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Chapter Text

Part One: Fissure

Jasmine Fenton loved her little brother. She considered “Danny's big sister” a fundamental part of her identity. In fact, she held this fragment of herself so close to her heart that it was impossible that she could exist as herself, Jazz Fenton, without the part of her that was her brother's sister. She was tied to him, inseparable. Intrinsic, unshakable, and so, so loving were the strings that bound her to him. She could not imagine herself without Danny because she never knew herself before he was born. She was too young, she thought, mind still malleable, still barely formed enough to recognize her mother didn't cease to exist when she left the room. Jazz’s first identifiable memory was of her brother. She wasn't dependent on him to define her, of course, and she understood herself as an individual outside of her role as an older sister. She knew what was healthy sibling attachment and what wasn't, and she knew their family didn't cross that line, even if it edged it every time Jazz found herself playing the roles of sister, mother, and therapist all at once. 

It didn't matter, though. 

None of her dissection of her and Danny's dynamic changed the fact that she was losing Danny, that somehow, something had changed, and since then she had been desperately reaching across a crack in her very world for a brother who didn't care if she let them both fall off the edge. She knew logically that that's how it was , how it was supposed to be. Danny was a teenager. She was nearly graduated, and ready to leave Amity Park and start a new life. It still didn't make her feel any less like the further away Danny drifted, the more she lost herself with him. 

***

“Okay, Jazzy, you have to be very careful, alright? Danny is just a little baby.” 

Jazz smiled brightly. She knew careful, she knew what her mother was saying, and she loved her new brother. 

“Be soft!” she squealed. 

Jack laughed loudly, the sound echoing through the room, and gently rested one big hand on Jazz's small shoulder. There was a quiet whine from the bundle in Maddie's arms. 

“Shh, Daddy! Shh!” Jazz exclaimed, pushing a finger against her lips and putting a hand on a hip. Jack nodded very seriously and placed a finger against his own lips before laughing again, a soft chuckle this time. 

“Danny!” Jazz said, holding out her hands. She was small, very small. She didn't have all the tools she needed to articulate her request, but her parents understood her, and smiled. Her dad fumbled with the lens cap on the camera while her mom gently guided Jazz to the couch. Jazz climbed up and wiggled her way across the squishy cushions until the back of the couch stopped her. She sat very still, her little legs sticking straight out in front of her and her arms held open on her lap. She felt warm and sunny and sugary. 

“Very gentle, okay, Jazz?” 

“Mhmm!” 

Maddie slowly held the little bundle that was Jazz's baby brother out in front of her before carefully resting him in Jazz's arms. The blanket he was wrapped in was pale blue and very, very soft. Jazz looked down at him, forgetting for a moment this was supposed to be picture time. He stared back at her, blinking his big blue eyes sleepily. His tiny face was haloed by the blanket. When Jazz grinned, he reflected her expression, small mouth twitching gently. Jazz looked up at her parents, excitedly wondering if they saw how he smiled at her, and the camera flashed. 

Danny started crying, and he was swept up away from her. 

***

Jazz eyed her brother as he wolfed down another spoonful of cereal. They were running late, and they both knew it. Jazz was ready; Danny wasn't. 

“Y'know, Danny, setting your alarm earlier-” 

“-Doesn't stop me from sleeping through it,” he finished, dropping the now-empty bowl into the sink and shouldering his backpack. He didn't look like he'd slept an extra thirty minutes. In fact, he didn't look like he'd slept at all. Jazz felt a familiar, protective worry pressing against her stomach as she took in the undeniable signs of exhaustion written across Danny's features. His dark hair was unbrushed and sticking up in multiple different directions. The dark circles stamped beneath his eyes were almost purple enough to resemble twin bruises. 

He was wearing the same rumpled clothes he had worn yesterday, minus his sneakers, as he started towards the door. 

“Danny-” 

“I know, I know, we're running late, and it's my fault, and hitting snooze is a sign of whatever and whatever. You can tell me all about it while we're hightailing it to school, but let's just go before Dad decides he needs to drive us.”

“Danny, your shoes?” 

Danny froze, eyes dropping to his feet. They were bare other than his simple white socks. 

“Oh.” He scrambled to put his sneakers on. 

“Danny, are you-” 

“I stayed up late playing Doomed with Tucker and Sam, okay?”

Jazz pretended not to notice the way his eyes cut away from hers. She wanted to believe him, wanted to believe her little brother trusted her enough not to lie about why he wasn't sleeping. She told herself he wasn't lying. 

“Danny, you know you need at least-” 

“Let's just go. I'm too tired to survive the RV.” 

“Okay. Sure. Just don't let Dad hear you call it the RV instead of Fenton Ghost Assault Vehicle again, I'm pretty sure it'll make him cry.” 

