, nothing really.”

“That looks pretty serious,” Mom said.

“Aw, sometimes boys get out of hand,” Dad said. “You give ‘em the old Fenton right hook?”

“Oh, yeah,” Danny said. “But it wean’t a big deal.”

“Did the office have anything to say about it?” Mom asked.

“Oh, um…”

“Kids their age shouldn’t be running to the office every time they have a disagreement.”

“They shouldn’t be hitting each other, either,” Mom said. 

“I mean, I didn’t start it,” Danny said. 

“Of course not,” Dad said. “But us Fenton men take care of things ourselves, don’t we Danno?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s taken care of,” Danny said.

Jazz gave Mom a look.

“I don’t want you fighting, though,” Mom said. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You should be able to deescalate a problem with your words. Though, I did think I’d taught you to block a strike better than that.”

“It’s been forever, Mom,” Danny said. 

“A boy’s going to take a few licks growing up,” Dad said. “Now, how about we dig in. This looks great, princess.”

Jazz was grinding her teeth. Though Danny wasn’t having much fun chewing on his food. Eating was more painful than it should be, considering that he’d been hit in the eye and not the jaw. Miraculously, Danny didn’t seem to be in trouble.

“So, it’s been a while since we’ve done this,” Danny said.

“Oh, baby, we’re going to make it up to you, just as soon as we’re at a good stoping point.”

“Oh, yeah, well, I was thinking, remember when we went to Palos Park, for stargazing? I was just thinking it would be nice to do that again. Sort of nostalgic, you know?”

Jazz was suddenly staring at him for some reason.

“You’re, um, feeling nostalgic?” Jazz asked. 

“I guess? I just really want to go, is all.”

“Like, something you need to do? Before…”

“Uh, something I want to do, as a family. Why? Is nostalgia a symptom of repressed teenager disorder?”

“I- that’s not a thing.”

“Danny, we have been thinking about your ectocontamination,” Mom said. “You won’t need to look for nostalgia; you just work hard for NASA and you’ll go to see the stars yourself.”

“Right,” Danny said. He was pretty sure he’d gotten squished together with all of the ectoplasm they were still trying to replace. They might be past decontamination, and he wasn’t thinking about that just then, because if he thought about it, he’d think about it all night like the night before. “But, a trip to Palos would be nice, right? I was thinking we could just make it a weekend, some time. Maybe if you wanted to take a break, to recharge.”

“Some time,” Mom agreed. “This was great Jazz, thanks for getting us out of the lab.”

Danny knew he was getting brushed off.

“Why stop now, we could play the…” Jazz sighed. “The Ghost Busters board game.”

Jazz hated that board game. Mom and Dad got super competitive over it.

Suddenly Dad gasped. “Gotta cross the beams. Mads, I’ve got an idea.”

Without any more preamble, Dad had leapt up from his chair, which clattered behind him, and had dashed to the basement.

“That man,” Mom said fondly. “Let’s see. Jazz cooked, so, Danny, could you take care of the kitchen?”

“Oh, yeah, Mom,” Danny said.

“And take some Tylenol, that’s swelling pretty bad.”

She was gone a moment later.

Jazz buried her face in her hands. It took him a moment to realize she was crying.

“Uh.”

Jazz got up and hugged him.

“Okay.”

“We should plan a bunch of trips.” Jazz said. “A bunch of things to look forward to.”

“Oh, yeah,” Danny said, with no clue what she was on about.

“There’s the Air and Space Museum, and the Smithsonian, and there’s going to be meteor showers, Danny. And we’ll make sure to get your application for space camp in early next year, or a new camp.”

“Oh, yeah, okay Jazz. I get it. I’m definitely looking forward to the future. I won’t be going anywhere.”

“Anyone who says you should is a moron,” Jazz said. “We should make a list, and then we can do some research.”

“Okay, are you giving me vacation homework?”

“There’s just so much for you, Danny.”

Was there? Danny couldn’t reliably stay visible. He was in trouble at school for dropping, like, five beakers in a week. He was pretty sure someone at NASA was going to notice. He’d be worried that his parents were going to notice, but…

“I should start cleaning up,” Danny said.

“You hardly ate anything,” Jazz said. “Have you been eating- much- since the accident.”

“Plenty,” Danny said. "My face hurts, though. Eating’s not fun.”

Jazz made him a milkshake while he started throwing as much as he could into the dishwasher so he wouldn’t have to hand wash it. She wasn’t always the worst sister in the world.

Danny went upstairs and played games with Sam and Tucker. Later, when he was sure that Jazz had gone to bed, he snuck out. It was easy enough to find, if not for the memorial on the sidewalk then for the angry ghost pacing around and yelling at every car that drove by. Danny was ignoring the weird icy feeling in his chest that popped up whenever he was near a ghost. 

After what had happened that morning on his way to school, Danny decided to give him some space. It should have occurred to Danny that if Sidney could grab his arm, then another ghost could punch him in the face.

His palms itched as he approached the guy and he thought a part of him actually wanted to transform into whatever he was. 

Just like that morning, the ghost seemed to zero in on Danny, ignoring the passing cars, now. It was odd that Danny felt sort of drawn to the ghost, despite what had happened earlier.

“Hey,” Danny said, a bit loudly. No one was walking about, and he wasn’t worried about someone driving past and wondering who he was talking to. “How’s it going?”

“How’s it going?!!! How’s it going?!!! There isn’t a fucker in this town who can drive. Did you see what they did to my motorcycle? You want to know how it’s going?!!!”

Danny’s plan of keeping some distance didn’t really work, since the ghost just sort of flickered and then was right in Danny’s face.

Danny took a step back, nervously. “He went to jail,” Danny said.

“What?”

“He was driving drunk,” Danny said. “They arrested him. He went to jail.”

“Well, good!” the ghost said. “That fucker could have killed me!”

He was still yelling, but Danny thought he was a bit calmer.

“You should look at that,” Danny said, pointing with a trembling hand. 

“Huh?” He was starting to look confused.

“Just right over there,” Danny said, really hoping that he was right, and that he wasn’t about to get pummeled by an angry ghost.

“What is this?” 

“It’s for you.”

“What?”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? Jake Mitchell?”

“Why is this here?”

“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “He went to jail for killing you. Your parents miss you. They put this here for you.”

“I died?” the ghost asked, deflating.

“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “It shouldn’t have happened. You don’t have to stay here. If you stay here, nothing’s going to change.”

Sidney had been at Casper High reliving his death for decades. 

“Are my parents okay?”

Danny hadn’t thought to check.

“Their son died,” Danny said.

“Ma always said it would be the death of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That fucker killed me.”

Danny took a step back. “He’s in jail. He can’t kill anyone else like that.”

The ghost looked at him, and Danny couldn’t help but to flinch a little.

“You were here earlier.”

Danny nodded.

“I hit you. Why did I hit you?”

“Uh.” Danny hadn’t exactly followed the ghost’s logic on that one, too busy that morning picking himself up off the ground. “You were upset,” he said. “I think you’ve been upset for a while. If you stay here, I think you’ll always be upset.”

“Where should I go?”

Something started burning in Danny’s chest.

“I don’t know,” Danny said, in discomfort. It wasn’t like Danny had any of the answers.

“Just not here.”

Danny shrugged, feeling like something was trying to claw its way out of him. It wasn’t like when he had transformed into that thing. It was different. For a moment, Danny stopped breathing. 

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” the man said, walking over to the side of the road. Kneeling down, he righted a motorcycle that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Swinging his leg over it, it roared to life. “Maybe I just need to take a ride.”

It was an impulse. Danny walked up to the ghost and hugged him. His heart stopped, he felt ice cold, something inside of him opened up, and-

Danny was cruising down the street, the wind in his face, it was a good day for a ride, going through the intersection, he saw it too late. It hit him and he felt something crunch. That idiot. That fucking idiot. He’d just paid the thing off, too, and-

In a flash of green the ghost disappeared. Danny collapsed to the ground, his physical systems booting up again while his emotional ones were still reeling. He felt at his leg, sure that he was going to find a fractured femur sticking out, but Danny was fine. With his lungs filling up again, Danny let out a sob and tried to convince himself that everything was normal and cool.

A car honked at him, and Danny got off the side of the road. Walking home, he had a bit of time to process what had happened.

‘Hey Sam,’ Danny texted out. ‘What do you call something that sends the souls of the dead to the afterlife.’

Sam was always talking about healthy life choices, so he was sort of surprised that she was still awake and had promptly texted back.

‘Psychopomp anything you want to share with the rest of the class?’

‘I’m writing bad Ghostbusters fan fiction leave me alone.’

‘Link or it didn’t happen.’

‘*tongue sticking out emoji*’

He got home and hoped he could just go to bed, but…

“Danny!” Jazz said, as soon as he’d gotten back upstairs. “I- I thought-”

“Were you checking up on me?”

“I- What were you doing out?”

“Late night soul searching?”

“What if someone kidnapped you?”

“Jazz, Amity Park has, like, a next to zero violent crime rate.”

Jazz sighed. “Just be careful, okay? Wait, have you been crying?”

“Uh, late night soul searching?” Danny tried again.

“Well, is there anything you want to talk about?”

“Nope,” Danny said. “Goodnight, Jazz. Do not check in on me in the middle of the night. It’s weird.”

Jazz sighed. “Danny, I just caught you sneaking back in at eleven thirty.”

“Hey, it’s not even midnight, yet, so honestly, I think we’re doing alright. Good night, Jazz.”

“Good night, Danny.”

Danny got ready for bed and woke up, like, three different times from dreams about getting hit by a car.

Chapter Text

Danny let Sidney out of his locker, first thing when he got to school. Sidney was changing, a bit. He cringed less. It didn’t take him too long to realize that it was Danny, and that Danny wasn’t going to hurt him. They walked to the stairwell by the cafeteria where they could hide out underneath. It was easy enough to have a quiet chat under the stairs. Sidney always kept his eyes glued to Danny when they walked there, never glancing at the other students.

Sidney liked to talk about books he couldn’t quite remember, and things they were studying in science class. 

Danny let him talk for a while. Sidney had been such an enthusiastic guy. He’d loved the things he’d loved, and someone had killed him for being different. 

Just before the bell was going to ring, Danny asked, “Hey, Sidney, can I give you a hug?”

Sidney’s pale cheeks tinged a bit green. “A hug, between two blokes?”

“Nothing’s wrong with that. It’s just us down here,” Danny said. “No one will see.”

“Oh, well, I guess. If you really need a hug.”

Danny prepared himself for the burning in his chest and his body shutting down, for reliving Sidney’s death, but nothing happened, besides a large chunk of Danny’s torso feeling pins and needles all over.

“That was okay,” Sidney said. “I could- I mean to say, if you needed one, I could give you a hug again. If you needed one, and it was just the two of us.”

Danny sighed. “Thanks Sidney. The bell’s about to ring for the end of the day, you should get home.”

“Okay, Danny, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He always looked reluctant to go, but he still did. The biker ghost hadn’t gone until he was ready. So what did Sidney need to be ready to move on?

When snack period rolled around, Sam looked at Danny expectantly.

“I’m just getting interested in the spiritual side of my parent’s work,” Danny said. “You need to stop thinking that I’m hiding something.”

“Oh, does that mean you don’t want to know what I found out about the kid that died here in the fifties?”

“Wait, really, I looked everywhere online.”

“I know a guy,” Sam said.

“Was it a librarian?” Tucker asked. “I’m guessing the only place you’re going to find something would be in old copies of the Gazette.”

“Let’s just leave it at I know a guy,” Sam said. 

“Can we also leave it at nothing’s going on and I’m just curious?” Danny asked. 

Sam rolled her eyes and produced a photocopied article.

“Sidney Poindexter died here at Casper High in 1953. He was found shoved in a locker.”

“Did they ever catch the killer?” Danny asked.

Here, Sam’s smug look for having found something disappeared and now she looked angry.

“They never looked for one. It was an ‘accidental’ death caused by his asthma. Like, they literally put asthma down as his cause of death.”

“Like, what, the locker had nothing to do with it?”

“Well, how do we figure out who killed him, then?” Danny asked. “Whoever did it’s, like, in their eighties, or dead.”

For all that it had gotten him a black eye, dealing with the motorcycle ghost had been relatively easy after he’d found the news article.

“Just for curiosity sake?” Tucker asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Danny said. “For curiosity sake.”

“My Gran Gran says old people confess to the wildest stuff at the retirement home,” Tucker said. “Maybe you can just go ask them.”

“How old’s your grandma?” Danny asked.

“Eighty-two,” Tucker said. “And don’t try to pin this on my grandparents. Casper High wasn’t even integrated back then.”

“Wait, really?” Sam asked.

“What about your grandparents?” Danny asked Sam.

“Pamela’s parents are in their seventies, and Grandma Ida’s in her nineties.”

Danny sighed.

“The school library would have a yearbook from back then,” Tucker said.

Was Danny actually going to have to solve Sidney’s murder?

“I’ll check it out over lunch,” Danny said. 

Danny wound up spending the rest of the day in his PE clothes, because at that moment Dash walked by and ‘accidentally’ spilled a cup of soda in Danny’s lap. Those PE clothes later got pretty grass stained when Dash ‘accidentally’ tackled Danny during touch football. They’d been on the same team. 

“Just reflexes; you know how it is, Freaky Fentonail.”

Danny did manage some research, though. It was easy enough to find the old yearbooks, and easy enough to find the one for 1953. He found Sidney’s picture, not very much different from how his ghost looked. Sidney had had an older brother or cousin who didn’t look much like him at all. Clayton Poindexter had been a senior when Sidney had been a freshman. 

Danny didn’t really want to track an old man down and ask him about his kid brother who’d died seventy years earlier. Danny searched through the year book for the pages dedicated to school clubs and candid photos. Clayton had been all over the thing. There were a few photos where Danny thought Sidney might have been in the background, but the only photo where he was sure was a photo of the chess club, where Sidney’s face was half blocked out. He was smiling brightly though.

Looking through, he thought there should have been a page or something to commemorate or at least acknowledge Sidney’s death, but there was nothing. It took him a while to cross reference the faces in the photo to the named photos in the back, and then he searched through every name and found seven boys whose first names matched the three names Sidney had been able to remember. 

How on earth did you find people with just a name?

On the way out of school, Dale managed to rip Danny’s PE shirt, but Danny might have actually on purpose went intangible to slip away and when he’d gotten around the corner he went invisible. He was going to need a new PE shirt. He didn’t want Jazz questioning him about his clothes, though, so Danny decided to walk home. He even texted, because he was such a nice little brother.

It was on the walk home that he felt a chill that stood out in the late summer sun. He stopped in his tracks and turned to his left and he knew there was a ghost inside the house he had been walking past. 

“Hello?” Danny tried.

He hadn’t really been expecting an answer. He also was not breaking into someone’s house to talk to a ghost. Whatever this psychopomp thing was, Danny wasn’t getting a criminal record for it. Danny got home and found that Jazz had been waiting for him in the living room. He should have gone in invisible. The whole point of walking was so that he could change before she saw him.

“What happened?”

“Do you really want to have the same conversation all over again?”

Jazz sighed.

“No one hit me today,” Danny said, ignoring the fact that his side really hurt from getting tackled.

“Do you want any help on your homework?”

Danny shrugged. “I think I’ve got it.”

Upstairs Danny texted out, ‘Can the guy you know find people with just names?’

‘Probably.’

‘Are you just being mysterious or do I not want to know what’s up with the guy you know?’

‘Sam’s in the mafia, confirmed,’ Tucker responded.

‘Maybe the guy I know is a ghost *winkey face emoji*’

‘Ghosts are not that informative actually.’

‘Oh?’ Tucker asked. ‘Do tell.’

‘Or so my parents say.’

‘Boo,’ Sam wrote.

Danny shot off the list of names.

‘Ooh, another Poindexter,” Tucker pointed out.

‘A senior when Sidney was a freshman. Maybe a brother or a cousin.’

‘You should start with him,” Sam wrote.

‘I’d actually like to talk to literally anyone else.’

‘He’d be your best lead.’

‘Yeah,’ Danny agreed.

Somehow, by the time Danny had finished his homework, Sam had the list back to him.

‘They were brothers,’ Sam texted with the list.

‘Sam, is this a ‘better call Saul’ thing?’

‘I know a guy’

‘You know Tucker is incorporating this into his fury fan fiction about us. He’s going to make you the daughter of a Chicago mob boss who keeps his daughter out of the city to keep her safe.’

‘It’s not a furry fan fiction, it’s a were-people friend fiction. But also, sus, Sam’s never had us over to her place.’

‘My parents are tools, and probably criminals of some sort, but definitely not that sort.’

‘Word’

‘When are we going?’ Sam asked.

‘I wasn’t planning on bringing you along to a murder investigation.’

‘LOL,’ Tucker responded. ‘Try again buddy. I will absolutely violate the bro code if you go question a murder suspect on your own.’

‘I don’t want to get you involved.’

‘Oh, wow, I’m so uninvolved. I just did all of your research for you.’

‘Hey, I got the list of names. Also, whoever it is is a geriatric, I think I’ll be fine.’

‘Danny, I mean with this with all the love in my heart, but you are the featherweight of the freshman class.’

‘Rude’

‘6 tonight at Nasty Burger, then Poindexters place,’ Tucker texted.

Danny groaned.

‘Fine’

‘See you loosers then.’

Danny looked up how to question people in a murder investigation and got a bunch of conflicting stuff and several techniques that probably didn’t work if you weren’t the police.

“I’m going to go hang out with Tucker and Sam,” Danny said, going down stairs. 

“I’ll drive you,” Jazz said. 

“I’m not going to have a seizure on the way.”

“I’ll drive you,” Jazz said again.

Danny sighed.

“What are you doing for dinner?”

“We’re stopping at Nasty Burger,” Danny said.

“And then…”

“Hanging out.”

“Okay,” Jazz said. “And are they going to walk you home?”

“Uhhh.”

“Come on,” Jazz said. 

So he got a ride from her, and she didn’t lecture him, or ask him questions about his mental health.

“So what do kids do for hanging out these days?”

“Jazz, you are two years older than me,” Danny said. “What does that even mean?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what you like to do for fun.”

“Whatever. Sam likes old movies. We’re going to watch a murder mystery together, see who can figure it out first.”

“Well, that sounds like fun.”

It probably would be, if the murder wasn’t real.

When they got to the Nasty Burger, Danny was a bit put out to find that Jazz wasn’t just dropping him off.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked.