The sound of Jack's heavy footprints shut her up and she shuffled herself and Danny out the door before they could be bombarded by their father. When they were out the door, Danny shoved his hands in his pockets and sped up until he was a few paces ahead of Jazz. Jazz watched the deliberate distance put between them. For a moment, she considered closing the gap. It wouldn't be difficult, only a few quicker steps. 

She didn't.  

She didn't want to hover. This was how it was supposed to be. It was normal for Danny to distance himself. He was sixteen. 

It still felt like losing a friend. 

“Danny?” Jazz prompted after they had been walking for what she felt was an appropriate amount of time. They were only a few blocks from the school, and she didn't want them to be spent in silence.

“What, Jazz?” Danny responded. Jazz tried not to let the bite in his voice dig too deep into her heart. She took him slowing his pace to match hers as a win. 

“Finals are next week.” 

Danny tensed. “Yeah. I know.”   

“How's studying going?” 

Jazz lost sight of Danny's face, but he was gripping his backpack straps tightly. 

“You know, I can always help you study. I took the same classes as you-”

“Yeah. I know.” Danny's voice wasn't short, necessarily, but there was something bleeding into it, a dangerous contradiction of nonchalance and warning. It made Jazz hesitate to respond. They were almost to school, anyway. Jazz didn't want to start the day with an argument, her and Danny both had high enough stress levels as it was. 

“Sorry,” she said finally. She wasn't sure exactly if she needed to apologize, but it felt right, and she suspected it would soothe Danny. Instead, he glanced over at her and cocked his head. He seemed to be looking for something. Whether he found it or not, he eventually relaxed, melting back into a casual walk, face softening into an almost smile. 

“But just remember-” 

“Jazz!” 

“Right.” 

Despite his quickly cutting her off, Danny was finally smiling, and it was infectious. Their interaction didn't feel easy necessarily- there was a bit of a careful balance Jazz felt she was tripping across- but there was a familiarity to the bickering, and it curled up warmly against Jazz's heart. 

Casper High came into view. Danny shivered, his smile dropping. He looked at Jazz, at the school, away from both of them. His grip on his backpack tightened. He opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut and stalked away, completely silent. Jazz froze, stricken, and watched him vanish from her sight line. Her stomach felt cold and there was a weight on her chest. 

Danny didn't want to be seen walking to school with his sister. Was it cooler if they didn't get along? Some vile tendril of anger twisted in Jazz's gut. She took a breath, pushing it down. She had no right to be upset. Danny was her little brother, not her child, and so what if he was embarrassed by walking to school with her? She couldn't be more embarrassing than their parents. He was distancing them. She knew that he didn't like to be associated with her, didn't like how the teachers saw him as a failure when comparing him to her. He was protecting himself. He was growing up. 

Jazz swallowed, held her messenger bag tighter, and walked into school. 

When the ghost alarm went off and then almost immediately quieted, she assumed it was a drill. When she found out it wasn't, that a ghost had slipped onto school grounds and had to be chased off by Phantom, she wished even more Danny hadn't left her side.

Chapter Text

Queen Elizabeth's position as a female monarch of England heavily influenced Shakespeare's works, as she- 

The front door slammed open. Jazz paused, pencil hovering over the neatly lined pages of her composition notebook. Her dad barreled into the room and straight to the kitchen, her mom marching purposefully behind him, gently shutting the door. Neither of them spared a glance towards where Jazz was, sitting cross-legged on the couch, senior literature textbook on one knee and notebook on the other. She raked her scattered thoughts back together and pressed her pencil back to paper. 

- as she directly violated decency beliefs regarding the display of women in public by performing her duties as the- 

“Come on, Maddy!” 

The pencil lead snapped. Jack's voice filled the house, trampling through Jazz's thoughts just like the man himself frequently crashed through the living room. Jack Fenton was the kind of man who was felt whenever he entered a room. He was loud, and boisterous, and refused to go unnoticed. No one could ignore Jack Fenton, even after he left and the echoes of his voice finally faded. 

Jazz wished she could ignore him. She wanted nothing more than to shut out her dad's booming voice and re-focus on her essay. It was due soon. She still had more research to do on Shakespeare's portrayal of women, more writing to compose, more sources to cite. 

But her dad was talking in the next room over, and Jazz was an unnoticed hostage in his discussion. She sighed and folded away her books. 

Jack and Maddy didn't notice when she slunk into the kitchen. Maddy smiled at her when she heard the sound of ice tumbling into Jazz's glass, but she was engrossed in conversation and didn't address her. Jazz sipped at her ice water, grabbed a yogurt cup from the fridge and a spoon, and settled herself at the kitchen table. 