“I wanted to get dinner, too,” Jazz said. “I won’t sit with you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Whatever,” Danny said.

Danny walked inside and saw Sam and Tucker already sitting at a table. He ordered and then went to join them.

“So,” Sam said when Danny sat down. “I know a guy, you’re just ghost curious, what shady thing can we pin on Tucker?”

“Um, well, I’m pretty sure he’s probably committed at least five major hacking crimes this past week, so…”

“Yeah, but I’m open and honest with my best friends about it,” Tucker said.

Sam sighed. “When he has no shame, what can we do?”

“Oh, speaking about no shame, let me tell you about how I’ve updated the friend fiction since we last talked.”

“I refuse to hear about your friend fiction when I’m not even a vampire in it.”

Sam was, in fact, dressed like a vampire. Or at least, she was wearing all black clothes that, in addition to her wide brimmed hat, probably did make sure not an inch of her skin came into contact with the sun.

“You’re not a vampire, because you’re an ultra recyclo vegetarian,” Tucker dismissed. “You’re obviously a were-jaguar.”

“Jaguar’s a lot cooler than Labrador,” Danny said, glaring at Tucker.

“A vampire could be vegetarian,” Sam said.

“They literally can’t,” Tucker said. 

Sam rolled her eyes. “So, what’s the plan tonight?”

“Well, you two could go have fun somewhere else without me,” Danny said. “This isn’t going to be fun or exciting.”

“What if we actually solve a murder, though?”

Then Danny would have to say goodbye to Sidney. “I think this is important,” he said. “I’m not doing this for fun.”

“Dude, it’s sad that he died, but it happened seventy years ago.”

“Which means we’re running out of time to find answers.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “But, do you actually have a plan? Do you know what you’re going to say to this guy when he asks why the hell you’re asking about his dead brother?”

“Uh…”

Well, he couldn’t say he was trying to help Sidney’s ghost move on so he wouldn’t be trapped in a locker for the rest of time.

“Just the truth, I guess,” Danny said. “We found out about Sidney, and that no one ever really investigated what happened, and we want him to get justice.”

“Do you really think he’ll talk to us?” Sam asked.

“He’s almost ninety,” Tucker said. “Maybe he’ll just want to talk to someone.”

Danny saw Jazz approaching their table and tried to give her his best glare, but it was no use.

“Hey guys,” Jazz said, ignoring Danny.

“Uh, hey Jazz, what’s up,” Tucker asked.

“Oh, I just wanted to check which one of you could make sure Danny got home okay tonight.”

“Oh my god, Jazz.”

“It’s just another couple of weeks,” Jazz said.

“Uh, what?” Tucker asked.

“Danny in trouble for breaking curfew?” Sam asked.

“Oh,” Jazz said, giving Danny a disappointed look. 

Danny and Jazz had a brief stare down.

“Danny got electrocuted, he’s not supposed to be walking home alone, especially at night, until we’re sure there won’t be any side effects.”

“You got electrocuted?!” Tucker asked. “You said it was a minor shock.”

“Barely electrocuted,” Danny said. 

“Danny it melted your suit and your face shield,” Jazz said.

“Which is why I’m fine, my HAZMAT suit took all the damage.”

“You literally went into shock and had a seizure.”

“It wasn’t a seizure.”

“You said the doctor said you were fine,” Tucker said.

“Where did this happen?” Sam asked.

“In that stupid death trap our parents have been building.”

Danny buried his head in his hands. “Please stop talking right now.” He was so uncomfortable hearing Jazz talk about the accident.

“So can one of you make sure Danny gets home okay?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Of course.”

“Thanks,” Jazz said. “I’ll see you at home, Danny.”

“You’re the worst,” Danny said.

“I love you too.”

“Dude,” Tucker said. “Why didn’t you tell us you were electrocuted.”

“Because I’m literally fine,” Danny said.

“And you wanted to go investigate a murder on your own?” Sam asked.

“The doctor’s just being super cautious. They seriously didn’t find anything wrong with me.”

Sam shook her head. “So, like, what happened?” she asked.

“I do not want to talk about it,” Danny said.

“Okay, but, are you really okay?” Tucker asked.

“Do I look like I’m about to drop dead?

“Yeah, a little,” Tucker said.

“He looked like that, before, though,” Sam said. 

Danny sighed. “Look, it wasn’t a big deal. Everyone just acted like it was one because it could have been worse, I guess.”

His parents had been sensible about it, at least.

Tucker narrowed his eyes at him. “Okay, you had an accident in your parents weird ghost portal thing, and right afterwards start asking about a kid that died at Casper?”

“Uh, I mean it wasn’t right after.”

“Danny.”

“Okay, so, should we get going? We don’t want to get there too late.”

“Danny, my dude, you’re a weird little guy.”

“Says the guy writing fury fan fiction about his friends.”

“Were-person friend fiction.”

“Nah, Danny’s the weirder one,” Sam took Tucker’s side.

They didn’t know the half of it.

They left the Nasty Burger and caught a bus to Elmerton.

“So are you really alright?” Tucker asked.

“Urgent care didn’t find anything wrong with me,” Danny said. 

“Is that because you hid all your symptoms?” Sam asked.

Well, that wasn’t wrong, but what would urgent care have done with symptoms of intangibility and invisibility?

“What do you think I’m hiding?”

“Do you want a list?”

“What symptoms do you think I’m hiding?”

“Uh, seeing ghosts?” Tucker asked.

“Literally, what illness is that a symptom of?”

“Ooh, being undead,” Sam exclaimed.

“You want me to be dead?”

“Un-dead,” Sam said. “Very different from being dead.”

“Oh, like a vampire?” Tucker asked, rolling his eyes.

“At least let me live vicariously through Danny,” Sam melodramatically sighed.

“Don’t you mean ‘undead vicariously?’”

“That does not roll off the tongue at all,” Danny said. 

“So, are we setting up a detective agency after we solve this one?” Tucker asked.

“There definitely aren’t enough murders in Amity Park,” Danny said. 

“We don’t have to solve murders,” Tucker said.

“What, are we going to help the police solve property crime?” Sam asked scornfully.

“We could catch people cheating on their spouses,” Tucker suggested.

Sam rolled her eyes.

“How about we just leave it at this one case,” Danny said. 

“You guys are no fun,” Tucker complained. 

Out in Elmerton, they had some walking to do. Clayton Poindexter didn’t live in a retirement home, he had a house out in the suburbs where Sam’s ‘guy’ said he lived alone.

“So what’s the plan if he doesn’t want to talk to us?” Sam asked. “You going to do the eye thing?”

“We’re not interrogating him, Sam, if he doesn’t want to talk to us, then we go down the list until we find someone who does.”

Besides, he didn’t like to do the eye thing on purpose, unless Jazz was being annoying. Danny was pretty sure that both Sam and Tucker wanted this to be some sort of action adventure sort of thing.

They arrived outside the home and Danny figured it looked about right for a place built in the fifties and then never renovated. 

“Should we have called ahead?” Tucker asked suddenly.

“And give him time to come up with some other story?”

“He’s not a suspect, Sam.”

Then, from the house, “What are you kids doing staring at my home?” 

Danny blanked on what to say. 

“Mr. Poindexter?” Sam said. “We’re students from Casper, where you went to high school.”

“So?”

Sam looked at Danny.

“We wanted to ask about your brother Sidney, uh, Sir,” Danny said. “He was killed at our school, and no one ever gave him any justice. His death wasn’t an accident, and it shouldn’t have been treated like one.”

“You’re trying to find out what happened to Sid?”

“Yes, Sir,” Danny said.

“And what do you think I can tell you about it?”

“Well, we thought you might know who was bullying your brother. We have some suspects, and some names of other people we think might have known him. Maybe you could point us in a likely direction?”

“You think they’re all still alive for you to talk to?”

“Well, you are,” Sam said.

Mr. Poindexter sighed. “Well, let’s stop hollering at each other,” he said. “Or do you three just want to stand there on the sidewalk?”

Sam and Tucker looked at Danny. 

“Oh, uh, can we come in?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Mr. Poindexter let them in and had them sit on the couch. The man definitely looked like he was closer to ninety than eighty. There were photos of a family, and probably grand children on the walls. 

“You kids are giving me the chills, coming in here bringing up the dead, and this one dressed for a funeral.”

“Sorry, Sir,” Danny said. Definitely the topic of the conversation and not Danny himself giving the old man chills. 

“Any of the grandkids at Casper?” Sam asked.

“Oh, the grandchildren are all grown up now,” Mr. Poindexter said. “My oldest great-grandchild is in Kindergarten now. How did you three hear about Sid?”

“Oh, well, it was just a rumor at school, Sir, about a boy who was found in a locker. Sam… Oh, um, this is Sam, and Tucker, and I’m Danny.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell your story, boy.”

“Right, well, Sam was able to find an article about it in the Gazette from back then, and it just didn’t seem right that they said it was an accident, and put his cause of death down as asthma. Someone put him in that locker. He wouldn’t have died otherwise.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Oh, well, I saw you in the yearbook from back then, and we were able to look you up.”

“You really think you’re going to find anything?”

“We’re going to try,” Danny said.

“Does this one talk?” he asked, gesturing at Tucker.

“Uh, I talk, Sir.”

“Normally he doesn’t shut up,” Sam said. 

“So we have some printouts of faces and names. We were hoping you might know some of them and if they had anything to do with Sidney.”

“Well, let’s see them,” Mr. Poindexter said. 

Danny pulled out the photos.

“These are some people from the chess club, who we thought might have been friends with Sidney.”

“There were more than four of them,” Mr. Poindexter said.

“Uh, these are the ones who are still alive,” Danny said. 

“Oh, you did your research then. Well,” he paused. He looked off to the side, but he pointed. “This one, I don’t know his name. I never knew his name.”

He looked uncomfortable.“I saw him with Sid now and then.”

“Okay,” Danny said. “And then, these guys are… well, we thought some of them might have bullied Sidney.”

Sam and Tucker were looking at him, because he hadn’t exactly been able to tell them why he suspected them.

“These ones all still alive, too?” Mr. Poindexter asked.

“No, Sir,” Danny said. “I mean, some of them are, but we still want to narrow down the suspects, even the ones who, uh, aren’t around anymore.”

Mr. Poindexter had a bit of trouble going through the pages, but he set three down on the coffee table between them.

“That one was the ringleader of them,” Mr. Poindexter said. “Always thought it was funny getting poor Sid all riled up. He never did get how to stand up for himself. I thought… Middle school should have taught him a thing or two.”

“Did you ever see any of them shove your brother in a locker?” Tucker asked.

“Oh, this one, a couple of times. Sid got so upset about that. Maybe he was claustrophobic, people didn’t talk about that back then.”

“You beat them up for messing with your brother?” Sam asked.

“Now what would that have taught Sid, if his big brother had to fight his battles?” He sighed. “Maybe I should have, maybe I should have worried more about taking care of him than in making sure he toughened up. Maybe he’d still be here. He was always different. You know, you kids have it lucky. You’ve got students doing all sorts of dumb things and getting away with it.”

“Did Sidney do stuff at school that they didn’t like?”

“Well, he was a bit of a sissy. More interested in poetry and the stars than in sports and stuff that you could earn a living off of. He had no clue how to talk to people without putting them off.”

Danny thought Sidney could talk to people just fine.

“Maybe Sidney would have done better today,” Mr. Poindexter said. “You kids have it easy.”

“It might not be as different as you think,” Sam said, looking pointedly at Danny.

“Oh yeah? They still give kids swirlies?”

Danny’s face flamed red. “It’s been known to happen. They still cram kids in lockers, too.”

“You got a big brother to beat them up for you?” Mr. Poindexter asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Then you’ve got to stand up for yourself,” Mr. Poindexter said. “Man up.”

“Danny’s plenty brave and plenty manly,” Sam said.

“I’m sure he is,” Mr. Poindexter said skeptically. “Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you about who hurt him.”

“Do you know why the police called it an accident when it obviously wasn’t?”

“It was an accident because no one was trying to kill him, putting him in that locker.”

“Shoving him in the locker wasn’t an accident,” Sam said indignantly. “It was a violent act, and it killed him. That’s still murder. What, the police just said, boys will be boys?”

“They probably did,” Mr. Poindexter said. “Besides,” he sighed again. “There were rumors about Sid, I guess that doesn’t matter these days, but back then… Some of the guys were saying he was a homo. These days, I guess that’s fine, but back then, the police didn’t much care to do much for poor Sid.”

“That’s awful,” Sam said. 

“That’s just the way it was.” He sighed. “You kids wait here. Don’t touch nothing, now.”

Mr. Poindexter got up on mostly stable legs and shuffled out of the room. 

“I guess it’s different now,” Sam mocked.

“Shh.”

“It doesn’t sound like it’s much different for him,” Sam hissed.

“Yeah, but, can we just finish up here before you roast him? He is talking to us.”

Mr. Poindexter came back into the room with an old dusty box. 

“Don’t know why I kept all this. Ma used to look through it, and then she left it to me.”

He pulled out an old journal. 

“He was always writing.” 

He handed it over to Danny. 

“Can I take this?”

“Well, I don’t want you to sit around here and read it,” Mr. Poindexter said. “Has anyone ever told you you give them the heebie jeebies?”

“It’s come up,” Danny said.

“Your parents never teach you to look people in the eyes when they’re talking to you?”

“The topic’s come up.”

“Any photos of Sidney in there? We were hoping to find something besides his school photo.”

That was news to Danny.

Mr. Poindexter sighed, but rummaged through the box. 

“Here he is with Ma. Sid was always a momma’s boy.”

Sidney was proudly holding up a certificate of some sort. Mother and son were standing outside the library. He looked only a bit younger than the Sidney that Danny had been talking to.

“Thank you, Mr. Poindexter,” Danny said. 

“Alright, off with you,” he said.

“We’ll let you know if we find anything,” Danny said.

“You do that,” Mr. Poindexter said dismissively.

Outside the house, Tucker let out an audible breath.

“Right?” Sam asked.

“Kids are writing furry fan fiction these days,” Danny said.

“I guess things are different now,” Sam said.

“I’m not writing about us being furries, I’m writing about our were-sonas. It’s very different.”

“If it’s my were-sona, why don’t I get a say in what it is?”

“Because you’re a cat,” Tucker said. “I don’t make up the rules.”

“ACBT, assigned cat by Tucker.”

“So,” Sam said. “How’d we do, my not un-dead friend?”

“Well, our prime suspect’s dead. Actually, we’ve got one living person who might have been a friend of Sidney’s and one living person who might have shoved him in that locker.”

“What’s the bet he got just as much crap at home as he did at school?” Sam asked.

“I wouldn’t bet against it, that’s all I’ll say,” Tucker said.

“Do you think you’ll get anything from that journal?” Sam asked.

Danny shrugged. “It’s not like he ever had the chance to write about who shoved him in there that day.”

“There might be something,” Sam said. 

“Sure,” Danny said. “I guess it’s a bit late to go look these two up.”

“Tomorrow,” Sam said. “So I guess Tucker and I are walking you home.”

Tucker grinned. “Oh, yeah, does that mean we get a kiss at the door?”

Danny rolled his eyes. “You guys don’t really have to.”

“Let’s humor the doctor, Danny,” Sam said. “I don’t actually want you to be undead, much less dead dead.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Come on, we’ll be your body guards for the next couple weeks.”

“Okay, I don’t need body guards. I can take care of myself.”

“Like Sidney?”

“Sidney was different. Come on, we don’t want to miss the last bus.”

“Jazz would come and pick us up,” Tucker said.

“Yeah, and then we’d have a group therapy session in her car with no way out.”

“She’s worried about you.” Sam said, like she agreed with Jazz.

“Yeah, well, she’s a worrywart.” Danny said pointedly.

They caught the bus back to Amity and Danny started flipping through the journal.

“What was the last thing he wrote?” Sam asked. 

Danny skipped to the end.

“It’s a poem,” Danny said. 

“You should go read it at the Skulk and Lurk,” Sam said.

“Why would I do that?”

“Why are you doing any of this? Maybe it would be nice for something of his to still have a place in this world.”

“You don’t even know if it’s good or not,” Tucker said.

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s not bad,” Danny said, shutting the journal.

“Soooo,” Tucker said, while they were walking back to Fentonworks from the bus stop. “Did you just flip through that yearbook and say, hey, these guys look like bullies? Because three out of seven ain't bad.”

The weather turned, suddenly, and Danny felt a chill.

“Something like that,” Danny said, seeing his breath fog in front of his face. “Oomph.”

“Can you help me? Please, I’m lost.”

“You alright Danny?”

“Uh,” Danny said, looking down at the little girl that had just barreled into him and thrown her arms around him. 

“Why are you holding your arms like that?” Sam asked.

The little girl turned her head, and Danny saw her black eyes staring up at him. Sam and Tucker couldn’t see her. Danny’s own eyes started burning and he looked to the side and blinked back tears. The chilled pins and needles around his midsection should have given it away.

“I- um, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? If you feel weird, you can say so. Dude, I don’t want to mess around if you’re going to have a seizure or something.”

“It’s alright,” Danny said, lowering his arms and trying to surreptitiously pat the girl on the back. “Come on, you need to get home.”

“We’re walking you home, remember?”

The little girl asked tremulously. “You’ll help me?”

“Yeah yeah, come on, don’t want to be out here all night.”

The little girl let him go and grabbed his hand as they started walking.

“I saw this kitty, and I tried to go pet her, but she ran away, and then I don’t know what happened, but I can’t find my mommy, and I want to go home.”

“It’s been a long day, huh.”

“It’s been forever and I can’t find it.”

“You tired, dude? I was planning to kick your butt online when I got home.”

“I don’t think I’ll be playing games tonight,” Danny said. 

Danny thought the little girl was as unaware of Sam and Tucker as they were of her.

Sam and Tucker walked him all the way to Fentonworks.

“This isn’t my home,” the little girl said.

“I just need to look some stuff up,” Danny said. 

“Oh, I thought we were leaving that up for Sam’s ‘guy.’” 

“Later,” Danny said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“You promise?” 

“Night Danny,” Sam said as the two of them started walking away.

“Hey,” Tucker called back. “I didn’t get my goodnight kiss?”

Danny flipped him off behind the little girl’s back. 

“I’m Danny, can you tell me your name? I might be able to look up your home on my computer.”

“I’m Melody.”

“Hi Melody, do you know what your last name is?”

“Of course I know my last name,” Melody said. “I’m a big kid. It’s… I, I know it. I…”

“It’s okay,” Danny said, familiar with Sidney’s difficulties remembering the finer details of his life. “It’s been a long day, remember? We’ll figure it out. 

Danny walked inside, gave Jazz the silent treatment on his way to his bedroom, and wound up with half his body feeling like pins and needles because the girl insisted on sitting on his lap while he used his computer.

“Hey Melody, can you read that word for me?”

“I know that one, it says google.”

“How about that, right there?”

“Um…”

“It’s okay,” Danny said. He just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be able to read whatever article he pulled up.

“Hey, Melody, what are your parents names?”

“Mommy and Daddy.”

“Okay, but what do other grownups call them?”

“Um, oh, my Mommy’s name is Melissa. Um, I don’t think I know Daddy’s name.”

“That’s okay,” Danny said. 

He asked google to search through articles about Amity Park with what little he knew.

Five years old Melody Turner, ran into traffic six years ago chasing a stray cat. He already knew she was dead. Why did reading the article make him feel worse? He tried to find Melissa Turner’s address, but came up blank.

“Hey, Melody, what school did you go to?”

“Mary Montessori,” Melody said. 

“Did you walk to school?”

“I do! I know the way.”

Danny looked up Mary Montessori. It was a private school not too far from Marley Elementary where Danny had gone.

“Okay,” Danny said. “Let’s find your home.”

Sneaking out wasn’t hard and Danny walked Melody to Mary Montessori.

“That way!”

“Hey, Melody, what do you like to play at recess?” Danny asked.

“Four square! I’m the best. I beat Andy and he cried like a little kid.”

“Oh wow, you must have been really good. Do we need to turn anywhere to get to your home?”

“The house with the big tree, there’s a house in it, but they never let me go play in it.”

“Oh, I always wanted a treehouse.”

There was a house with a big tree, and what looked like pieces of wood still nailed to it in some places, but no house. It was a T-intersection, so they turned right. They found her house a couple of blocks later.

“That’s it!” Melody exclaimed.

What now? Danny wondered.

“Kitty cat!” Melody shrieked, and ran off to a car parked at the side of the street. Danny went to look and there was actually a cat under the hood of the car, probably enjoying the warm engine block. The cat didn’t seem to notice Melody, and Melody didn’t seem to notice that her hand wasn’t exactly making contact with the cat.

“That’s a pretty cat,” Danny commented.

“She's the prettiest cat in the world,” Melody exclaimed.

“Okay,” Danny said. “Hey, Melody, it’s pretty late. It’s time to go home.”

Would she just be lost tomorrow, like Sidney would be back in the locker.

“She’s so soft, she’s the sweetest, bestest kitty cat ever. Her name’s going to be Jazmine. Can I keep her, please, please, please?”

"Yeah," Danny said. "Yeah, Melody, Jazmine's your cat now."

Melody looked so happy.

Danny felt a burning in his chest. He felt compelled to get closer to Melody and he crouched down and put a hand on her back and held his hand out to let the cat sniff him. Jazmine sort of gave him a look of indifference.

“Time to go home,” Danny said again, before he stopped breathing.

“Okay,” Melody said. “Come on, Jazmine.”

Danny’s heart stopped, his chest exploded in a flash of light, and…

Mommy had said she was too little to have a kitty cat, but that had been forever ago, and now Melody was a big kid, and she would take such good care of the kitty. She already knew what she was going to call her. Her kitty would be Jazmine, and Jazmine would do silly things like chase string, and at night Jazmine would sleep right next to her and she would purr, just like Tiphani’s kitty cat did when Melody pet her. Mommy was going to let her have a kitty cat and it was going to be the happiest day of her life.

Danny’s heart started beating again and he let out a sob. He had a thought about taking the cat to a shelter, or something, for Melody’s sake, but whatever light show had gone off when Melody had left must have scared it off. Danny sat on the curb and tried to stop crying for a while. It was late enough, no one was out walking the neighborhood.

Danny’s phone went off.

‘Where are you?!’

It was Jazz.

Danny huffed.

‘Stop trying to watch me sleep or whatever’

‘It’s not even your bedtime.’

‘Hey yeah I’m not even out past curfew’

‘Curfew was half an hour ago, and I’m guessing you’re not with Sam and Tucker.’

‘Soul searching’

‘Danny please come home.’

‘Oh no, I’m getting kidnapped, and having a seizure, and wait, is that Michael Myers?’

‘Just two more weeks and you can go hang out with Jason vore his for all I care.’

‘Oh, yeah, I’m voring his what?’

‘That was autocorrect.’

‘Vore his’

‘Are you coming home or not?’

‘Yeah whatever’

Danny got up off of the curb and headed home, thinking about the whole psychopomp thing. He wasn’t sure why he had relived the biker ghost’s death, but gotten a strong desire to have a cat from Melody.

Danny’s breath fogged in front of his face and his whole body felt a chill as something heavy hit him from behind and Danny fell face first to the asphalt. He rolled over and caught sight of a vaguely humanoid staticky mess. His palms itched. He didn’t have time to get up before it was lunging at him and for a moment all Danny could do was curl up and cover his face. He cried out as claws raked at his arm.

It wasn’t something he debated. He felt that thing in his chest and he let it wash over him, he transformed into whatever he was in the middle of the street and with a thought floated away from the… he didn’t even want to call it a ghost, it was nothing like the others. 

The wraith lunged at him again, and the itching in his hands became a burn of plasma that shot out and hit the thing. It screeched an angry cry that hurt his ears and then it became a brawl. They rolled around mid air clawing at each other. From time to time, something built up inside of him and he shot more beams out of his hands. He kept trying to remember some of the moves his mom had taught him when he’d been younger, but all he could manage was wild punches and knees and elbows. He took several more claws to his arms and his face. Finally, something slipped into his mind and he remembered a move. 

Grabbing the wraith’s arm, Danny twisted midair and threw it over his shoulder, straight down to the ground where… it flew right through the ground. Danny felt that burning in his chest and when the wraith flew back up he went right for it, throwing another haymaker and then grabbing it. This time it wasn’t just a flash of light bursting forth from him. His whole chest cavity split open wide and the wraith screamed as it was sucked in.

For a moment, all Danny could feel was anger and wrath and the desire to make something bleed, but then it was gone, and his chest was stitching itself back up again. 

Danny made himself float down so his feet were touching the ground. He was dripping green stuff… No, even he couldn’t deny that it was ectoplasm. He was bleeding ectoplasm. Because he was a ghost. An undead ghost? Danny landed on the ground and, thinking about it, let gravity take hold of him. He leaned up against someone’s car and inspected the wounds. The ectoplasm was pretty goopy, it wasn’t bleeding very fast. He could feel the slashes closing up slowly. None of them had been more than maybe a quarter of an inch deep. He thought about trying to change back, but thought he wanted the wounds to be done closing before he did. 

He didn’t want to wait there, though. Not wanting to use his injured arms, and forgetting he could just fly, he leaned back against the car as he pressed himself up with his legs, and then stopped when he heard the scratch of the tires on the asphalt. Had he just moved the car a bit? He looked around. He knelt down next to the car, where he was pretty sure the jack point was, grabbed it and started to lift the dang thing off the ground.

“No way,” Danny said.

The car alarm started blaring. Danny dropped the thing a couple of inches and took off.

He was a glowing ghost flying through the air. Danny went invisible. It was easier to do when he was a ghost. Danny went intangible, too, and flew through a billboard just because. He flew through the billboard. He was flying. Danny was literally flying. It helped put, just, everything else on the back burner for a bit. He tried to do a loop in the air and almost crashed into the ground. 

He got home and camped out on top of the roof while he waited for the wounds to heal. One of them wasn’t, though, and it was that first slash on his forearm when he’d still been human. That was going to bleed a lot when he changed back. Danny flew down to the alleyway next to their brownstone. There was a brief moment where he was scared that he wasn’t going to be able to change back, but it wasn’t an issue. 

The slash on his arm burned worse when he was human. All of the ectoplasm was gone and he was left dripping blood pretty quickly.

Well, crap. He slapped his hand over his forearm, which made it burn worse, and made his way to the front door. Jazz was on him the moment he was inside.

“Oh my god, Danny, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Um… I told you Mike Meyers was after me.”

“Daniel Janus Fenton!” 

“Jeez, okay, well so, I thought I saw this cat, and I went to go pet it, but it was maybe a young bobcat? And it didn’t like me much.”

He pulled his hand away to show her.

“Danny, that looks really bad!”

Jazz literally scooped him up in her arms.

“Hey!”

 And carried him to the kitchen, where she sat him on the counter, grabbed his arm and shoved it under the running faucet before yanking his arm up over his head, and wrapping the kitchen towel around it tight.

“Hold this up there,” Jazz said, manually grabbing his other hand and placing it over the towel.

She picked him up again and set him on the floor. 

“My legs do work.”

“Keep your arm up; if you feel faint, put your head between your knees.”

“I haven’t lost that much blood.”

“Danny!”

“Yeah, okay.”

Jazz ran out of the room and came back with the first aid kit. She didn’t even remove the towel first, she just started wrapping his arm tightly with gauze.

“Don’t we need to do more than that? Like Neosporin?”

“Danny, this is first aid to get you to urgent care.”

“Urgent care? Jazz, it’s not that deep.”

Jazz just kept wrapping his arm really tight. Tying it off, Jazz got up and walked over to the door to the basement. 

“Mom! Danny’s bleeding a lot!”

“Oh, come on, Jazz.”

“You can bleed in the RV; you’re not going to urgent care in my car.”

Mom and Dad actually got out of the lab pretty quickly.

“Uh, hey,” Danny said, waving with his heavily bandaged arm.

Chapter Text

To their credit, Danny literally bleeding out in the kitchen got their parents to actually act like parents and they got to urgent care faster than an ambulance probably could have managed.

“A bobcat,” Mom said as they waited for Danny to be admitted. “Really Danny. I thought you had more common sense.”

“It was dark,” Danny said. “It wasn’t that big.”

“Urgent care twice in as many weeks.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Now Mads, you grew up in the country. Danno’s a city boy. We don’t get bobcats around here all too often. A boy’s going to get into some scrapes. Did I ever tell you about the rocket sled I built when I was your age Danno? Fifteen stitches.” He gestured towards his side. 

“He should still know better than to approach a wild animal at night,” Mom said.

Jazz took pity on Danny. “Mom, I seem to recall a story about a badger.”

Mom sighed. 

“I just want you to take care of yourself, okay? You won’t always have your big sister to take care of you.”

Well, not if Jazz could help it. 

Danny buried his face in his hands.

“Danny Fenton?”

Danny was the first out of his chair, jumping up like it would get him away from the conversation, then he collapsed.

“Danny!”

Danny groaned.

“Wha happen?”

The nurse was next to them a moment later. 

“You passed out, kid. Blood loss and jumping up like that don’t mix.”

Danny groaned again. Dad scooped Danny up before the nurse could object, but he insisted on getting Danny a wheel chair before they went back.

“This is so embarrassing.”

“Well, maybe you need a bit of embarrassment for the lesson to stick,” Mom said. 

The nurse cleaned out the wound, put him on an IV, and then the doctor came in. 

“You got lucky,” the doctor mentioned, inspecting the wound. “No tendons, no nerves. This could have been much worse.”

“See, it’s not a big deal.”

The doctor started doing the stitches with a surprisingly steady hand, considering most people didn’t like touching him. The nurse cleaning out the wound hadn’t had a fun time. Danny just made sure not to make eye contact with the doctor during the procedure.

“Of course, now you need a tetanus shot and a rabies shot. So that's- seven shots.”

"You mean two?"

"One for tetanus. It's not uncommon for people to have allergic reactions to the rabies shot, so first there's a shot to prevent that. Then rabies is five shots, both thighs, both glutes, and one of your arms."

“I thought rabies was from saliva,” Danny protested, sounding a bit hysterical.

“Animals lick their paws."

“Okay, but it probably didn’t have rabies, right, is this all really necessary?”

“Did anyone catch the bobcat to make sure it doesn’t have rabies?”

“Can’t we wait and see?”

“Once rabies starts showing symptoms it’s a hundred percent fatal, regardless of any medical intervention. So there is no wait and see.”

“He’ll get the shots,” Mom said. 

“Now rabies is a series of shots,” the doctor said. “So we'll be seeing you again, but if anyone tracks this bobcat down we can see if it’s going to continue to be necessary.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Mom said. 

“I’ll send the nurse in with your shots, and the front desk will schedule the rest of the series.”

Jazz followed the doctor out.

“Um, excuse me, doctor, I had a quick question.”

“What can I do for you.”

“It’s just- with the accident he had a couple of weeks ago, and now this, could you tell if that was really from a bobcat?”

“Well, it wasn’t from a knife, and even if it was, people struggle to cut themselves uniformly like that. I’m pretty sure that was from claws. Bobcat’s the best explanation I can think of.”

“Okay, good,” Jazz said. 

On the way out, Dad slapped Danny on the back and said, “Eighteen stitches, a Fenton record.”

“Let’s make sure no one breaks it,” Mom said.

Mom and Dad went back in the lab when they got home.

“Why are you hovering?” Danny asked.

“I just wanted to make sure you got upstairs okay,” Jazz said. 

Danny opened his mouth, seemed to think about it, and then just mumbled, “Thanks for making sure I didn’t bleed out, earlier.”

“Any time, little brother.”

That night she thought through everything. The accident had probably been an accident. The cuts were probably actually from an animal. Danny was definitely dealing with mental health issues, he was troubled about something, or multiple somethings, but she didn’t think he was deliberately hurting himself.

He also bled, he passed out because of blood loss, he’d been checked over by a doctor twice. He definitely wasn’t a ghost, and Jazz’s own stress might better explain the reasons she had thought he could be. 

Had she deluded herself, like she had when she’d been a kid?

Ghosts weren’t real, of course, but had that machine in their basement done something to Danny?

He definitely wasn’t going to tell her if it had.

Was it getting better? Was it getting worse? Was it permanent?

The next day, Jazz drove Danny to school and went straight to the nurse to hand in the note excusing him from PE for the next three days.

“Kyle,” Jazz greeted, finding the sophomore outside of Mr. Faluca’s classroom. “How are you doing this morning.”

Regardless of other health issues, Danny was depressed, someone was hurting him, and however much he insisted he could take care of himself, Jazz wasn’t going to let anyone get away with punching her little brother in the face.

“Oh, hey Jazz, um, I guess you want to talk about that thing.”

“I do, yes,” Jazz said. 

Kyle pulled a USB stick out of his bag. 

“Okay, well, first of all, your brother came to school that day with the black eye.”

“What? Could it have been in front of the school?”

“There’s cameras there too,” Kyle said.

“I literally saw him ten minutes before classes started.”

Kyle shrugged.

Jazz shrugged. “Okay, so what’s on there?”

Kyle hesitated. “This really didn’t come from me.”

“Okay?”

“Um, well, someone is hurting your brother.”

“Is there a name?”

Kyle took a deep breath and said really quietly, “Dash Baxter.”

He said it like Jazz should know who that was.

“The freshman football player already being scouted by recruiters?”

Jazz shook her head. “Okay.”

“Look, I don’t think there’s much he could do that isn’t going to get brushed under the rug. The only thing they care about is him playing in the next game.”

Jazz took the USB stick.

“Thanks Kyle. I have no idea where this came from.”

“Right,” Kyle said.

Jazz felt the USB stick burning a hole in her pocket throughout the day. She wished Danny had classes near her classes so they could cross paths more during the school day, but she saw him over lunch with Sam and Tucker and, all in all, she’d been glad that he’d gone out with them the night before. It was clear they cared about him, but she really wished they weren’t convinced that keeping Danny’s secrets was more important than making sure he didn’t get hurt.

Danny let her drive him home after school. It might have had something to do with the injection sites being incredibly sore.

“So,” Jazz said. “How was school today?”

“Uuuuuugh.”

“I’m just making conversation,” Jazz said. 

Danny sighed.

“Someone started a rumor about why I have bandages around my forearm,” Danny said.

“Okay,” Jazz said. “What did your friends say?”

“Well, they didn’t believe the rumors,” Danny said.

“Was there something else they thought it was?”

Danny snorted. “They were debating if it was a werewolf or another supernatural entity. They also told me off for going out again last night. So I’m going to have to keep them away from you since you seem to be rubbing off on them.”

“Your friends caring about you is a good thing, Danny.”

“I can take care of myself,” Danny said. 

If she pointed out all the evidence to the contrary, he’d just shut down on her. 

“It’s good to be self reliant, but it’s also good to have backup, and people who look out for you. You’d look out for them, right? If they needed help.”

“Well, yeah.”

“You know… you’re just as much of a boy, even if you need backup sometimes.”

“Okay, now you know more about being a boy than I do.”

Well, she could probably talk about toxic masculinity for a while.

“Dad’s been really supportive of your transition,” Jazz said.

“Yeah?”

“And he’s always including you in masculine precepts.”

“Maybe no SAT words, Jazz.”

Jazz put on her best Jack Fenton voice, “Us Fenton men take care of things ourselves.”

“I do need to take care of myself, though,” Danny said.

“What happens if you don’t?”

Danny didn’t say anything.

“Can you think about it, when you have some time?” Jazz asked. 

“Are you giving me more homework?”

“I’m just saying, if it’s something you believe, then it’s worth asking why you believe it.”

Danny sighed.

“Okay,” Jazz said. “What are you going to be getting up to this evening?”

“Uh, Sam and Tucker and I are going out again,” Danny said. “They’re probably going to be very careful to walk me home, so don’t worry.”

“Do you guys need a ride somewhere?”

“Nah, we’ll get there just fine.”

“And if you see a big cat?”

“I’ll try to catch it to see if it has rabies or not,” Danny said.

“I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you understand that that would be a very bad idea. If you see the bobcat again, call animal control.”

They parked in front of Fentonworks and suddenly Danny’s breath fogged up in front of his face, his unbandaged arm was covered in goosebumps, and he started looking around. 

“Danny?”

“Uh, you go ahead inside, I’m gonna sit on the porch for a bit.”

“Sit on the porch?”

“Worried I’m going to get eaten by a wolf? It’s a nice day out, I think I’ll do my homework out here.”

The mystery continued and Danny still had absolutely no intention of telling her what was going on. He was still looking at something outside, though there wasn’t anything she could see.

“I’ll be doing my homework in the living room. Holler if there are any wolves, or bobcats, or if you want some help with your homework.”

“Yeah yeah,” Danny said. 