“Now, Jack,” Maddy said, placating and cautious. “They didn't say that Danny was skipping-” 

“Truancy, Maddy! We're close to being charged with truancy!” 

Jazz realized with a jolt that Jack was angry . Her happy, silly, bumbling dad was so rarely angry, it was startling to see him express the feeling towards anything that didn't start with “G” and rhyme with “host”. 

Jazz watched as her mom leaned against the kitchen counter, rubbing her eyes. She was wearing her jumpsuit, but not the goggles. Jazz wondered briefly if this was how her studies would be like in college; observing people, their behaviors, observing and recording, recording and analyzing. If they would be, she hoped they wouldn't generate the same gnawing anxiety she was feeling then as her parents worried over truancy. 

Truancy. 

Jazz had perfect attendance. Danny should have perfect attendance. She was with him when he went to school, and usually at least saw him leave. He was in the building. He could leave. Security at Casper was mostly focused on keeping ghosts out, not keeping students in. Jazz didn't know where he would go, though. There wasn't anywhere he could spend enough time to have collected enough absences to border on truancy. 

“I'll talk to him,” Jazz said, standing and forcing a chipper perkiness into her voice she wasn't really feeling. Her parents’ eyes snapped towards her. Jazz thought they looked shocked to see her, even though she had been there nearly the whole time. Her mom had smiled at her. 

“Good plan, Jazzy-pants!” Jack exclaimed, clapping her on the back. He took her empty yogurt cup and dumped it for her while her mom smiled quietly. Jazz smoothed her hair, plucked some lint off her sweater. 

“Thanks, Jazz, Honey,” Maddy said. “We would, but-” 

“Well, you know how Dann-O is.” 

Jazz smiled, tight lipped. She tried to remember if Danny had always been as guarded towards their parents, or if this, too, was a recent cog in the mechanism of his aging, his changing, his worrisome distancing, like the way he no longer wanted to be seen walking in with Jazz, or the way he had been apparently cutting classes in secret without any identifiable reason.

Jazz stepped lightly as she made her way upstairs. She was sure Danny had heard her parents talking, and knew without a doubt he had caught their dad's voice. She figured he would be guarded, and didn't want him to feel ambushed. When she got to his door, she paused, momentarily debating whether she should wait until a more organic opportunity to question him. She decided putting it off would do more harm than good, and knocked gently on the door. When Danny didn't answer, she pushed it open. 

Three pairs of wide eyes fixed on her. Jazz’s skin started to itch. She felt intrusive, like an outsider. Danny's trio was all stress and sharp lines. Sam was perched on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees as she leaned forward. She must have been intensely focused, before Jazz interrupted. Tucker, too, was apparently in the middle of a dire task. He was sitting at Danny's desk, hands frozen over the keyboard. When Jazz squinted at him, he quickly shuffled the open tabs around, pulling up a blank Google page as opposed to whatever it was he was hiding from her. 

“Jazz? What's the matter?” Danny asked. His voice was gentle, probing, almost worried, but there was an edge to it. He didn't want her there. His body was tense, rigid, face drawn with sharp, focused lines. One hand had been raking its fingers through his hair, the other was gripping a Fenton thermos. Jazz paused. 

“Are you… making soup?” 

“I- what ?” 

Jazz felt a touch of smugness at how taken aback Danny was. It felt justified to see her confusion matched. She was quick to clear it, though, and nodded her head pointedly towards the thermos. 

“No, I- Ugh, sure. Yeah. Fine. I'm making soup.” 

He's lying to you, whispered the quiet underline to Jazz's thoughts. She brushed it away as Danny sighed. 

“Did you need something, Jazz?” Danny asked, and suddenly Jazz was the one on the outside again. 

“I needed to talk to you. About school.”

“Can it wait?” 

Jazz put her hands on her hips as Danny glanced at his friends. She couldn't tell what exactly he was silently communicating to them, and it killed her. 

“No. It can't. Danny, I'm-” 

She was going to tell him she was worried about him, that, yes, distance was normal, changing was normal, but truancy? That was a textbook example of a behavioral red flag. Before she could finish her sentence, Danny shuddered. His face went white. 

“Look, Jazz, I don't want to talk.” He started herding her out the door. 

“Danny-” 

“I'm busy, Jazz-” 

Jazz froze, planting her feet, hands back on her hips. 

“Danny, you need serious attendance recovery. They're talking about truancy.” 

Danny stopped, face slack. He looked at Tucker, at Sam, the pair wearing matching sullen faces. 

“Are you serious?” he asked, voice quiet. 

Jazz didn't answer his question. She knew he knew she was. It frustrated her that he hadn't before realized the gravity of his actions, but at the same time, the thoughtlessness of it only made her concern grow. Danny was a good kid. He cared about being good. This wasn't like him. 