She went inside, and sat down on the couch. Pulling out her laptop, she plugged in the USB stick. Kyle, it turned out, had gone a bit above and beyond what she’d asked him for. She didn’t need to sort through anything, he’d made a compilation video of Dash Baxter and her brother. She watched Baxter put Danny in a headlock, she watched him pick Danny up and drop him in the hall trashcan, she watched him bodily shove Danny into a locker and forced the door closed, while a bunch of other boys in letterman jackets watched and laughed, and she watched while Baxter punched Danny from behind and Danny fell to the ground and threw up. It was like every day Baxter sought Danny out to hurt him.

Whatever was going on, she was sure had been going on since middle school, when Danny had started retreating and showing signs of depression. 

She waited until Danny came inside.

“How was homework outside?” Jazz asked.

There were tear tracks going down his face that he’d tried to scrub away.

“Uh, went well,” Danny said. 

Jazz took a deep breath in and out.

“Can we talk about Dash Baxter?”

Danny blanched. “Um, that football player? What’s there to talk about?”

“He’s been abusing you. I’m guessing since middle school.”

“Oh, Jazz, uh, abuse is a pretty strong word.”

“He routinely hurts you without prompting and without you being able to defend yourself.”

“I’m not weak,” Danny said. 

“You’re not,” Jazz agreed. “But you’re not fighting back.”

“Oh, I’m supposed to fight back, now?”

“No, I’m saying it’s abuse because he’s hurting you and he knows he has impunity.”

“I’m handling it,” Danny said. 

“Like a man?”

“Yes, sort of.”

“Danny, how are you handling it?”

“I’m, you know, I’m handling it, I’m not letting him get to me,” Danny said.

Well that definitely wasn’t true.

“While resilience is a good trait to have; just letting someone continue to hurt you indefinitely is absolutely not handling it.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Do you know how many times he messed with me in middle school right in front of the teachers and literally nothing happened? I can’t fight him, and I’m pretty sure if I actually hurt him they’d throw the book at me for hurting their star player, so what am I supposed to do? What do you think happens to me if I actually get him in trouble?”

“Then it sounds like a problem that you might be expected to need help in dealing with.”

“I’m-”

“Enduring it isn’t enough. You deserve better and I’m not going to ignore this.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” Danny asked.

She wasn’t ruling anything out.

“I’ll let you know if I figure anything out,” Jazz said. 

“Well, good luck with that.”

“Do you want to talk about what you were upset about out there?”

“That’s really not something you can help me with.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to talk about it, though.”

“It’s really not,” Danny said. “I’m going to finish my homework upstairs.”

“Okay. If you want any help with your homework…”

“That is literally the one thing I’m not having trouble with,” he said by way of parting.

She missed the excited kid who would talk her ears off.

Jazz pulled out her recorder, once he was out of earshot. 

“Target is an adolescent boy who enjoys hurting people weaker than him.”

Jazz gathered her thoughts. She was a planner. She had planned out her doctoral dissertation when she was a freshman. But Danny couldn’t wait for something elaborate.

“Obstacles are institutional powers willing to turn a blind eye to bullying.”

Jazz deleted the recording. She walked over to the door where the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ was leaning against the wall. Picking it up, she went down stairs.

“Oh, hi sweetie,” Mom said. “What’s brought you down here?”

“Just need to get some practice in,” Jazz said, holding up the bat.

“Okay, make sure you do some stretches first.”

The sub basement had a room for all of the medieval torture devices that had been passed down for generations from the family’s old witch hunting days, and next to that was a little gym where there were some training dummies. 

She mostly just needed to get some aggression out. Whatever she was going to do, she was going to have to do her research, and make a plan, and then execute it. She just needed to clear her head a bit first. 

Danny had sort of been feeling like he was juggling ten different things ever since the accident. Jazz finding out about Dash just felt like one more thing. It had probably only been a matter of time before Dash would have done something right in front of her, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing when the day would come?

“Where do you guys want to meet up?” Danny asked.

“Your house, because we’re walking you.”

“Right, well, Shady Acres visiting hours end at six, so we should get out there a bit sooner than we did last night.”

“Do we need to pretend to be this guy’s grand kids or something?” Sam asked.

“It’s not a hospital,” Tucker said. “I’m pretty sure anyone can visit.”

“And do you know what you’re going to say?” 

“Uh, how about, do you know who killed Sidney? Straight to the point, you know?”

“You’ve got to butter him up first,” Sam said.

“What if he did it?” Tucker asked.

Danny was sort of hoping to be told that one of the dead suspects had done it and he could just tell Sidney that the guy who killed him was dead.

“Well,” Danny said. “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

Sam rolled her eyes.

Brian Flemming had been one of the boys who had bullied Sidney, but he wasn’t the one who Mr. Poindexter had said had actually shoved Sidney in a locker at some point before his death. Sam and Tucker picked him up from home, Jazz refrained from doing anything embarrassing like telling his friends to take care of him, and the three of them headed for the bus stop.

“You know, lycanthropy can be transmitted through a scratch; it doesn’t need to be a bite,” Tucker said, for the third time since Danny had given them the whole bobcat story.

“It was absolutely not a wolf,” Danny said.

“My dude, I’m going to be very upset if you become a were-cat. That’s Sam’s thing. You’re going to ruin the whole friend fiction.”

“Pretty sus, Danny hasn’t shown us what’s under the bandage. I’m betting on vampire bite.”

“I’m not anything supernatural, it was just a regular bobcat.”

“It could have been a were-cat. It was dark; you probably didn’t see the signs.”

“Oh, now you want me to be a were-cat?”

“Absolutely not! Do not ruin my story, dude.”

“Very well, if I start turning into a cat, I won’t tell either of you. Lips are sealed.”

“But if you’re a vampire, you have to tell us,” Sam admonished him.

“Yeah, yeah, I promise to tell you if I’m a vampire.”

Shady Acres was right next to the bus stop, and Danny noticed a few older riders get off with them.

“Hi,” Sam greeted when they walked into the front door. “We’re here to visit Brian Flemming.”

The receptionist eyed the three teenagers suspiciously, especially Danny.

“Is he expecting you?”

“Nope,” Sam said.

“Well, write your names on this slip and then sign in here.”

They had to wait a bit in the lobby, but eventually a staff member came in to escort them back to Mr. Flemming’s room. It wasn’t really what Danny expected. It was carpeted, and the bed looked like a bed and not a hospital bed. Basically, just a bedroom. Mr. Flemming was sitting in an armchair by a desk, and there was a wheelchair sitting next to it.

“Ah, you know when she said some young people had come to visit me and your names, I worried for a moment I’d forgotten the names of my own grand children,” Mr, Flemming said.

“Nope,” Sam said. “No relation.”

Mr. Flemming gave Danny a worried look, and Danny took it to be the bad vibes look he got plenty of.

“We’re students at Casper High,” Danny said. “We were hoping to ask you some questions about your time there.”

“Oh, this is some social studies project, is it?”

“Um, well, it started like that,” Tucker said. “But we found out about some stuff from that time that we wanted to look at more closely.”

“Well, I can’t promise I remember that much. It’s been an awfully long time since I was your age.”

“Well, this might have stood out, Mr. Flemming,” Sam said.

“Do you remember Sidney Poindexter?” Danny asked.

“Poindexter!” Mr. Flemming said. “Well, of course I remember Poindexter, it’s not every day a student dies at school, and not like that. Though, I have to wonder why you’ve come to talk to me, specifically.”

“We thought it was messed up how the police said it was an accident, with what actually happened,” Danny said. “We thought that someone aught to actually do something.”

“So, someone told you I used to give the poor boy a hard time,” Mr. Poindexter said.

“Did you?” Sam asked.

“I did, yes. Can’t say I’m proud of it.”

He actually did look regretful. Probably not enough, though.

“Did you shove him in that locker?”

“No,” Mr. Poindexter said. “No, I didn’t like to get that physical. A shove here or there, mostly I took his stuff and made him… Well, I can’t say I’m proud of it.”

“Do you know who did?” Sam asked.

“Not that day, no. I always wondered if it was Dylan- Dylan, oh now, what was-”

“Dylan McAfree?” Danny supplied.

“That’s it,” Mr. Poindexter said. “You have done some research, haven’t you.”

“Why did you suspect Dylan?” Sam asked.

“He’d shoved that boy in that locker a few times. I’ll admit I watched and laughed one or two of those times.”

“Did McAfree act any different after Sidney died?” Tucker asked. “Like, did he act guilty?”

“Guilty? No, and I doubt he ever did any introspection after Poindexter died. I don’t suppose you’ve talked to him yet?”

“He’s dead,” Tucker said. 

Sam elbowed him.

“Oh, she’s right, you know, don’t show your hand. If I wanted to deflect I could tell you it was him if I knew he wasn’t around to refute it.”

“Would you have told us it was him if you knew he was dead?”

“Hm, no, I don’t think my answer would have changed much.”

“Any reason to think it wasn’t McAfree?” Danny asked.

“Well, Dylan liked an audience. The locker stuff, the swirlies, he liked to have an audience. I think if he had Sidney alone he would have just roughed him up and went on his way. To be honest, even though he’s the only one I knew who liked to go through the bother of shoving that boy into that locker, I never really thought it was him. Oh, I thought to myself, what if it was, but still, it never really made sense. It happened after school, too, and that’s when Sidney was a bit off limits.”

“Why was that?” 

“First thing that boy would do after school was to go across the hall where his big brother had class, um, hmm, Clayton. It was Clayton.”

“Any idea what Sidney might have been doing, staying after school, where there weren’t any witnesses?”

Mr. Flemming shrugged. “Nothing I can think of.”

“Any reason you can think of that someone would do it if there wasn’t an audience?”

“Well,” Mr. Flemming hummed a bit. “I don’t want to speak of such things about someone who’s gone.”

“Was it that people thought Sidney was gay?” Danny asked.

Mr. Flemming shrugged and sighed.

“There were people who thought Poindexter was a bit of a joke, and there were some that seemed to think he represented something so un- Well, there were people who acted like that sort of thing was a threat. I can’t really tell you who. I ran with the people who thought he was a joke.”

“Anything else you can think of?” Sam asked.

Mr. Flemming shrugged. “What are you going to do if you find the answers you’re looking for?”

“Uh-” Danny supplied.

“I don’t think we’ve thought that far ahead,” Tucker said. 

“Well, then, good luck to you,” Mr. Flemming said. 

“Thanks for talking to us, Mr. Flemming,” Danny said. 

Outside, Danny huffed.

“Did you think he was just going to say who did it?” Sam asked.

“There was always hoping.”

“Well, we can still try that guy from the chess club, if he was friends with Sidney, he might know what was going on that day.”

“What did you think about the whole, no audience, thing?” Tucker asked.

“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I feel like McAfree is still our prime suspect.”

“Who knows, maybe we just talked to the killer,” Sam said.

“I thought he was telling the truth,” Danny said.

“Because he was acting like he was all remorseful?”

Danny shrugged.

“Wanna come over?” Tucker asked. “Mom’s making meat lover’s surprise again.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “I could go for that.”

Tucker’s parents tolerated him well enough.

“There’ll be a salad,” Tucker said.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said. “And what, should we watch a murder mystery together?”

Danny thought about it. He wanted to go out later, but it was still pretty early.

“Yeah, a movie sounds good.”

He’d been getting better at not going intangible, and he went through the whole meal without dropping his fork (the surprise was crushed pistachios). Tucker’s mom insisted on showing them an old detective show that had a funny guy with a French accent, but it took place in England. None of them called the ending, so maybe they weren’t the best to be solving Sidney’s murder. They were just the only one’s trying.

Tucker’s Mom insisted on driving him home, since apparently Tucker had told her about the whole electrocution thing. Back home, Danny waited till Jazz went to bed and then snuck out. He psyched himself up and then transformed. It didn’t take much effort at all, like it was something he’d been holding back. 

Changed into his other form, Danny flew around. Besides a ghost that he came across, the night was quiet. Amity Park was a pretty sleepy city. There wasn’t going to be much going on. A bit disappointed, Danny went out to the industrial park and tried out his strength and energy blasts on some wooden pallets. It was sort of cathartic, but also scary, since he didn’t really know how to do a ‘low’ setting and he’d sort of destroyed some of the pallets. It would be good to practice before he did something like… trying to stop crime? Danny wasn’t sure what he was going to do, especially since there wasn’t much to do in Amity Park. He’d have to practice, though, or else he was going to accidentally hurt someone, and Danny was pretty against making more ghosts.

Danny went home and made it to bed without any additional injuries and without Jazz having known he’d gone out. All in all, maybe uneventful was a good thing? Though he would have liked to have actually had something to do.

“Any reason you’re so eager to get to school early all the time?” Jazz asked.

“No particular reason,” Danny said. 

Danny went straight to Sidney’s locker and let him out.

“Oh, hey Danny, glad it was you who found me,” Sidney said.

They went and talked under the stairs.

Danny had forced that wraith to move on when he’d been in his other form. It hadn’t been like with the other ghosts. He didn’t want to force Sidney to move on, though, he wanted to help Sidney find peace by finding his killer. Except, what if he couldn’t? He wasn’t ready to give up, though. 

“Hey Sidney, would you ever want to do a poetry reading?”

“What do you mean?” Sidney asked. 

“Like, go somewhere people read their poetry out loud, and you could share yours.”

“Here? In Amity Park?” Sidney asked, like Danny had asked if he wanted to go play in traffic.

“Would you do it in New Orleans?”

“Well, that’s the point of going,” Sidney said. “Well, there’s a lot of reasons to go, but you sure bet I’m going to find my people there and we’ll share poetry and ideas and, golly, it’ll be swell.”

The bell rang.

“Better get home,” Danny said, feeling a bit heavy. Sidney was never going to do any of those things. “Can I have a hug?”

Sidney always looked shy when Danny asked, but he seemed to like them.

Danny managed to avoid Dash for the whole day, but someone in a letterman jacket shoulder checked him after third period, and someone had made a not bad drawing of Danny as a zombie getting shot in the head on his desk, which was… creative. He’d started carrying wet wipes around after the first time he’d had a trashcan dumped on him, so he tried cleaning his desk up with that, but it just smeared ink around and Danny somehow got in trouble for this, which sucked, since he was already in trouble for dropping a bunch of beakers.

“Royal Glenn has shorter visitor hours,” Sam said. “We should just go early.”

“Like now?” Tucker asked.

Sam nodded.

Danny texted Jazz, so she wouldn’t get on his case for disappearing, and they got on a bus to Amity Park’s Old Town district.

“Okay,” Tucker said. “So, hopefully this guy is super chill and has a bunch of stuff to tell us, and won’t say anything offensive.”

“Want to bet?” Sam asked.

“Nope,” Tucker said.

“Wanna get dinner in Old Town, afterwards?” Sam asked.

“Let me guess, there’s a new ‘old’ vegan place there.”

“Well it is old, The Gravy Train has vegan options now.”

“There’s no such thing as vegan gravy,” Tucker said. 

Sam rolled her eyes.

Danny thought it would be a bit early for dinner, but maybe that would mean more time to explore his ghost stuff later.

“Sure,” he said. “Just as long as we don’t do the Ghosts of Old Town tour.”

“Oh, no, thanks for reminding me, we absolutely have to do that.”

Danny got nervous. “Uh, I mean, that stuff’s for tourists. Also, dinner’s probably going to wipe me out.”

“It’ll be fun,” Sam said. “I can cover you.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” Danny said awkwardly.

“Ghost boy’s scared of the haunted houses,” Tucker said.

He was just worried that there would be actual ghosts and that he would be stuck having to deal with one and not be able to let on that something was happening. It had been hard enough talking to Melody in front of Sam and Tucker.

Royal Glenn had large old trees and well kept lawns, but even with plenty of decorations, on the inside, it was more hospital than home, like Shady Acres had been. They got a bit more scrutiny at the front desk, but they did get escorted back to a common room where Aaron Tidwell was staring rather absently at a chessboard with no one sitting across from him.

“Mr. Tidwell,” the nurse said rather loudly. “You have some visitors.”

“Hah, Jason?”

“You have some visitors from Casper High, Mr. Tidwell.”

“Oh, I graduated from there, you know.”

“Well, here they are, you let us know if you need anything.”

She looked over at them with a shrug and went off to supervise the area.

Mr. Tidwell looked at Danny.

“Is it that time already?”

“Uh, no? Um, we’re just here for a visit.”

“Oh,” he said, and then looked back at the chess board.  

“Hey, Sam, you play chess, don’t you?”

“I know how to play chess,” Sam said. 

“Great,” Tucker gestured towards the table.

Sam didn’t look happy, but she sat down across from Mr. Tidwell.

“Hi, Mr. Tidwell, my name’s Sam, and this is Tucker and Danny, mind if we sit here?”

“Oh,” he said. “I can go if you need the table.”

“No no, I wanted to play some chess with you, Mr. Tidwell?” Sam asked. 

“Hah, oh, do I know you?”

“No, but I heard you like to play chess.”

“Oh, I do, I do, well-” He looked at the board. “It would seem you go first. Did you bring a clock? They don’t have a clock here.”

“I don’t have a clock, but I’ll try to keep up with you,” Sam said. “Can we talk while we play.”

“You want to walk?”

“Talk,” Sam said louder. “We were hoping to ask you some questions today.”

She gestured for Danny and Tucker to sit down at the table.

“Oh, is this about the accident?”

“The accident?” Danny asked.

“At the quarry, I saw it happen, but the foreman had a better view of it than I did, I don’t think there’s much I can say about it.”

The quarry had been closed probably since before Danny had been born.

“Oh, no, we wanted to ask you about when you were a student at Casper High.”

“Oh, I graduated from there, you know, I didn’t think I would. Pa wanted me to go to work, but I won him over.”

“That’s great,” Sam said. She moved a horse piece, and Danny wasn’t sure if she was supposed to do that, since the pawns were in the way, but after Mr. Tidwell’s eyes narrowed in on the piece, he just made a move of his own, advancing his left most pawn by two spaces, and Danny wasn’t sure if he knew any of the rules of the game. 

“You were in the chess club, weren't you?”

“Yes, club captain, my senior year.”

Pieces were moving faster now, and Sam did not look happy. 

“We saw your picture in an old yearbook,” Sam said. “From when you were a freshman, actually.”

“Oh, that was a year, wasn't it.”

“Because of Sidney?” Sam asked.

“Oh, you know about Sid?”

“He’s actually why we’re here,” Sam said. “Danny had some questions for you.”

She was staring at the board, and Danny thought she wanted to stop talking and focus on not loosing to an octogenarian.

“I found out about how Sidney died,” Danny said. “I thought it was awful that they never really treated his death as a murder. We were hoping that if we talked to people who knew him, we might be able to piece something together.”

“Oh, poor Sid. He always wanted to get out of this town. Maybe I should have gone out there for him. He- he wanted to go-”

“To New Orleans,” Danny supplied.

“New Orleans,” Mr. Tidwell said. “That’s right, Sid wanted to go to New Orleans. He wanted to be a poet.”

“He liked science, too, right?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Tidwell said. “Oh, Sid. He was such a swell guy. Tragic how he died. I always felt awful.”

“What did you feel awful about?” Danny asked.

“Oh, well- Oh, my dear, I think that’s check mate.”

Sam sighed in defeat, and Mr. Tidwell started resetting the board.

“What were we talking about?”

“You said you felt awful?”

“Oh, that soup, I told them okra didn’t agree with me, but did they listen? Oh, I didn’t sleep a bit.”

“No, Mr. Tidwell, we were talking about Sidney,” Danny said.

“Oh, Sid, you know about Sid?”

Danny shared a look with Tucker. Tucker elbowed Sam to start a new game.

“We were talking about how Sidney died.”

“The locker,” Mr. Tidwell said. “You know I always hated walking by that thing. I found him, you know.”

“That must have been awful,” Sam said.

“How did you find him?” Danny asked.

“Oh, Sid was usually late to chess club. He always went to hang out with… with…”

“With Clayton?”

“His brother, Clayton, yes. Always with Clayton after school, until the coast was clear and he could come to chess club alright. But he didn’t show up that day.”

“Did you see him that Friday?” Danny asked.

“Which Friday?”

“The Friday he got shoved in the locker, the Friday he died,” Danny said, hoping this wasn’t a hopeless conversation. Mr Tidwell was more focused on the chess board.

“Oh, that was horrible, what happened to him,” Mr. Tidwell said. 

“Did you see him that day?”

“Yes, oh, I did, I always thought I must have been the last person to see him alive.”

“What do you mean?” Danny asked.

“We stayed late, to finish a game, it was just us there. I wished I’d walked him home. He lived so close to the school. Oh, I felt terrible. We were so close, I always missed him so. He was a good kid, a good friend. Oh, we used to talk forever over a game. I didn’t learn much my first year, we were always chatting over the board. But he was a good player. He wanted to be a poet you know. Oh, but he wanted to be all sorts of things. Probably could have done anything if he didn’t need any brawn to do it.”

“Who else might have been in the school that afternoon, after you left Sidney?”

“I left Sidney?”

“The Friday he died,” Danny said. 

“Oh, yes, that was so terrible.”

Danny sighed.

“Mr. Tidwell, did you ever suspect anyone of killing Sidney?”

“Oh, well, no one in particular, but why would you be asking about that?”

“Because no one ever did, and Sidney deserves justice!”

Sam put a hand on his arm and Danny took a deep breath.

“Did anything happen between you and Sidney the day he died?” Sam asked.

“Oh,” Mr. Tidwell said. “Well, we stayed late, you know, talking. We could talk forever. Kids these days, you know, they’re all on their phones but not to talk. Sid and I could just talk and talk about anything really.”

“Did anything happen when you were done talking?” Sam asked.

“Oh, I- I ran off. It wasn’t anything. Oh, and that’s another check mate, dear. You don’t pay enough attention to your rooks, you know.”

“You ran off? Like you were upset about something?” Danny asked.

“Well, not upset, not at Sidney, of course. Oh, Sidney was a swell guy. He really was.”

“Did something happen between you and Sidney?” Sam asked, begrudgingly resetting the board.

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t run off like that, I should have stayed. I should have walked him home. Maybe then…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Tidwell,” Tucker said. 

“I was a bit of a coward,” he said. “I always was. Sidney was so brave, you know, he was going to leave this town and live the life he wanted. I wanted to go to college, I wanted to-”

“It’s not too late,” Danny said. “You can still tell us what happened.”

“He took my hand,” Mr. Tidwell said. “He took my hand, and he- well, he asked me if I’d leave Amity Park with him. He said he wanted to travel the world with me. Wouldn’t that have been the life? But- I couldn’t - I pulled away, I ran away. I knew he was sweet on me. I’d known for a while. I just- I couldn’t- So I ran away. That would have been the life.”

“Did anything happen when you ran away? Did you pass anyone in the hall?” Danny asked.

“Oh, I wasn’t paying attention. Sidney was calling after me, and… I should have stayed.”

“It wasn’t your fault people couldn’t leave you to be yourself back then,” Sam said. 

“We were happy together, my sweet Eleanore. I always felt guilty for wondering what if- what if I’d stayed, and what if I’d left Amity Park with Sidney?”

“That would have been something,” Danny said, feeling a bit watery eyed.

He looked Danny right in the eyes. “You’ll tell him I’m sorry, won’t you?”

This time it was Danny who felt nailed to the spot.

“I- yeah, I’ll tell him that.”

Tucker cleared his throat. “Mr. Tidwell, you said you found the body,” he said. “That must have been awful, but did you notice anything out of place?”

“There wasn’t any room in my head for any of that when I saw. Oh, my poor Sid, it must have been so awful.”

Sam looked at Danny, looking a bit guilty. They hadn’t really found anything about Sidney’s death, and all they’d done was make an old man remember the tragic death of someone he’d cared about. 

“Thank you for telling us that, Mr. Tidwell,” Danny said. “Sidney sounds like he was a great guy.”

“He was,” Mr. Tidwell said. “He really was.” He sighed. “Perhaps, young lady, you and I could play another game, and you all can tell me about what the young folk are getting up to these days.”

Besides murder investigations?

They talked with Mr. Tidwell, and after a bit he seemed to forget why they’d originally sat down with him. Eventually he told them he was tired and an orderly wheeled him out of the room. 

Mr. Tidwell looked at Danny as he was being wheeled away. “I don’t think I’m quite ready yet.”

Before they could leave, a woman with a walker came up to their table.

“Oh, excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you earlier. You were asking about Sidney Poindexter?”

“Uh, yeah,” Sam said. “Did you know him?”

The woman sighed and looked a bit sad.

“We were lab partners my freshman year. Lucky me, I helped him with French and he helped me with Biology. He was a sweet boy.”

“It’s nice to know there were people who appreciated him,” Sam said.

“Well, I didn’t do him any good. I never did anything to help him. I used to worry about injuring his pride.”

“Was he very proud?” Sam asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. He would try to put a brave face on things, even when they were bad. His brother was always telling him to ‘toughen up.’”

“Clayton?”

“It was hard for Sidney to have a brother like that, someone who seemed the polar opposite of him, who so many people in the school looked up to.”

“We heard Clayton protected Sidney,” Danny said.

“Oh,” she looked at him like she hadn’t really seen him before. “Well, I don’t expect anyone ever really bothered him when Clayton was around, but Clayton wasn’t about to go and fight any of Sidney’s battles. He was pretty hard on the boy. I used to think it was unfair.”

“Unfair?” Tucker asked.

“He was sweet. I didn’t see why he should have to lose that just to get by.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve been waiting all these years to tell someone who killed him,” Sam said.

“I’m afraid not, but I hope you do find something. The least the world can do for him is to give him a bit of justice.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “We’ll try.”

They didn’t exactly have a bunch of other leads at that point, though.

“I don’t suppose you three know how to play rummy,” she asked.

“My gran gran taught me well,” Tucker said and introduced the three of them.

“Call me Adelaide,” she told them.

It was a while before they left.

Chapter Text

“That, was not gravy,” Tucker said. 

“You don’t get to say anything, because you refused to try any. It tasted fine, back me up, Danny.”

“It tasted okay,” Danny said.

“See?”

“But it didn’t taste like gravy.”

Sam rolled her eyes.

“Should we find something to do?” Tucker asked. “We want to do this after dark, right?”

“Well,” Sam said. “It’s the middle of the week, and we haven’t done any homework today.”

“That’s not what I had in mind.”

“We could just do one of the tours now,” Danny said. 

“Boo,” Tucker said. “Ghosts come out at night.”

“Gotta agree with Tucker on this one,” Sam said. “Which means Tucker agrees that we’re going to go do some homework till it gets dark.”

“Aw man.”

The thing was, that there were more ghosts in Old Town. He’d had three times now, where he’d had that shiver and had to hide his breath fogging up. The ghosts kept looking at him, but Danny made sure not to make eye contact with any of them. None of them had approached him, yet. There were even ghosts in the old library.

“Hey now, were you looking at me?”

Danny quickly looked down at his worksheet.

“You were! You were looking at me. Hey, come on now. Give me another gander.”

He looked only a bit older than Danny, but he also definitely looked like he fit in in Old Town. The ghost reached out and poked Danny in the shoulder and Danny stiffened at the pins and needles.

“Hey, now, I can poke ya, too. Now come on, give me another gander.”

“Uh, bathroom,” Danny said suddenly, getting up from his chair.

In the back of the library, Danny said quietly, “Dude, not in front of other people.”

“Oh, but you can see me, and you’re alive?” The older boy looked delighted.

“For the most part,” Danny said. “You, um, you know you’re dead?”

“Well, what else would I be?” He didn’t seem bothered by it.

Danny shrugged. “All the ghosts I’ve met didn’t really seem to get the memo.”

The ghost shrugged. “The ones round here did. Not much of a secret.”

His parents had tried to set up shop in Old Town because it had higher levels of ambient ectoplasm, but town hall had absolutely refused them any permits to build anything in the historic district. Did ectoplasm have something to do with how cogent ghosts were?

“So, um, did you need help moving on, or something?”

“Now why would I want to go and do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, why’d you come start poking me in the library?”

“Uh, you’re alive and you were lookin at me; you’re the most interesting thing come through this town since the automobile.”

“Well, I’m out with my friends, and I’m doing my homework, so, unless you want me to do a little dance or something, I’m afraid I can’t offer you much in the way of entertainment.”

“Aw, I’ve seen how y’all dance these days, I could teach you a thing or two.”

He gave Danny a smile that had him blushing a little bit.

“I’m going to go do my homework.”

“Aw, well, I can wait.”

Wait for what?

Danny stopped in his tracks on the way back to the table they’d been working at, because Tucker was there, staring at him.

“Uh, dude?”

“Practicing for a play,” Danny said.

“You’re practicing for a play?”

“Yes.”

“You joined drama club?”

“I’m thinking of trying out.”

“What’s the play called?”

“Tuck.”

“Danny.”

“I’ve got nothing.”

“Is the library actually haunted?”

“Oh, everything in Old Town is haunted apparently.”

“Dude.”

“Or that’s what my parents say, anyway.”

Laughter from the ghost boy.

“Oh my god. Come on dude.”

“Don’t tell Sam.”

“Don’t tell Sam, what?”

“Anything about the last two minutes?”

“Danny.”

“Tuck.”

“Why can’t you just tell me what’s really going on?”

Because he didn’t want to explain why he could see ghosts. Maybe because a lot of it was sad, and they’d worry about him. He had it handled.

“If it helps, no one knows what’s really going on. Not even me.”

“Then let’s figure it out.”

“We should go back to Sam before she thinks we’re making out or something.”

“You should be so lucky.”

Danny rolled his eyes.

“Were you two making out or something? The bathroom’s literally on the other side of the building,” Sam said when they got back.

“Nope,” Tucker said. “No smooches when there’s secrets between us.”

Danny glared at Tucker.

“Ooh, was Danny being a cryptid again?”

Tucker shook his head. “Afraid I can’t say,” he said.

“Well, no smooches for you, either.”

Danny was pretty sure that none of them had ever kissed anyone. They managed to finish their homework around the time it was getting pretty dark.

“Okay,” Tucker said. “Danny, I don’t care what secrets you’re keeping, you have to tell us if a ghost’s about to kill us.”

“I mean, if they’re just coming for you, Tuck, I’ll probably keep my mouth shut.”

Tucker acted wounded.

Danny felt a little guilty when Sam paid for him, since he did have the cash for it, but he hadn’t wanted to go, and Sam had said she’d pay, so there it was.

The tour was, in fact, very haunted, mostly with ghosts that thought it was funny. 

They’d just gone into the old courthouse when Danny let out a shriek. That damned ghost from the library had snuck up on him and grabbed him by the short ribs. 

Everyone was looking at him. The ghost was laughing uproariously. 

“Uh, thought I saw a mouse,” he said, very stupidly.

“Dude, is there a horribly grotesque ghost in here?” Tucker muttered next to him.

“The most grotesque you could imagine,” Danny said, eyeing the asshole that had startled him. He just laughed harder.

The tour ended without much more hullabaloo. They learned a bit of history, Tucker swore he saw a ghost, where Danny was certain there hadn't been one, and they passed up the gift shop at the end.

After the tour, things did not go so well. They were walking back to the bus stop when-

“Was Freaky Fenton doing a ghost tour?” Dash asked loudly. He was with Dale and Kwan. “I thought that was you earlier. Were you giving the ghosts lessons on how to be creepy?”

“Piss off Dash,” Sam said. 

The three boys were walking towards them with long strides. 

“Hey, come on, we’re not even at school, man,” Tucker said.

“Exactly! Why do I have to see this guy’s face when I’m not even at school.”

“You could see a lot less of it if you just walked away,” Sam said. 

Dash walked right up to Danny and threw an arm around his shoulders. He liked to make a show of grabbing Danny, since he’d been scared to touch him when they’d been younger.

“Fenton doesn’t scare me, though. You know, there’s something here that would probably spook even this creep.”

“Dash, let go of him,” Sam said.

“Or what?” He looked between Sam and Tucker and grinned at his friends. “These two are getting pretty annoying, aren't they?” 

“Hey,” Danny said, his skin crawling worse than any ghost had ever managed. “It’s okay, guys, let’s just see whatever scary thing he’s got.”

“Danny,” Tucker said, nervously.

“It’s fine,” Danny said.

Dash smirked down at him. “Come on now, let’s see how you handle something really scary.” His menacing arm around Danny’s shoulders, he started dragging Danny off the sidewalk and across the dirt plot that housed the old barn that was part of some historic thing Danny had forgotten two field trips ago. 

Danny had super powers. He was pretty sure he could punt Dash as well as Dash could punt a football. Except, he couldn’t do that without turning into that other thing. Besides, he wasn’t going to maim Dash just because he was a pain in the ass. Dash hadn’t hurt him yet, and maybe he was too caught up in the theatrics of whatever stunt he was pulling to bother. As long as they didn’t do anything to Sam and Tucker, he could just keep his cool.

“So, what’s so scary?” Danny asked.

“You’ll see,” Dash said. 

“You don’t want to build the suspense?” Danny asked.

Dash’s grip on his shoulder tightened painfully. “Alright Fenton, imagine this, two hundred years ago, the guy who owned this place had two sons. One of them was going to inherit, the other one wasn’t. So what does the guy getting left out do? On the night their father died, he snuck into his brother’s room with an axe, and cut him to bits! Buried him somewhere in this field. When his mom realized what he’d done, she tricked him, right… here.

“The field behind the barn.”

“Check it out, Fenton, what do you think that is?”

“Uh…” It was dark out, and there were no lights behind the barn. There was just some small stone structure in the field.

“It’s a well, stupid. So what do you think his mom did to her murderer son?”

“What?” Danny asked as they got closer and closer to the stone structure.

“She told him the crank broke on the well, and he needed to fix it. Except when he came over to check it out, she shoved him in. Took him forever to die down there, in the dark, with no way out. His ghost still haunts the thing, ready to drag down people who get too close so he can hack them to bits with his axe.”

“Wow, Dash, A-plus creative writing, you should write that one down for Mr. Lancer.”

“We’ll see how scared you are when you climb down there,” Dash said.

“Fuck, no,” Sam said. “Are you trying to kill him?”

“Aw, come on,” Dash said, grabbing Danny’s still bandaged arm and waving it about. “I’m sure he’s dying to try again.”

“What did you fucking say?!”

“Dale, she’s so annoying!”

Danny heard a scuffle.

“Hey, hey, yeah, there’s a rope, I’ll- I’ll climb down.”

“Danny, no-” Tucker said.

“Hey, boys, come on,” Dash said. “I’m doing something here, can we get some quiet?”

“Dash, come on, I’ll get in there, okay? I’m the creep right? Why are you messing with them?”

Danny looked back where Dale had Sam in a headlock and Kwan had a hand over Tucker’s mouth. 

“Okay, then. Go on, creep, let’s see how far down you can climb before you fall.”

Danny looked back at the well. He couldn’t see how far down it went. He couldn’t even really see if the rope was anything approaching sturdy. Danny reached out and grabbed on. The rope felt scratchy and weathered. 

“Get in, freak.”

He never thought he’d be grateful for being made to climb a rope in PE. One leg went over the ledge, and then the other and he wrapped both legs around the rope to stop himself from sliding down and getting massive rope burn on his hands.

He looked back at Dash. 

“Okay, Dash, I’m in the well. I, uh, sure hope that ghost doesn’t get me.”

“Start climbing down,” Dash said. “Or are you scared?”

With the unknowable darkness below him and a ratty rope in his hands, yeah, he was a bit scared. He didn’t think he could hold on for long.

“Come on, Dash,” Danny said. Dash didn’t really want him dead this bad, did he?

He looked at Dash, just barely making out his eyes as little glints on his silhouette, “That’s enough, you had your laugh.” He stared into Dash’s soul.

Dash flinched but recovered quickly. “Go drown, you freak,” he spat out. He reached out, and there was a thunk of some mechanical release, and then Danny felt weightless for a moment. He didn’t want to die again.

“Danny!” Sam choked out a scream.

Both his own scream and his free fall were cut short with a thud not much later.

Dash was now howling with laughter.

Sam and Tucker were yelling.

Danny rubbed at his back and shoulder, and his ankle was throbbing. He looked up. He thought he’d probably fallen about seven feet.

“It’s- it’s boarded up you dweebs,” Dash said between laughs.

“Jesus, Dash,” Kwan said, laughing nervously. “For a moment even I thought you’d killed him.”

“You fucking asshole!” Sam said. 

Surprise, surprise, the only ghost in the well was Danny.

Nope, not thinking about that.

“You guys, why didn’t we get that on camera?” Dale asked.

For a moment he’d been sure he was going to die. Again. Danny was shaking. 

“Let’s get him on camera now,” Dash said.