“Danny,” Jazz started. He stared at her, blue eyes sharp. “Danny, are you-” Jazz paused again, looking at Sam and Tucker. "What's going on, Danny? I'm- I'm worried about you, little brother.” 

Danny swallowed. There was a long pause, and it warmed the hope in Jazz's stomach. He was going to open up, she had made a breakthrough, she knew it. 

“Jazz-” Danny started. His voice was gentle, not riddled with spiky defenses, face open and vulnerable. His friends were eyeing him curiously. He was about to open up. 

Then he shivered again and took a step away from Jazz. His face was blank again, guarded and sharp and mean. 

“My attendance isn't any of your business. Just stay out of it.” 

“Danny-” 

“ Please, Jazz. I'm fine .” 

Danny pushed past her. A chill went through Jazz. She spun around to try and catch her brother, but he was gone. She was left in his room, his friends staring at her, at the open door. Jazz looked at them, tilted her head. 

“We, uh, we should probably leave,” Sam said. “I have, um, plans.” 

“Me, too,” Tucker added hurriedly. 

“Wait,” Jazz said as they stood up to leave. “I- I know you're his friends, and I'm his older sister, but-” Jazz huffed. “Can you please just tell me what's been going on with him?” 

Tucker and Sam both looked at her, taken aback. Then Tucker looked pointedly at Sam, and Sam sighed. 

“Look, Jazz,” she started, toeing the floor with the tip of her boot and looking anywhere but at Jazz. “We're Danny's friends, okay? It's not our place to tell you anything.” 

Jazz swallowed. “Can you at least tell me that he's okay?” 

Tucker and Sam looked at each other again, mouths pressed together in twin looks of reluctance. Finally, Sam sighed and looked at Jazz. 

“You don't have to worry about him,” she said. “He has us.” 

Her and Tucker ducked past Jazz and left, presumably to wherever Danny had vanished too. Jazz stared after them. 

He has us . 

Her chest squeezed. When had it stopped being that he had her ? 

Chapter Text

Jazz was cold. The white lab coat that brought together her doctor's costume was thin, and the late October air cut through it with every breeze. She shivered, holding her bag of candy tightly in one hand and squeezing her brother's hand with the other. His skin was cold, and she found herself worrying he would get sick. She didn't want him to get sick; she had been sick a few weeks before, and hated the taste of the medicine she'd been given. 

“Are you wearing your coat under your sheet, Danny?” she asked. He nodded. He was wearing a white sheet with little eyes cut out, and the hem of it bobbed around his ankles when he moved his head. 

“I'm warm,” he said. 

Jazz tugged him to the next house, satisfied. Their parents trailed behind them, sticking close but ultimately letting Jazz take the lead. She was already six years old, and felt very grown up, especially wearing her doctor costume. 

Danny and Jazz knocked on the door, said the words, got the candy, but when they left, Danny's feet dragged. Jazz heard him sniffle under the sheet. 

“What's wrong, Danny?” 

“I'm sad.” 

“Why?” 

He kicked at the ground and crossed his arms. “The lady said she liked that I'm a ghost.” 

“I like your ghost costume, too.” 

“But I don't want to be a ghost! I told Mommy and Daddy I wanted to be a spaceman!” 

“Oh.” Jazz wasn't sure what to say. She wanted to make her little brother feel better, but she couldn't fully understand what he was feeling. She wanted to be a doctor for Halloween, and she was. She didn't want to be a spaceman, or a ghost, so she wasn't.

“Maybe you can be a spaceman next year,” she finally said. She felt proud of her answer. She thought herself clever for thinking of it, and her heart warmed when her brother stopped fussing and gave her a hug. He was still frowning, though. She thought maybe distracting him would be better.

“Come on, Danny,” she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him along. “Let's get more candy!” 

He followed her. He didn't stop pouting, not really, but by the end of the night, both of their bags were heavy with candy. 

“Did you have fun, Danny?” Jazz asked. Danny kicked at the sidewalk. 

“No,” he said dejectedly. 

“Oh.” Jazz’s stomach ached. “I'm sorry, Danny.” 

“S'not your fault, Jazz!” Danny crossed his arms as he said this, as if offended that she would apologize. Jazz tried to say something, but her words became a shriek as she tripped over her feet and fell forward, landing flat on the sidewalk. In spite of herself, she started crying. She was only six, and it was all she knew how to do when her hands and knees stung, scraped by the concrete. She moved slowly to sitting while sobbing a wet, hiccuping cry. She only stopped when she felt a small hand on her shoulder and looked up to see her little brother. He patted her gently. 