Danny was petty. He transformed and turned invisible. A light appeared above.

“What was that? Hey, where’d he go?”

Danny flew up and out of the well.

“What do you mean, ‘where’d he go?’”

Sam and Tucker had both been tossed to the ground and Dale and Kwan were approaching the well, where Dash had his phone out, pointing the light into it. 

He could turn invisible when he was normal, so could he turn back to normal and stay invisible, without the flash of light?

Sam and Tucker were getting up. 

“Danny?” Sam croaked out.

Nothing for it but to try it; he transformed. No one turned to look, so he assumed there hadn’t been a flash of light. Dash was making plenty of noise at the well. 

“Guys, don’t say anything,” Danny said quietly.

Both Sam and Tucker turned to look at him in shock. Danny held his finger up to his lips and gestured with his head that they should get out of there.

“This isn’t funny Fenton, stop hiding,” Dash said.

“There’s nowhere to hide down there Dash,” Kwan said.

“Did he fall through?”

They hurried back around the barn.

“Danny, what the fuck?” Sam asked. 

“Uh-”

“Dude, how did you do that?”

“Well-”

“Yes, you were in a well, and then you weren’t.”

“What’s wrong with your voice?” Danny asked.

“It’s just scratchy. What happened, Danny?"

“Okay, so, I realized Dash was about to, you know, with the rope and all, so I leapt to the side and held onto the wall. Dash was too busy laughing about it to notice and I just climbed out and hid on the other side. It was dark, you know? He didn’t see me, so I just snuck around while they were freaking out.”

“You leapt and climbed? You? Mr. Noodle arms?”

“Uh, hysterical strength?”

They got back to the street.

“Why are you limping?” Sam asked.

“Um, gopher hole, or something? When I was running around?”

“And I heard a thud, I definitely heard you fall and hit something,” Tucker said.

“Oh, I think I dislodged a rock or something? On the side of the well?

“Is that a question?”

“Um, no.”

“Okay, dude, come on. Did a ghost friend help you out of there?”

Danny took a deep breath in and out.

“That’s more believable than that I had a moderate show of strength?”

“And agility, and reaction time,” Sam said.

“Hey.”

“Are you okay?” Tucker asked.

“Uh, yeah, I just rolled my ankle.”

“Well, stop then,” Sam said. “Tuck and I will be your crutches.”

“You guys don’t have- wait, did you guys get hurt?”

Sam got on one side and wrapped her arms around his back, and Tucker got on the other side.

“Just my pride,” Sam said, still a little raspy. 

They started hobbling to the bus stop, Danny feeling bad that they had to touch him.

“Kwan probably gave me a staff infection, or something,” Tucker said. “But dude, I can’t believe you climbed in there. You didn’t know it was boarded up. You could have really- dude, you could have died, for all you knew.”

“Well, I didn’t. Besides, what was I supposed to do? They were going to hurt you guys.”

“Oh, yeah, a wedgie is totally worse than losing my best friend,” Tucker said.

“Guys, it’s alright, nothing happened.”

“We’re literally investigating the murder of a kid who got bullied to death and you’re letting Dash stuff you in a well.”

“Dash isn’t going to kill me,” Danny said. 

“Dude.”

Danny bit down a sharp reply. He’d handled the situation. He’d gotten out fine. He even managed to distract the three assholes so much that they were able to get away clean.

He didn’t want them worrying about him.

“Come on,” Sam said. “Let’s get you home.”

He could have flown home.

“You guys don’t really have to take me home, I live pretty close to the blue line.”

“Dude, I’m about to hack your phone and change all of your ringtones to backstreet boys.”

“Or you could escort me home like it’s the fifties and we just went on our first date.”

“No smooches, though,” Tucker reminded him. “Not till you tell us what’s really up.”

“Tuck, I’m starting to think you really want to kiss me goodnight,” Danny said.

“Well, you won’t find out until you fess up, dude.”

They got on the orange line and navigated their way to Fentonworks.

“Should we walk him inside?” Tucker asked. “It would be super embarrassing if a were-rat bit you on your doorstep and then I had to change my whole story to give you a ratsona. I mean, it would already be bad enough if it turns out it really was a were-cat that scratched you.”

“I think I’ll survive,” Danny said. 

“Alright, you two going to be online?” Sam asked.

Danny was going to say no, so he could sneak out, but it was already a bit late, and he’d been staying up late for a while now, for ghost stuff. A night of gaming and then going to bed before Jazz, even, actually sounded nice.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “That should be fun.”

He went inside and Jazz immediately zeroed in on his ankle.

“What happened?!”

“Okay, first of all, I’m not bleeding out this time.”

“Danny.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in and out.

“I just rolled my ankle,” Danny said. “If you think about it, the severity of my injuries has steadily been going down.”

She looked at him, worried.

“No, it wasn’t nerve damage that caused me to stumble or something, I stepped in a gopher hole in a field in Old Town. I’ll, um, ice it, or something.”

“You’re taking a first aid class,” Jazz said.

“Am I supposed to use heat?” Danny asked.

“No, ice is right,” Jazz said. “And you wrap it, and you elevate it, and you get crutches.”

“I do not need crutches, or a first aid class.”

“Third injury in two weeks.”

“It’s been a bit more than two weeks,” Danny said.

“Danny, I know I can’t stop you from getting hurt all the time, but at least I can make sure you know what to do when something happens. Besides, you never know when you’ll need to help someone else. Go sit down on the couch.”

“Actually, I’m going to go play Doomed with Sam and Tuck.”

“Ankle first, or I’ll doom you.”

Danny rolled his eyes, but he sat down. 

“Throw your leg up over the back of the couch,” Jazz said.

“That seems like a bit much elevation.”

“It’ll make it easier for me,” she said, going to get supplies.

Danny wound up laying flat on the couch with his leg sticking up and hooking over the top of the back cushion.

She came back a bit later with an ice pack, an ace bandage, and crutches that were old enough the foam padding was falling apart. Inspecting his ankle, she complained, “Gross, when was the last time you washed your feet?”

“I took a shower this morning,” Danny protested.

“Did you actually wash them?”

“The soapy water runs off over them,” Danny said. “They practically wash themselves.”

“Boys are so gross,” Jazz said. 

“Girls are grosser,” Danny said. 

Jazz was not terribly gentle wrapping his ankle.

“What did you three get up to?”

Danny shrugged. “Ghost tour in Old Town. Sam wanted to do it.”

“Homework?”

“Did it at the Old Town library. No, I don’t need you to check over it.”

Jazz secured the bandage and shoved the ice pack under his ankle when she was done.

“Okay, Sam and Tucker walked you home?”

Danny nodded.

“Then they won’t be home for a bit to play Doomed. Ice that for a bit before you go upstairs. Do not try to use the crutches on the stairs, just use the rail for support.”

“Yeah, okay,” Danny said. 

He thought she would go do her own thing, but she sat down in Dad’s armchair. Awkward conversation, incoming.

“So what’s new with you?” Danny asked.

“What?” Jazz asked.

“You’re about to interrogate me, so I’m doing a preemptive strike.”

She looked like she was going to say something about that, but she deflated a bit. “I’ve been looking into conflict theory and male insecurities.”

“Wait, is this about… nope, never mind. Okay, without discussing me at all, what’s your pet project this year?”

“Oh, well right now Ms. Thornberry is going to have her tenth graders do reports on historical figures and I’ve been helping her with the list of options.”

“That doesn’t sound hard.”

“Well, it’s important that they’re interesting, that they fit in the period and region for the curriculum, that there’s good information out there, and that someone isn’t going to spark a heated debate.”

“Like Sam did last year about Churchill?”

“I didn’t hear about that one, but probably, yes.”

Apparently, there were a bunch of historical ghosts in Old Town. Maybe that could be a project never.

“How have you been?” Jazz asked.

“You know, literally no time has passed since the last time you asked me that question,” Danny said.

“You were upset, the other night, when you asked Mom about taking a trip. Do you want to talk about that?”

“Okay, if anyone was upset that night, it was you,” Danny said.

“You’re deflecting,” Jazz said.

“And you’re treating me like I’m your patient instead of your brother.”

“Mom and Dad won’t get you help.”

“Why are you so convinced that there’s something wrong with me?”

“You’ve been moody.”

“Being annoyed with my intrusive sister isn’t being moody.”

“Withdrawn.”

“I’ve hung out with Sam and Tuck a bunch recently.”

“I’m glad,” Jazz said. “You hardly did over the summer. Let’s see, you’ve been on edge.”

“Avoiding you.”

“Your Mom and Dad haven’t been there for you.”

“They’re busy and I'm not a baby.”

“You take risks with your safety.”

“Not really,” Danny mumbled.

“You said people around you want you dead.”

“Can you just forget about that one? Or, like, all of this?”

“And you’ve been hiding some pretty serious bullying.”

“There’s no point in saying something when no one’s really going to do anything.”

“Even if that were true, which it isn’t, there are still ways people can help you that doesn’t involve… beating Dash Baxter with the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™.”

“Please don’t do that.”

“It’s not option A.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the one who needs therapy.”

“Stop deflecting.”

“You’re deflecting.”

Danny’s phone buzzed. 

“Tucker’s online.”

“Be careful on the stairs.”

“Yeah yeah,” Danny said getting up.

“You know, I thought you were dead,” Jazz said. 

Danny paused at the foot of the stairs. “Uh, yeah, you said.” 

“Danny, I- You were probably right that I might need some therapy. I’ve been really upset. I- Gosh, you’re never going to let me live this down, but- for a little bit I thought you were a ghost.  After the accident, I could have sworn- Anyway, obviously, ghosts don’t exist, but I was spooked, okay? So, I’m just saying, it would be nice if you could be more careful.”

Danny was so lucky Jazz didn’t believe in ghosts.

“What would you do if I was a ghost?” Danny asked.

Jazz laughed. “Probably try to selfishly keep you here.”

He wanted to tell her, for some reason.

“You think that would be selfish?”

“If you needed to move on…”

“Maybe I want to stay here, too,” Danny said. “Is that why you were all about me looking forward to things?”

Jazz blushed crimson. “It’s still good to look forward to things, even if… you’re still alive.”

“You know I’d haunt you really bad if I were a ghost, right? Slamming doors, cold breezes, flickering lights, appearing just out of your vision. I’d do it all. As long as Mom and Dad weren’t home.”

“I’m glad to know you’d torment me even in death,” Jazz said. “Let’s just keep you breathing.”

“Most of the time, at least,” Danny said.

“Try all of the time.”

“No promises,” Danny said, hopping up the stairs.

Tucker was in the waiting room when Danny logged in. Then Sam texted to say that her parents were being impossible and that she wouldn’t be gaming. 

‘Mob stuff?’ Tucker asked.

‘Worse’ Sam texted, but didn’t elaborate. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

Danny and Tucker played online for a while until Danny said he was getting tired. He had been tired of acting like everything was okay for Sam and Tucker and Jazz. He laid down on his bed and stared at the stars for a while. 

He wanted to tell someone what was going on, but he couldn’t tell anyone that he’d… that he’d died, or something. Died and came back different, a living ghost. He couldn’t tell anyone that. How could he explain why he could see ghosts, why he was responsible for helping them move on. 

How could he help Sidney, though, if he couldn’t solve his murder? He was worried that they were at a dead end. He didn’t want to force Sidney to move on. He didn’t want to take that choice from him, but Sidney was reliving his death every day.

It felt wrong, and it probably was wrong, but Danny opened up Sidney’s journal and started flipping through it, starting from the back. It wasn’t just poetry. There were journal entries, notes for future projects, reminders, and phone numbers. Danny focused on the journal entries. 

Sidney talked about Mr. Tidwell, though he never outright said what he was feeling. He talked about getting bullied, but never named any names. He talked about disappointing his father and about how hard it was to live up to Clayton’s example. Ms. Adelaide had been right about Sidney’s brother being hard on him, and there were plenty of examples of Sidney feeling bad for not being man enough for Clayton’s liking. Clayton had tolerated Sidney hanging by his side at the end of the day until the school cleared out, but he’d made it clear that he thought Sidney was a coward. He didn’t like how Sidney looked. He didn’t like how Sidney talked. He didn’t like that Sidney didn’t fight back. He didn’t like that his mom made him go look for Sidney when he was late getting home.

Besides a ‘woopin’ for accidentally tearing the upholstery in his dad’s Cadillac, there wasn’t anything in there to suggest that Sidney was getting beaten up regularly at home, but it still hardly felt like home was any sort of respite, unless Sidney and his mom were home alone with one another. Sidney never had anything bad to say about her. That was something, at least. 

Besides Mr. Tidwell, there wasn’t anyone in there that stood out as someone to try to talk to. In the end, the journal felt like a bust, and Danny felt bad for reading it when he was going to be talking to Sidney the next day. 

He thought about the other ghosts he’d helped. Melody hadn’t needed anything related to her death, but she hadn’t been murdered, it was just a freak accident. Sidney had been murdered. He needed justice, right?

“Let me out, oh please let me out. I can’t breathe. My asthma, I can’t breathe. You don’t understand. It wasn’t like that. Please come back. I can’t breathe.”

“Hey Sidney, it’s just me. You’re okay.”

He pulled Sidney out.

“Danny?”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Sidney, come on, school day’s almost over, let’s just go sit under the stairs.”

“Oh, yeah, hey Danny, thanks for getting me out of there, you’re so swell.”

They made their way beneath the stairwell, and sat down. 

“Sidney, I’ve got to apologize to you.”

“What? You haven’t done nothin wrong to me.”

“I- well, I overheard you and Aaron earlier; I shouldn’t have been nosy.”

“You- you overheard that? Oh, Danny, that wasn’t- you don’t understand, it wasn’t what it looked like.”

“It’s okay, Sidney,” Danny said. “It’s okay, I’d never be upset with you for something like that.”

Danny had had a thought, the night before, that maybe Sid wasn’t waiting for his killer to be brought to justice.

“I like boys, too,” Danny said. “It’s okay.”

“Danny, be careful, just sayin something like that out loud.”

“It’s okay, it’s just us here,” Danny said. “But listen, I talked to Aaron. He wanted you to know that he was just scared. He wished he’d stayed. He thought it would have been swell to travel with you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, and then he felt it, that feeling in his chest. He got ready to say good bye.

“So you don’t have to worry about a thing,” Danny said.

“Oh,” Sidney said. “Well, Clayton’s probably still going to be pretty sore with me about it.”

The feeling in his chest died.

They’d stayed late after chess club. Sidney’s mom had sent Clayton to find him.

“What? Your brother heard?”

“Yeah, I tried to fib, and tell him it wasn’t like that, but he didn’t believe me. I just hope he doesn’t tell Pa.”

Danny looked at Sidney aghast, his heart pounding in his chest. “Sidney, did Clayton put you in the locker?”

“Aw,” Sidney looked uncomfortable. “He didn’t mean it. He would have come back for me. He’s probably lookin for me right now. He’s just worried, you know. He doesn’t want me to get in trouble for it. He said the locker was the least I’d have to worry about if I was like that around other people. He said, people like that, they can get killed or sent to prison.”

“You did get… Sidney, he…” He couldn’t say it, so he just settled on, “Clayton hurt you.”

“Aw, he didn’t rough me up, really.  He’s just worried. I’ll talk to him. I’ll convince him it wasn’t like that.”

“Sidney.” What should he do? “You didn’t deserve that. Not at all. He- he shouldn’t have done that. Sidney, he- Don’t you want to get him back?”

“What for?”

“For hurting you, for putting you in a locker and leaving you there, you couldn’t breathe, you were scared, you- your asthma, Sidney, you were so upset when I pulled you out of there.”

“He didn’t mean it,” Sidney said.

“He still did it.”

Sidney didn’t say anything.

“Sidney, if someone… If someone punched you, and you fell and cracked your head open, and you died. What would you want to happen to the person who killed you.”

“That’s an odd question.” Sidney shuddered and flickered.

“I need to know.”

“They didn’t mean to k-kill me?”

“They were trying to hurt you.”

“Well, I’d hope they regret it for the rest of their life.”

“That’s it?”

“Seems pretty heavy to me,” Sidney said.

“But he killed you.”

Sidney flinched and turned staticky for a moment.

“Most people don’t die getting punched. It sounds like a freak accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident that he hurt you.”

“Danny, I don’t want to talk about people killin’ me!”

The bell rang.

“End of the day, Sidney,” Danny said. “You should go home.”

Sidney looked confused.

“Weren’t we just- that was after school. Clayton came for me after school. I don’t- How long was I in that locker for?”

“Sidney-”

Sidney had vanished. 

Danny stayed under the stairs until everyone was in class and then he left campus.

Jazz was pretty sure that, with some time and effort, she could fix whatever made Dash Baxter enjoy tormenting her brother. Danny shouldn’t have to wait that long, though. In an ideal world, Dash’s behavior would be handled by the administration and his parents, and then he’d be kept away from Danny while a professional worked through his issues. Jazz had checked, though. Dash had actually been sent to the office a few times in the few weeks since he’d started high school. Each of those times, the administration had swept it under the rug. Who knew how many times that had happened in junior high. Kyle had been right, she supposed. So she didn’t feel like waiting for an ideal world solution.

She’d done her research. Dale had been last year’s star quarterback. Now, in his senior year, he was sitting on the bench while Baxter had taken his spot. Baxter had swept in and seemed to have rapidly captured the whole social order. Dale, like Baxter, had a history of bullying and violence that he never suffered too many consequences for.

“Hey there, you’re Dale, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Dale said. He looked around, like he was nervous for some reason.

“I watched you play last year,” Jazz said. “That pass during the game with Union High was a clutch save.”

Spike was on the marching band, and he knew enough about the game to give her some talking points.

“Ah, that was nothing,” Dale said, looking a bit more relaxed now. “You must have missed the game against Fullton.”

“You’re such a good quarterback, it’s just a shame.”

“What is?”

“That Baxter came along your Senior year. If he’d gone to any other school you’d still be the star. It just doesn’t seem fair that they put him on the varsity team when he’s just a freshman.”

He visibly tensed up and looked around when Baxter came up.

“Aw, you know how it is.”

“And now all these recruiters only have eyes for Baxter; it’s like he’s stealing your chance.”

“I’ll, you know, I’ll be fine. They’ll still see me.”

“He’s taking all your time on the field. What are they going to see? That’s what I mean by it’s not fair. You should have your chance to show them what you can do, but they let him cut to the front of the line.”