“It's okay, Jazz,” he said, voice low and soft, like he had heard her speak while soothing him many times before. He reached into his candy bag and fished around for a moment until he found what he was looking for. His little hand reached out from underneath the white sheet, holding a chocolate bar tightly. 

“Here you go, Jazz. Don't be sad.” 

Jazz took the chocolate and looked at the label. It was Danny's favorite candy. 

She hugged him tightly, and, for the first time that night, they both smiled. 

***

Danny tapped his fingers against the closed lid of the Fenton thermos in his hands. His whole body felt taut, like a rope about to snap, or a spring waiting to jump. He floated cross-legged at the old observatory, Sam and Tucker having long since retired for the night. He wasn't ready to go home, though, and he didn't need to. He'd told his parents he was staying at Tucker's that night, just in case he wasn't able to make it home and got grounded for breaking curfew again. 

It had been a quieter night than normal. They finished early. Danny still didn't go home. He needed time away, time to think. He looked up at the stars, blinking at him from millions of lightyears away. He couldn't stop thinking about Jazz's face when he pushed past her, or when he ran from her on the way to school. He knew she was only trying to help, but she didn't understand. She couldn't understand. He couldn't tell her that the reason she needed to stay out of his business was because he lived a double life as a fucking ghost their parents swore to hunt down and tear apart molecule by molecule. 

Jazz's thing was psychology. Science. Not the same ecto-oriented, half-pseudoscience their parents bumbled through, but science nonetheless. He could feel her trying to pick him apart, every conversation a puzzle to her. It made him itch, the way she could almost peel back Danny enough to uncover Phantom. If she asked him the right questions, caught him at the right moment, he wasn't sure if he wouldn't just break down and tell her. It terrified him.

For all Jazz seemed to quarrel against the ghost-hunting and the gadgets and the biting hatred, he had seen her in a Fenton jumpsuit, a brightly colored copy of his own ghostly clothes, blasting away alongside their parents. 

Danny did believe that if anyone in their family could come to terms with who- with what - he was, it was Jazz. That didn't mean he wasn't terrified he'd be wrong. 

Danny sighed and stretched, reaching his arms up and behind him. The movement was weird when he was like this; his muscles and joints felt cold, liquidy. Stretching still eased out the stiffness his tension brought on, but it felt like shaking out a sheet of half-frozen ice, cracking and shifting and sluicing back into water. Whether or not it was the same for all ghosts or just a byproduct of his too-human nature he didn't know. 

Danny let himself sink through the old, clouded glass dome ceiling. There was a small room in the observatory, just outside of the center area where the telescope sat, unused for years. Danny figured it must have been an old storage room, or broom closet. He only cared that it had been empty enough for him to clean it and turn it into a half-decent safe room. There was a first-aid kit, bandages, small syringes of extra ectoplasm in case he needed it. A sleeping bag was rolled in the corner with a quilt and pillows. There were changes of clothes, too, and food and water enough to last him for a few weeks, more if he stretched it. Typically, he used the room for quick patch-ups when he wasn't able to make it to Tucker or Sam's. He didn't remember when he started stocking it with more provisions than he would need for more than a night, but he knew he had too. 

Just in case. 

He didn't think he would ever have to leave his house. He didn't think his parents would ever find out. Still. Just in case. 

After rounding up a few low-level ghosts with Tucker and Sam, Danny had left his backpack with the thermos in it in the safe room. He grabbed his bag, shouldered it, prepared to fly home, then stopped. He thought about Jazz again, walking to school with her. He thought about how tired he was. He was so, so tired. He didn't want to go home. He didn't want to walk to school with his sister and avoid her prying questions. 

Danny put his backpack back down. He closed the door to the room and locked it. His humanity came back to him in a snap, and he felt the chill in the air. Even so close to summer, it was cold. Danny wondered if it was his fault, if the chill was left by Phantom. Danny was always cold lately. 

There was a small space heater, so he set it up, then pulled on some soft, warm pajamas. It took barely any time to unroll the sleeping bag, unfold the quilt, fluff the pillows. The floor was hard, reassuring. Danny was asleep in seconds. 

***

Danny woke up slowly. The light coming in through the observatory ceiling was gentle, filtering through the built up dust. He felt warm, well rested. Content, he thought, startled. It was a rare feeling since his accident. 

He ran his fingers through his hair, refolded the bedding, brushed his teeth with a disposable toothbrush. He took his time getting ready for school. The hoodie he pulled on was soft on the inside. When he grabbed his school bag, he didn't fully transform, just faded into invisibility and slipped through the observatory walls. He flew high above the streets, enjoying the feeling of the cool morning mist. It was early enough that he could drop his invisibility once he was high enough, too. 

Danny loved flying. He figured it was as close to being an astronaut he would ever get. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that the zero gravity effect wasn't coming from him. It was too easy to pretend he was free floating in a rocket, or a space station. It was silly, childish. It made Danny happy at the same time that it made him feel stupid. He had more important things to worry about than an after school pipedream he had long ago realized was impossible after his accident. 

Still, Danny closed his eyes, and for a moment he was wrapped in stars. 

He almost lost his air when that familiar chill seized his body, sending a shiver through him and causing his skin to prickle with goosebumps. He opened his eyes to see his breath clouding in front of him. His mind immediately focused on the feeling, like alarm bells ringing, startling away all thoughts of space. He fully transformed and followed the warning, scanning the streets below for whoever was setting it off. 

Something caught his eye and he realized Jazz was below him and only a few paces ahead. He slowed and held his invisibility tighter. He didn't think she was in any immediate danger- he still hadn't found who was setting off his ghost sense- but seeing her when he knew there was a ghost around made his core ache, icy fingers clawing at his Obsession  and begging him to do something . 

Carefully, Danny tucked his backpack behind a decorative shrub and flew a slow circle around Jazz, frantically searching for the threat. He didn't realize how much energy he was emitting until he saw Jazz shiver. He'd accidentally made the air colder. Her hair was frizzing, too, like the moment before a lightning strike. She stopped walking, likely feeling the drop in temperature and the electricity in the air, and Danny forced himself to pull in his power. His pulse would have been pounding if he had one. He felt tense, waiting. Where the hell was the ghost tripping up his senses?

“He-hello?” Jazz shakily called out. Danny saw her hand reaching for her bag and he hoped she had a wrist wray in there. Even if she ended up aiming it at him, it would calm him to know she had a way to protect herself. 

Danny didn't expect anyone to answer Jazz, but a low voice slithered through the air, sending shivers through Danny once more. 

“Hello, human girl,” said Skulker. Danny couldn't see him; he was hiding, but he must have been close. Danny's ghost sense went off again, his whole body shaking with the chill. He tried to calm himself down. He knew Skulker. Skulker was simple; they fought all the time. With Skulker's Obsession, it was practically a game. Despite his efforts, however, Danny's own Obsession was screaming at him. It was making him sick to see his sister in danger, to see how her face morphed from uncertainty to terror. 

Danny let his invisibility drop. He was directly in front of Jazz, and only a little bit above her. He heard her stifle a scream, hand clasped over her mouth. Danny wanted to apologize for startling her, but he couldn't look at her. He didn't know if he was scaring her, too, and he wouldn't be able to bear it if he was. Instead, he looked out behind Jazz, scanning for Skulker. 

“I know you're here,” Danny said, voice crackling, almost like static. “Leave her alone.” 

Skulker chuckled, lowly and sinister. The sound came from behind Danny, and ground level. He dropped down and spun in that direction, holding a hand in front of him and Jazz as he prepared to blast Skulker. He never got the chance. Instead, a net was thrown over him, the weights wrapping around his ankles and pulling him down. The glowing green strands of the net burned. 

“Foolish whelp. I am the ghost zone’s greatest hunter. Did you think I was incapable of choosing the right bait for a trap?” 

Danny writhed under the net's weight, feeling the anti-ghost qualities of it stinging more every time he struggled. He looked at Jazz. It was a mistake. She was frozen, terror stricken. Danny's core ached. He started to feel frantic. If Jazz wasn't there, he could probably switch back to human and maybe slip easily out of the net. He decided it wasn't worth the risk of the net still affecting him in human form, and turned his attention back to Skulker. 

“Seriously, dude? We're doing traps now? What am I, a mouse?” Danny was shocked at how level his voice was considering how close he was to hyperventilating despite not needing to breathe.

Skulker scowled, but ultimately ignored the comment. “Soon,” he said. “You will be nothing more than a trophy for my collection. I will have your pelt on my wall.” 

Danny huffed and rolled his eyes. “Sorry, but that doesn't get any less gross, no matter how many years you've been saying this. Don't you think some nice paintings might be a better choice?” 

Skulker growled- actually growled- and stomped closer to Danny. He tossed the net aside and gripped Danny by the back of his neck, lifting him into the air easily. Danny kicked and struggled, but none of his hits connected, and his skin still stung from the net. More than that, his Obsession was screaming at him to get Jazz out of there.

Danny twisted his neck to glance at her, startled to see she had a small wray gun aimed at him and Skulker. She was hesitating, and Danny realized with a twinge to his core that she was afraid of shooting him. She met his eyes; they were wide, and her hands were shaking. Danny gave her a small nod. She closed her eyes, shouted loudly, and fired. Danny contorted his body around the blast, but Skulker had been entirely focused on him and hadn't noticed Jazz. The force of the blast knocked him back and Danny was able to wrench himself from his grip. He immediately placed himself between Jazz and Skulker, rubbing out the pain at the back of his neck. 