“Yeah, but it is what it is,” Dale said. “You know, I told coach he should put me in more.”

“And all he cared about is that kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t give up. We want to see you out there, still. Maybe things will turn around after your team retreat.”

“Oh, it’s not a retreat, it’s high altitude training.”

Jazz doubted a weekend in the mountains was going to accomplish anything notable before a game that would be played a week later.

“But, what do you mean, things could turn around?”

Jazz shrugged. “A lot can happen during training. All of you in the mountains. Kids like Baxter are too cocky, they never had to really work for anything. I could see him not taking things seriously, coming back with some injury that’d keep him on the bench for a season.”

“Hah, here’s hoping.”

“Things don’t just get handed to you, though, do they? You’ve had to work hard to get what you want.”

“Yeah, yeah I have.”

She looked at her watch “Anyway,” Jazz said. “I hope to see you on the field.”

The bell rang telling them snack period was over.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

“Kaylee,” Jazz said, over her shoulder as she walked away. 

Over lunch she found Kwan, a Sophomore who had made varsity that year. He seemed, on the surface level, to be a bit of an easy guy to like. He cared about his friends. He laughed easily and was outgoing. He was an extrovert. Unfortunately, he was also the sort of guy who just went along with whatever the coolest guy in the room wanted. Jazz, saw insecurity. Maybe if he hadn’t helped block Danny’s path when he’d been trying to get away from Baxter, she would have skipped over him when she was figuring out how to get things done.

The thing was, that insecurity was a vulnerability that could be exploited.

“Hey, you’re Kwan, right?”

Like Dale, Kwan seemed nervous about something when she first approached him.

At the end of lunch, Spike bumped into her. “You know, that Baxter kid you were asking about? He’s been telling people that a ghost in a well dragged your brother to hell last night in Old Town.”

“What? Well, that’s ridiculous, I drove him to school this morning.”

Spike shrugged. “Rumor goes he hasn’t been in class either.”

Jazz took a deep breath in and out. “Excuse me, just a moment.”

She pulled out her phone. 

‘Were are you?’

Danny didn’t reply. If Baxter was somehow responsible for Danny not being at school, she was going to get the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ out of the trunk of her car.

“Thanks for telling me, Spike. Hey, we should do something this weekend.”

Maybe Baxter would have an accident in the mountains that weekend for her to celebrate.

When she got to class, her phone vibrated.

‘I had to do something. Can you cover for me?’

‘It’s two thirds of the way through the school day, I don’t have that much pull. Besides, I wouldn’t cover for you anyway, it would just enable you to make poor life choices.’

Danny sent an emoji of someone blowing a raspberry at her.

‘Does this have anything to do with something that happened in Old Town last night?’

‘No, why?’

‘Baxter’s telling people you got dragged down to hell last night by a ghost.’

‘On any other day I would be laughing so hard right now. I think he actually believes it. It’s his own fault.’

‘Danny, are you okay right now?’

‘Meh been better.’

Well, that was progress.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘*eyeroll emoji*’

Class started and she had to put away her phone.

At the end of the day she was going to leave when she noticed Sam outside the main office. What was odd was that it looked like her parents were there with someone in a very expensive looking suit. Sam looked very uncomfortable.

“Hey Sam,” Jazz said, approaching the group. “Is everything alright?” Her eyes zeroed in on a dark blotch creeping up past her unseasonable black turtleneck. “Is that a bruise?”

The woman that Jazz suspected was Sam’s mother said, “Those brutes manhandled my daughter last night.”

“Now Mrs. Manson,” the man in the suit said. “We shouldn’t be making any public statements at this time.”

“Did this happen at school, or does this have something to do with whatever happened in Old Town last night?”

Sam sort of looked like she wanted to kill no one in particular. “Uh, did Danny tell you about Old Town?”

The lawyer didn’t seem like he wanted Sam to say anything, but Sam’s dad looked at him and just shrugged, like, ‘what can you do?’

“Something about a well and Dash Baxter,” Jazz hazarded.

“Oh, yeah, Dash dropped Danny down a well, but it was boarded up not too far down, so it was just supposed to be a joke.”

“He what? Oh, I’m going to kill him.”

The man in the suit interjected. “Ma’am, I’m not your lawyer, but I’m going to have to advise you not say things like that out loud.”

Jazz huffed. “Well, what happened to your neck?”

Sam’s blush was almost as dark as the bruise on her pale skin. “One of his jock friends had me in a headlock.”

“He bruised your neck? That could have been serious.”

“Exactly,” Sam’s mom said. “He could have killed my Samiekins. A gang of hooligans, in her school.”

“Mom!”

“Principal Ishiyama will see you now,” Miss Dayton said from the front desk.

“Finally,” Sam’s dad said. “Don’t worry, Sammy, we’ll take care of this.”

Sam didn’t exactly look like she wanted her parents to handle it.

Jazz took a deep breath in and out. The whole time she’d wanted the adults to look out for Danny. She’d wanted her parents to look out for Danny, but, she supposed Sam’s parents would have to do. Sam’s mom wore expensive jewelry. The lawyer’s suit looked expensive. If Dash Baxter’s shield of local fame was toppled by a high priced lawyer, that would be great. She shouldn’t be disappointed that her own efforts might have been pointless. The Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ was in her trunk, and begging to be used.

Sidney’s brother wasn’t home when Danny got there, so Danny camped out on his porch. He didn’t know what he was going to do. The only proof he had was Sidney’s ghost, and even if Sidney could talk to the police, he didn’t want to talk to them about Clayton. Everything felt so wrong. Every option was wrong. 

He waited for what felt like forever. Jazz eventually cottoned on that he wasn’t at school and they texted for a bit. She was going to lecture him when he got home. Danny was probably going to get Saturday detention for skipping.

Sidney’s brother drove up in an old Cadillac. He gave Danny a grim look when he saw him.

“Was that the same one Sidney got in trouble for the upholstery?”

“Our pa left it for me.”

“Does it still have the tear?”

“No, I got it fixed years ago.”

“Didn’t want the reminder?”

“Why are you here, kid?”

“Why’d you send me to Mr. Tidwell? You could have pointed me to anyone else. The journal, too.”

“Kid.”

“He stayed late after chess club. Your mom sent you to go make sure he got home.”

“Yes.”

“You found him yelling after his friend, who he had a crush on.”

“Yes.”

“You stuffed him in that locker.”

“I did.”

“You left him there.”

“I came back.”

“Mr. Tidwell found him on Monday! When Sidney didn’t show up for chess club. How could you just leave him?”

“No, I came back. It wasn’t that long. I swear it wasn’t that long. He was already dead, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t mean it. I was just trying-”

“There was nothing wrong with him!”

“Now adays-”

Danny looked up and speared the man with his gaze. “Not today, not back then, there was never anything wrong with him. You left him. He begged you to come back, and you left him!”

Sidney’s brother looked at him in horror and Danny looked away. 

“He didn’t deserve any of it. He didn’t deserve to be killed by his own brother.”

“I didn’t want him to die.”

“But he did, he died because you found out he was gay and you wanted to hurt him.”

“I wanted to set him straight. They already did bad enough to Sid, and then he’s shouting out down the hall after a boy like that? You think I didn’t already know he was like that? He was going to… Better me to set him straight than someone else, than the law. It was still illegal back then, you know? He was just shouting for anyone to hear.”

“You killed him, you left him there, and then you just didn’t tell anyone for seventy years.”

“What do you want from me, kid?”

“I don’t fucking know?! I thought this would help, but it hasn’t. Figuring out who killed him was supposed to help, but it didn’t and now I just know, and… Why did you tell me about Mr. Tidwell? Why did you give me the journal?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess no one knows anything.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want to hurt him like that.”

“He deserved better.”

“He did,” Sidney’s brother agreed. 

Danny stared at the ground. He didn’t want to see whatever pitiful look the man had on his face now. 

“So, what now, kid?”

It would have been so much easier if Sidney was a vengeful spirit.

“I told you I don’t know,” Danny said, getting up from the porch and walking down the lawn. “I’ve got no proof. If you thought something was going to happen when you pointed me in the right direction, then you’re going to have to take care of it yourself. I’m just- I’m done. I don’t know how to fix this. Maybe this was never the way to fix this.”

“What are you trying to fix?”

“I’m trying to put your brother to rest,” Danny said.

“Danny?” Jazz asked, knocking on his door when she got home.

His door opened a bit later and Danny just stood there, looking miserable. He sort of opened arms a bit and Jazz moved in to hug him. She didn’t need a HAZMAT suit to push away chills and dread. Danny pulled away after a moment and looked off to the side.

“If we’d grown up in the fifties, would you have been upset with me for being queer?”

“Of course not,” Jazz said instantly. “I’m too smart for that.”

“Yeah, okay, Jazz,” Danny said. “For real, though.”

“You’d still be my little brother,” Jazz said. 

“What would you do if someone did something bad to someone else but the person they hurt just wanted to forgive them, like, they didn’t even realize how badly they were hurt?”

“Is this about Baxter?”

Danny shook his head. “I would not mind if he got expelled and I never saw him ever again.”

“Oh, good,” Jazz said. “Well, why are you asking?”

“I just need to know. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe it’s just what it is.”

“Is the perpetrator a continuing danger to the victim, or anyone else?” 

“Not really?”

“Then maybe don’t take the victim’s agency out of the equation.”

“But he doesn’t really get how bad it is.”

“That must be frustrating.”

“It’s sad! It’s horrible. Everything’s awful and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m sorry, Danny. What do you want to happen?”

“I just want him to be okay, I don’t want him to just keep having to relive it. I want him to just move- move past it.”

“So is forcing him to deal with the perpetrator going to do that?”

“I thought it would,” Danny said, letting out a sob and shaking his head. Jazz moved in to hug him again.

“Maybe there’s some way to help your friend that doesn’t involve the person who hurt them at all.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, pulling back again. “I was sort of expecting you to come yell at me a while ago.”

“I got caught up in some things at school. Um, Danny, this might not be the best time- Have you heard from Sam?”

“Not since last night.”

“Okay, did Baxter drop you in a well?”

“Um, okay, so it was really dark, so he didn’t notice I caught myself on the other side and climbed out. That’s why it was so funny he thought I just disappeared in the well.”

“And his friends roughed up Sam and Tucker.”

“Did they? I didn’t see them hit them. Oh my gosh, did they get hurt? They said they didn’t. Oh, I’m going to… I’m going to do something.”

“Someone already is,” Jazz said.

“What?”

Jazz braced herself for a blowup. 

“Sam’s parents noticed, they got the story out of her, they brought a high priced lawyer to school today.”

“What?”

“Baxter and his two friends got pulled in from football practice. Kwan and Dale rolled on Baxter pretty quickly, actually.”

Jazz was going to give herself credit for that part.

“For real?”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Um, well, yeah, things were getting… Are they really going to do something?”

“Sam’s high priced lawyer seems to be making sure of it.”

“Huh.”

“Do you want to talk about your friend?”

“I don’t know how to talk about that with you.”

“Is there anything that will help?”

Danny frowned. He reached out and grabbed the end of her sleeve and pulled her into his room so he could close the door. He just looked at her for a moment, and she felt the nothingness of the cold far reaches of the cosmos for just a moment as Danny came to some sort of decision.

“You already know what happened, so if I show you something, can you promise we won’t talk about what happened the day Mom and Dad went to Chicago. Like, we won’t acknowledge anything that happened that day?”

“I- okay?” Jazz said.

“You promise?”

“I promise not to talk about that day right now.”

“And you won’t tell Mom and Dad, or anyone, really.”

“Is this about someone hurting you?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Jazz said.

Danny huffed a sigh. “Don’t freak out, okay?”

“Okay,” Jazz said, getting pretty worried. 

There was a bright flash of light and the room chilled and that little sense of dread that seemed to emanate from Danny all the time increased ten fold.

“Oh my god, Danny,” she said, falling to her knees.

He was a…

“You don’t have to move on,” Jazz said, shaking her head.

“Not planning on it. I think I’m actually still alive somehow? But I think I also, maybe died, and I’m a ghost too.”

She pushed that feeling of dread down. “The doctor’s checked you out.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “I don’t really know. I guess I’m Schrodinger’s boy.”

He was hovering above the ground. He was wearing his HAZMAT suit, but the colors were wrong, and he was holding his arm behind his back. There were twin green glowing orbs behind the charred faceplate.

“Can you see with that?”

“I can see fine,” Danny said, reaching up like he was worried she was going to pull the mask away.

“Soul searching?”

“Ghosts,” Danny said. “Some of them need help moving on. Sometimes it’s… hard to deal with.”

“Your arm?” 

“Wraith attacked me, I- well, I didn’t so much help it move on, as I shoved it past the veil. Oh, and when I said I caught myself on the well? That was a fib. I fell, and then I flew out, ‘cause I can fly.”

Jazz nodded, sitting back on her butt and staring at Danny.

“Your friend is a ghost?”

A ghost, like Danny was a ghost.

Danny nodded. “His name’s Sidney, his brother killed him, like, seventy years ago. He… he found out his brother was gay and he thought shoving him in a locker at school would fix him somehow. I keep letting Sidney out of the locker but he’s always back there the next day. He’s hurting. There was this other ghost, and I just told him the guy who killed him went to jail and he was able to move on, but Sidney doesn’t know his brother killed him, he doesn’t know he’s dead, and he just… I tried to talk to him.”

Jazz took a deep breath in and held it for a bit. Danny was worried about that poor boy, but all she could really think about was that their parents had killed her baby brother. She let the breath out.

“Does a part of him want it to work?”

“What?”

“His brother did that to him to ‘fix’ him. Does your friend keep going back because…”

“I don’t know,” Danny said. There was another flash of light and Danny was back to being… alive.

Jazz moved in and hugged him tight. It was a relief that he was solid.

“What does Sidney want?”

“He talks about escaping Amity Park to go to New Orleans,” Danny said. 

“What’s in New Orleans?”

“Counterculture? He wants to be a poet.”

“Any way to get him there?”

“I don’t know; that would be quite a trip.”

“Amity Park has its own counterculture these days,” Jazz said.

Danny huffed a laugh and shook his head. “I guess Sam gave me the answer when this all started.” He went over to his desk and picked up an old journal. “I- got this from his brother. Some of his poetry.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do I have Saturday Detention?”

Jazz nodded.

“I guess we’ll spend the day together,” Danny said. 

“Danny, are you okay?”

“Let’s just pretend I’ve got superpowers. Well, I guess either way I do.”

“Super stink,” Jazz said. 

“I didn’t want to shower with my foot wrapped up like that.”

“The nice thing about that ace bandage is that you can take it off and put it back on.”

“My ankle’s probably fine now, anyway.”

“Were you walking all over town today without your crutches?”

“I flew, for the most part,” he bragged.

“Didn’t anyone see you?”

“Oh, no, I was invisible.”

He said that like it was mundane.

“Okay, superpowers,” she said with a bit of wonder. Though no big sister wanted a kid brother with superpowers. “But- you’re really alright?”

“Death’s sort of a downer. Um, Sam says I’m a psychopomp.”

“Sam and Tucker know?”

“Oh, no, I just asked… Jazz, you know how… Okay, not talking about that day. There is literally a portal inside of me that opens up when ghosts are ready to move on. But, I asked Sam what something that helps spirits move on was, and she told me that’s a psychopomp. And, it’s like, when a ghost’s ready to move on, I just instinctively get close to them and move them on to the afterlife, or whatever.”

“That’s a lot,” Jazz said. “That’s really a lot for anyone to handle.”

Danny just shrugged. “I don’t think I can ask anyone else to do it.”

“Are you going to let Sam and Tucker know?” Of course, it was out of the question for Mom and Dad to ever know. They’d need to have a conversation about being responsible with superpowers and not doing stuff that would get him caught.

“I haven’t decided if I’m going to tell them. Oh, gosh, I asked them to help me solve Sidney’s murder and now what do I tell them?”

“I don’t know. Can you explain to me why you needed to solve his murder if you were talking to him, apparently?”

“Okay,” Danny said. “So here’s the thing about ghosts…”

“Help me, oh, help, please, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Please come back. It wasn’t like that. Oh please come back, my asthma, I can’t breathe.”

“I’m right here, Sidney,” Danny said. “You’re okay.”

“Danny,” Sidney said. “Oh, thank you.”

“Anytime,” Danny said. “Hey, Sidney, this is a weird question, but do you want to keep me company during detention? We can go hang out afterwards.”

“You got detention?”

“Ha ha, yeah, I guess I’m a bit of a delinquent. Miss Delaney doesn’t keep track of who’s supposed to be there. She won’t notice.”

“I guess I could,” Sidney said. “What did you want to do later?”

“I just want to hang out with you. You’re a swell guy, you know?”

“Aw, you think so?”

“I really do,” Danny said. “Just a bit of boredom and then we’ve got the rest of the day to ourselves. I’ll be reading a sci-fi book I like, you could read over my shoulder if you want. Miss Delaney won’t notice.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Don’t worry, none of those bullies are going to be there.”

“Okay, Danny, let’s go.”

Miss Delaney just told them to do their homework and be quiet before she started playing some game on her phone. An hour later and they were out.

“Come on,” Danny said. “Let’s go to the library, we can read together some more. No one would look twice at us next together if we were sharing a book.”

Sidney looked shy but agreed to go. Sidney thought that the Martian was the best book ever, and they devoured it in an afternoon, sitting together.

“Go for a walk with me,” Danny said.

“Sure, Danny.”

“You know, I think you’re great Sidney.”

“Oh, ha ha, Danny, you’re great, too. We’ve just got to be careful, though.”

“What if we could go somewhere tonight where we didn’t have to be careful?”

“There’s nowhere like that here in Amity Park.”

“I’ll show you. There’s a bunch of people there who don’t really fit in out here.”

“Really?”

“Come on, we’ll walk around town a bit, and then we can go somewhere neat.”

Danny kept Sidney with him throughout the rest of the day and at seven o’ clock they arrived at the Skulk and Lurk.

“Danny, does that say it’s poetry night?”

“Yeah, surprised?”

“Oh gosh, I had no idea this was in Amity Park.”

“Well, most people don’t know it’s here,” Danny said. “Hey, Sidney, I’m a bit shy, I might not talk too much in here.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Danny.” Then Sidney gasped and looked over. Danny followed his gaze where two boys Danny recognized from Casper High were holding hands.

“I told you,” Danny said. 

“Oh golly.”

“Let’s stand at the back,” Danny said. He reached out and took Sidney’s hand and guided him to the back.