He needed to get Jazz out of there so he could fight without worrying about her. One look at her, jaw set and blaster held boldly in front of her, and he knew she wouldn't just listen if he asked her. Danny sighed, ignoring the way she looked at him at the sound. There was one way he could get her to safety and still fight Skulker, but that didn't mean he liked it. He wasn't even certain he would be able to retain focus enough to even fight, but what mattered in the moment was getting Jazz somewhere safe. Then he could refocus on Skulker. 

Danny grit his teeth, steeling himself, and willed a duplicate into existence. 

Chapter Text

Jazz didn't know what to do when the ghost boy split in two. This wasn't in any of the ghost safety procedures she had memorized. She was supposed to have known what to do when the ghost boy first appeared, but she panicked. She knew that was wrong; staying calm was the number one rule. She'd faced ghosts before, and sure, she had been freaked out, but she never imagined that she would have frozen. 

Jazz was so, so glad Danny hadn't been there. Her brother hated ghost hunting; he would have had no idea what to do, and Jazz would have been useless. 

Jazz's whole body went cold when the ghost boy grabbed her arm. She started screaming when she looked at where he grabbed her and saw nothing. Her body, and his, were just gone. She looked down, and the ground was falling away from them, and she screamed louder. She didn't know what to do. If she fought out of his grip, then she would be hurt falling, but if she let herself get kidnapped, then who knew what he would do to her, and she didn't know what to do , she didn't know anything, she- 

A gloved hand clapped over Jazz's mouth, shutting her up. 

“Hey, hey, calm down! Sorry!” The ghost boy's disembodied voice hissed in her ear. “I'm sorry about scaring you, I just- I need you to be- I need to get you somewhere safe, okay?” His voice was breathless, quick. He sounded worried, afraid. 

Jazz nodded. She was surprised she wasn't crying and then worried that she was going into shock. 

The ghost boy- Phantom, that's what everyone called him- took her to the old observatory. He pulled her right through the walls. It tingled. Jazz had always wondered what it felt like, to pass through something while intangible. She wasn't sure she liked it. 

Phantom set her down in a small room. He let go of her arm and scanned her, then backed away from her quickly, putting himself in the corner, green eyes never leaving her. In the dim room, he almost faded into the shadows, other than the glow from his eyes. Jazz thought it was just the vagueness of his form, a ghost thing, but then she saw him wince and flicker. She wondered if he wasn't supposed to be that hazy. 

“Are you… okay?” She asked hesitantly. He blinked at her, the confusion on his face so human that her stomach dropped. 

“Sorry,” she continued. “You just- You look a little-” She wasn't sure how to describe it. “You're flickering.” 

He tilted his head slightly but didn't say anything. The silence was disconcerting. Not only was Jazz already tense, but she was also certain she remembered the ghost boy being extremely chatty at every one of his sightings. 

A particularly strong wave of whatever it was hit him and he flickered again, his face screwing up. 

“Are you okay?” Jazz asked again. 

Phantom opened his mouth, and for a moment it looked like he was going to speak but no sound came out. His lips just moved silently until he paused, clenched his jaw, coughed, and opened it again. 

“Sorry,” he said. His voice made Jazz's skin feel cold. It sounded tinny, almost metallic, and there was a certain fuzziness to it. She didn't think he always sounded like that, and she wondered again what was wrong with him. 

“I, uh, it's hard to focus,” Phantom continued. “On you and Skulker, I mean. Hard to… stay split. Give me a second, I'll get more used to it. I-” He stopped and frowned at her, hesitating about something. “I don't usually do duplicates like this,” he finally admitted, eyes finally cutting away from her to look down at his feet. “I'm not very good at it.” Jazz stared at him and was shocked when she realized he was embarrassed. 

“That's… okay,” she said dumbly, not quite certain how to respond to a ghost feeling embarrassed. “Do you need to leave me here? You can leave me here, if you need to. If that helps.” 

The ghost's eyes flashed, green burning brighter for a split second, and he shook his head, jaw set. 

“I'm keeping you safe,” he said. Jazz wanted to retort that she was safe, or that she would probably be safer by herself than with him , but she held her tongue. He seemed angry, and she didn't want to distract him more. Or get him so angry he freaked out, like other ghosts sometimes did. She wasn't that familiar with where they were, and certainly didn't trust herself to flee from the ghost if necessary. 

Jazz hoped Phantom wasn't lying about taking her away to keep her safe. She didn't think he was, but he was a ghost. She understood human psychology, but ghosts were different. They were ruled by Obsessions and whatever emotional imprint kept them around. She had no idea what was happening behind those green eyes that were still watching her. 