The poetry reading got started. Sidney got excited for all the poems that seemed a bit more in a modern style than what he would have been used to.

“Hey, Sidney,” Danny whispered. “I was going to ask you earlier, is this yours?”

Danny pulled out the little journal from his pocket.

“Oh golly, it is,” Sidney said. He reached out and just like the biker had picked up a motorcycle that wasn’t even there, Sidney pulled out a ghost version of his journal. “Lucky you found it.”

“I’d be too nervous to go up there on my own,” Danny said. “Do you think, maybe, you’d want to go up with me and read one of your poems?”

“Oh, they’d laugh at me,” Sidney said.

“Not here, it’s not like at school.”

“Well, if we did it together,” Sidney agreed.

“I’ll go put our names down.”

Danny signed them up and went back to listen with Sidney where they flipped through the journal to find what Sidney wanted to share.

“I wish I’d know about this place before.”

“I’m glad you’re having fun.”

“Next up are Danny and Sidney.”

Sidney grabbed Danny’s hand and dragged him up front. Danny had to admit to himself that he would actually like to not go up and read a poem in front of everyone, but Sidney deserved this.

Danny took the mic. “Hi, my name’s Danny, and we’re, um, my friend Sidney wrote this and wanted to share it with you.”

Danny took in a deep breath, squeezed Sidney’s hand, and started reciting.

“Through the dark I crawl to the light

I struggle, I fall, but still I will fight

For a new turn of the page a new life for me

I am not blind, it’s they who don’t see

The boy in the mirror that’s for no one but me

The boy in class who can’t be who they want me to be

That boy who they want to smite

That boy who know’s he’s right

Lost between the stacks

Dreaming of gliding down the tracks

I’ll find my way out

I’ll make myself sprout

Wings of paper that spread

To take me away from this dread

The knight moves in an ell 

They’d drag me down to hell

Their game has me on black

Moving diagonal front and back

On wings I’ll move up and away 

No matter what I pay

They can’t make me stay

A new life on the coast

With who I’ll cherish the most

I could practically boast

For the life in the light

For life I won’t have to fight

For I’ll just be me

Living for all to see

Far far away from Ami-tee

I’ll walk beneath the light

There was a round of applause and Sidney rushed to the back.

“I can’t believe I just did that,” Sidney said.

Danny could understand that feeling.

“Like, in a good way or-”

“Danny, that was great!”

Danny let out a sigh of relief.

It was getting late, there were only a couple of readings after them.

“Can I walk you home?” Danny asked. 

“That’d be swell,” Sidney said.

It was a nice night. They passed by Casper High and a couple of blocks later they were outside a house that probably didn’t look like it had seventy years ago, but Sidney didn’t seem to notice. All he could talk about was the poetry and how good it had felt to share it with everyone.

“Danny,” Sidney said. “Today’s been a peach. I’m so glad we went out together.”

“I am too,” Danny said, honestly. Now, he thought, it was time to say goodbye. “Hey Sidney, do you remember what I said, yesterday, about Aaron? I talked to him earlier.”

“Oh, I- Sort of, I don’t…”

“It’s okay, Aaron said he wished he’d stayed with you. He wished he could have left Amity Park with you. He really cared about you. I think he loved you, Sidney.”

“I- really? He said that?”

“He did, and I talked to Clayton, too,” Danny said, closing his eyes. “You don’t have to worry. He won’t tell your Pa. He won’t tell anyone. He… He just wants you to be okay.”

“You really talked to him? He said it’s okay?”

“You’re okay, Sidney. It’s always been okay, alright?”

Tension that had always been there released from Sidney’s shoulders.

“Oh, that’s great. I was really worried to go home.”

That pressure started building in his chest. As much as he’d worked for this, he didn’t want to see Sidney go. Sidney had just started living again. Why couldn’t he stay? Everything felt heavy.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” Danny said thickly, looking up at Sidney. “It’s okay. You can go home now.”

Even his tears stopped along with his heart and he leaned in to hug Sidney. He held onto the boy tightly, but in a flash of light there wasn’t anyone to hold onto. 

He’d messed up; how could he have yelled out like that? How could he have messed up everything with the best friend he could ever have? Aaron would never talk to him ever again. Clayton had left him. He was going to tell Pa. Everything was going to get worse. Clayton wouldn’t help him ever again. High School would last forever, but he just had to wait. He just had to wait for Clayton to come back and let him out. He just had to wait to graduate. He just had to wait to find a place where he belonged.

Danny let out a sob that had nothing to do with the anchor that Sidney had released and everything to do with the fact that Danny was never going to see Sidney again.

“Danny,” Jazz said from behind him. 

He shouldn’t have been surprised.

“It’s not fair,” Danny said, turning to face her, looking down at the ground. He normally didn’t like her to see him crying, but he didn’t want to feel alone and he’d been doing a lot of it since he’d died. He moved in and hugged her. 

“It’s not,” Jazz agreed. “But you did something good today.”

“I just helped him after it was too late,” Danny said. And now Sidney was gone.

“He still needed help. You know I’m proud of you, right?”

“Yeah, Mom and Dad would flip if they knew I was helping ghosts.”

“I can’t believe they were right. I’m still so mad at them.”

Danny shrugged and let her go and letting go of Sidney as well.

“I can’t believe you followed me,” he said.

“Just after you left your poetry thing,” Jazz said. “I was at the café across the street.”

“Yeah? Was there a reason Spike was pointing his phone at me when I was up there?”

“I have no idea,” Jazz totally fibbed. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Depends, what’s going to happen on Monday?”

Jazz nudged him and they started walking, presumably to wherever Jazz had parked her car. “Is that all you’re worried about?”

“The ghost stuff is working itself out,” Danny said.

“A ghost sent you to urgent care.”

“I’m calling that a wraith. What’s happening at school, Jazz?”

“The vice principal wants to talk to you,” she said. “You’re not in trouble. There’s, well, there’s some videos from the hall cameras that show Baxter hurting you.”

“So, what do they need me to talk about?”

Jazz shrugged. “They want your side of things.”

“There are no sides, it’s on camera apparently.”

“They want to ask about the well.”

“Oh, well, I won’t tell them I flew out. I’ll stick to the whole climbed out, thing.”

“The relevant thing is that he did it. How you got out doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t seem real,” Danny said. 

“Danny, you’re dealing with ghosts, and a bully facing consequences seems unreal?”

“Well, I always thought ghosts probably existed.”

“We just can’t let Mom and Dad know; they’ll be insufferable.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s the reason they can’t know.”

Jazz looked at him and frowned. “Yeah, there’s probably more than that to worry about. We’ll keep your thing a secret. What are you going to do if they actually do open that portal, though?”

Danny looked a bit guilty. “I don’t think I’m going to let them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, people shouldn’t be messing with the veil. They shouldn’t be messing with the veil. They made up their minds that ghosts are monsters. If it’s my job to make sure they can move on, I can’t just let Mom and Dad rip open a portal to their resting place.”

“What are you going to do?” Jazz asked.

“I know how it works,” Danny said with a shrug. “All I have to do is unplug one of the internal connectors using intangibility, they create a micro portal but they never manage to keep it open. They loose all their ectoplasm, they have to start over, I go back in later, fix what was broken, they never know what went wrong. Maybe someday they go on to that ectoplasm green energy thing.”

“You could do the ectoplasm green energy thing while they waste their time,” Jazz said. “One Fenton can be famous for science and it won’t be them.”

“Okay, I know I’m messing with their life’s work,” Danny said. “But that’s mean.”

“They hurt someone I care about,” Jazz said. 

“I did something stupid,” Danny said. 

“They hurt you long before the accident,” Jazz said.

Danny huffed a sigh. 

“This your way of telling me to give up on NASA?”

“Danny, if you invent a new green technology, I think NASA would be all over you.”

“This ghost thing isn’t going to go away, I’m pretty sure… I went down to the lab last night, after Mom and Dad finally went to bed-”

“Well, I’m making sure you go to bed on time tonight, then,” Jazz said.

“Anyway, I used some of their scanners. I think whatever’s going on is self sustaining.”

“Ugh,” Jazz said.

“I don’t know that it’s a bad thing,” Danny said.

“No, my internal Fenton is activating and I’m bemoaning all the fascinating physics that’s happening inside of you that we can never ever publish.”

“Oh yeah? You could win a Nobel prize, you know, if you’d just be willing to dissect your kid brother.”

“Nope, it’s my job to protect you,” Jazz said. 

“I’ve got super powers now,” Danny said. 

“You literally passed out from blood loss a few days ago.”

“There’s a learning curve.”

“Besides, I’m going to get a Nobel prize for my paper on Repressed Teenager Disorder.”

“You said that wasn’t a thing.”

“Well, it will be when I write my paper on you.”

“Oh, ha ha, you can get an Ignoble prize for that. Besides, me being a ghost would skew all your data.”

Jazz didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Too soon?”

“I just- do you think it’s changed you? Like who you are?”

“I don’t know. I think there’s some, like instincts, or something, but other than that, I feel like me.”

“Okay,” Jazz said.

They got to her car around the corner from the Skulk and Lurk. 

“Can we talk about how you’ve been doing?”

“Well, not when I’m going to be trapped in a car with you,” Danny said.

“Apparently you can just fly away,” Jazz said.

“I guess we could talk about some stuff,” Danny said. 

He did wind up flying off halfway through, but Jazz couldn’t complain about that. He did give it a try.

He spent Sunday dodging Sam and Tucker’s ideas for further investigating Sidney’s death. Was he supposed to tell them that Sidney had moved on? It felt personal. He knew he should tell them about the accident, but again, it felt personal. Jazz would have something to say about it, he was sure. 

Monday came around and Danny had to talk to the Assistant Principal about everything. They acted like they had no idea that Dash had ever done anything wrong in his life ever. Danny figured they were used to covering up for the team. 

“For the last time, Danny, it’s fine,” Sam said, at lunch. 

“I can’t believe he left a bruise,” Danny said. 

“Ugh, my doctor said I’m bruising easily because I have a Vitamin D deficiency,” she said.

“Oh my god, Sam,” Tucker said. “You cosplayed a vampire so hard you made yourself sick.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Just deficient.”

“Okay, I’ll show you who’s deficient tonight, Tucker Foley.”

“So are we going to talk about how Sam’s guy was just a lawyer all along?”

“Oh, my guy wasn’t our lawyer, that was the private investigator my dad uses.”

“What does your dad use a private investigator for?” Tucker asked.

“Shady business stuff.”

“Wow,” Tucker said. “So why were we investigating everything?”

“Okay, if I email the guy pretending to be my dad just to look some stuff up, I can get away with it. If I ask him to open a murder investigation on a seventy year old cold case, that’s a different story.”

“So, what’s next?” Tucker asked. 

“It’s done,” Danny said, deciding it was the time to tell them.

“What, you found the killer?” 

Danny shrugged. “Sidney moved on, he didn’t care about that.”

“Like, for real?” Tucker asked.

Danny nodded his head.

“Okay, can we talk about that?” Sam asked.

He’d decided on the partial truth, for now.

“You know how my parents experiment on all this ghost stuff?”

“Yeah?” Tucker said. “Oh my god, did they experiment on you? Dude, that’s messed up, but if you got super powers that’s also super cool.”

“They didn’t experiment on me,” Danny said. “I was just exposed to ectoplasm from a pretty early age. Um, that’s probably why I’m a bit-”

“Eldritchy?”

“Sure,” Danny said. “Anyway, I, uh, sort of got a bit of a bigger exposure recently, and… I can see and interact with ghosts. Also, it wasn’t a bobcat, it was a wraith.”

“Dude,” Tucker said. 

“Okay, when we were walking you home and you stopped like something had hit you.”

Danny rubbed at the back of his neck. “Um, hey, so… There’s just a bunch of stuff I’m not really going to talk a lot about, okay? Some of it’s, you know, sad and messed up.”

Sam and Tucker gave each other one of those looks.

“So, are you okay?” Tucker asked, a moment later.

“Yeah, dude, I’ve been dealing with it.”

“So, Sidney?”

“I- uh, took him to a poetry reading at the Skulk and Lurk,” Danny said. 

“That’s what he needed?” Sam asked.

Danny shrugged. The rest was personal.

“So what’s next?” Tucker asked.

Danny shrugged. “Most ghosts aren’t too difficult to help out,” Danny said. “But- if I need help, I’ll ask, okay?”

“Anything else to tell us?” Sam asked.

“That’s the important stuff, I guess,” Danny said.

“Whelp,” Tucker said heavily. “I guess smooches are back on the table.”

Danny blushed a bit, though it wasn’t like he wasn’t still keeping a pretty major secret.

“So anyway, I guess I’m a psychopomp.”

“It should have been me,” Sam complained. “But hey, I was meaning to tell you. I know this was sort of your thing, but, well, the office was really bending over backwards with the lawyer thing, and…”

“What, you had a list of demands?” Danny asked.

“If you messed with the menu, I swear…”

“I asked them to put up a memorial for Sidney,” Sam said. “I gave them a copy of that photo we got.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Sidney’s death was just another thing this school swept under the rug. I figure there should be a reminder of what happens when you do that.”

“Good,” Danny said. 

“I also made some menu suggestions.”

“Sam, no.”

“There’s just going to be more options (after the trial period).”

“What was that last part?”

“Nothing.”

“So, what’s our next adventure? I picked this one.”

“You really don’t want to solve the case?”

“Sidney said it was an accident, and he didn’t want much more than for the guy to feel bad about it, which, he does…”

“Dude?”

“Crud.” This was probably why you shouldn’t tell partial truths. 

“He gave us that journal, and pointed us to Mr. Tidwell,” Danny said. “When I told Sidney that everything was going to be okay with Mr. Tidwell, Sidney basically said he was still worried about Clayton. Mr. Tidwell had said that they’d stayed late that day, and the journal said that Sidney’s mom would send Clayton to go get him if he was late getting home. Clayton heard Sidney calling after Mr. Tidwell. I confronted him and he admitted it. So, um, yeah, it was Clayton Poindexter.”

“He killed his own brother? And you just want to let it go?”

“I started this for Sidney. So, this is what I’m left with. Sidney said it was an accident. He doesn’t want vengeance, so- yeah. That’s it. Sidney stayed late after chess club, his mom sent Clayton to find him, and Clayton overheard Sidney calling after Mr. Tidwell. Clayton thought it would make things better if he scared Sidney out of it, or whatever. I’m sorry, if you were expecting more, but, yeah, if I’m helping the dead then I guess I need to listen to them.”

The confession took the wind out of the sails of all the excitement there had been for Danny’s revelation. The three of them sat with the revelation for a moment.

“So,” Danny said again, breaking the silence. “I chose the last adventure. Who wants to choose the next one?”

Sam’s parents had made her join an outdoors club, so the next adventure was hiking.

So Dash Baxter never had any ‘accident’ at any weekend high altitude training because he didn’t go to the retreat, because that was for people who were on the football team, which Dash Baxter was not. The Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ still wanted to be used, but (un)fortunately, Baxter’s parents had decided to take him to a school that would let him play, so… Jazz supposed that would be someone else’s problem. Though it did seem like Pamela Manson was intent on making sure that all three of those boys regretted that night for the rest of their lives.

School had gotten better, a bit, for Danny, so it had gotten better for Jazz too. It wasn’t like everything had been fixed, but she felt like she didn’t have to constantly worry about him.

“Did you hear about the super hero?” Spike asked when she showed up to his house to hang out.

“No,” Jazz said. “I didn’t think you paid attention to that stuff. Is this a movie or a TV show.”

“Try the news last night. Like, an actual freakin superhero in real life, just upstate a bit in Chicago.”

“Did they save someone?”

“Yeah, but Jazz, they legit had superpowers.”

Spike sounded more excited about this than she had ever heard him. Jazz had a bad feeling. 

“Superpowers?”

“Yeah, they were flying, and there was this woman in this old car in a crash, and the car caught on fire, so they legit, like somehow flew her through the car. Like impossible stuff.”

“Are you sure this wasn’t some weird rumor?”

“It was legit caught on camera.”

Jazz took a deep breath in and out.

“What did they look like?”

“Sort of glowey, and they were wearing this black suit with a blacked out face mask.”

She was going to kill him.

So, Jazz had some good ideas sometimes; Danny sometimes even listened to them. They talked, now and then, about ghosts and school and his shattered dreams for the future, and occasionally Danny tried some of the ‘coping’ strategies she suggested. 

School had gotten better, in that no one was actively hurting him anymore, but he was still the creepy kid. The discomfort people just instinctively felt around him had gone up, so he was just going to have to be friends with the weirdos who weren’t put off by that. It was okay, though, he really liked his weirdos.

“You know, it’s been a month,” Danny said with a sheepish grin. “You don’t have to walk me home.”

“Oh, I’m not walking you home because of any doctor’s orders,” Tucker said.

Danny blushed. They’d been joking about it for weeks, and so far, there hadn’t been any front door kisses, but Tucker had a bit of an air about him that had Danny wondering.

“Wait,” Sam said. “I feel something. Is there a ghost here?”

“Just like the last five times,” Danny said. “There is no ghost here.”

“Darn it.”

There’d been one in the parking lot of the Nasty Burger that Danny had talked to a bit to see if there was anything they needed, but nothing needed doing that night. The night before had been pretty exhausting.

“There has to be some way to become sensitive to it.”

Sure, just become the channel for an inter-dimensional gateway.

“Sooo, here we are, outside Danny’s front door,” Tucker said leadingly. 

“You know my parents have a camera on the front door,” Danny said. 

“Anyway, we should get going,” Tucker said.

Suddenly the front door was ripped open. 

“There you are, Daniel Janus Fenton, you get in here this instant,” Jazz yelled.

“Crap.”

Realistically, he’d known she would probably find out pretty quickly.

“Ooooh, what’d you do?” Tucker asked.

“If I don’t come to school tomorrow, you’ll know why.”

“Danny!”

“Yeah yeah,” Danny said, trudging up the stairs.

“No, we don’t know why. What did yo do?”

“Nothing! I’m totally innocent.”

“I cannot believe you right now.”

“This is where the line of belief gets drawn?”

“Night dude.”

“Hope you survive the night.”

Jazz slammed the door behind him.

“Absolutely not.”

“Jazz.”

“You flew to Chicago?”

“Come on.”

“Out in the open?”

“I did something good.”

“On camera.”

“I’m sort of, like, a superhero now.”

“You’re grounded is what you are.”

“You can’t ground me.”

“Watch me.”