“Um… Mr. Phantom?” 

Phantom frowned at her. “You don't have to call me that,” he said. “It's kinda weird. Just Phantom is fine. Or Danny.” He shrugged as he said this, but Jazz's stomach dropped. Everyone had fallen so strongly into the habit of calling him Phantom she had forgotten how he originally introduced himself. Danny Phantom. 

“You have the same name as my brother,” she said, then felt stupid. That wasn't particularly relevant, but she felt compelled to say it. She didn't know how to explain how that made her feel, and she didn't try, leaving it at only that statement, but it made her feel cold, and sad. Her heart sank for reasons she couldn't articulate. 

“Yeah, I know,” Phantom said, tilting his head slightly. There was a faint smile playing on his lips, like he was on the inside of a joke Jazz couldn't figure out. She was struck again by how human he looked. If she ignored the soft glow, the unnatural coloring, or the way he literally flickered every few seconds and had static fuzzying his voice, she could almost believe he was. It made her sad to think about, because she knew that at one point he had been. And now he wasn't. He looked the same age as Danny, too. 

“How old were you?” she asked softly. Phantom tilted his head again. “How old were you when you… when you died?” 

The temperature in the room immediately plummeted, and the air felt charged somehow, like the moment before lightning strikes. The energy shift had Jazz feeling her heart hammering in her chest and she knew she messed up. She was moments away from running out of the room, or reaching for the blaster she wasn't sure if she still had or not, when she saw Phantom's chest rise and fall slowly. She knew he wasn't breathing- ghosts didn't breathe- but the mimicry of the action seemed to work the same as a real deep breath, and the chill slowly receded.

“Shit,” he said, not meeting Jazz's eyes. “God. I'm sorry. I didn't think- I didn't mean to- I'm sorry. I don't usually, uh, react like that. I think I'm- I don't know. Just- You're not really supposed to ask us stuff like that. It… hurts . Physically, I mean, not just mentally. To think about that. Dying , I mean.” 

“Oh!” Jazz was startled by how guilty she felt. “I'm sorry, I didn't know.” 

Phantom shrugged and gave her a tight lipped smile. He didn't say anything for a long time. Jazz stared at him, silent, but he wasn't looking at her anymore. Instead, he was frowning at the floor, brow furrowed, thinking about something . She wished she knew what. She thought it might have been the fight he was still focused on- the one she was sure he would have been done with already if his focus wasn't split for her sake- but after her thoughtless question, she wasn't sure. 

“Fourteen,” he said finally. He said it quietly, almost to himself. 

“What?” 

“Fourteen. I was fourteen when I, uh… when I died.” 

“Oh,” Jazz said. “I'm sorry.” 

Phantom only shrugged, but Jazz was reeling. He had only been two years younger than Danny was now. He had been a child , and now he would never get to grow up, become an adult. She wondered if he had had a dream, like Danny, that went unfulfilled. She wondered if maybe he also loved space, had wanted to be an astronaut, and that was why they were in the old observatory. 

“Are you still fighting that hunter ghost?” she asked, wanting to change topics. She didn't want to think about it anymore, and Phantom likely didn't either. He hummed a yes. 

“He's… upgraded a little bit,” Phantom said. “Sorry. I know you're late for school. I'll try to wrap it up quickly, but I think I lost my thermos somewhere.” 

Jazz ignored the comment about the thermos. She knew Phantom stole Fenton tech. How he pulled it off, she didn't know, but she did realize that his ghost fighting was insanely more effective with the tech, and that it almost felt like it was in better hands when he had it than when her parents did. 

“Do you… are you hungry?” Phantom asked. “I have some snacks stashed around here, somewhere.” 

He started flitting about the room, and for the first time since being set on the floor, Jazz felt safe enough to take her eyes off the ghost long enough to take in her surroundings more. The room was small; Jazz guessed it must have once been used for storage. It also must have once been used as some sort of shelter for someone desperate. There were pillows and a sleeping bag stuffed in a corner, and Jazz noticed first aid supplies and water bottles when Phantom was rifling through boxes and cabinets. He handed her a water and a granola bar he must have found somewhere. 

“Thanks,” she said, mostly out of reflex. Phantom nodded in acknowledgement before taking his place back in the corner again. Jazz didn't like the feeling of his eyes on her, so she looked down at the ground. Her gut twisted when she realized there was a small part of the floor where the dust had been disturbed. She looked over at the also dust-less sleeping bag and pillows. 

“Does someone live in here?” she asked. She was with a ghost- a very powerful, very scary ghost; she wasn't afraid of someone walking in on their hiding spot, necessarily, but she didn't want to take their things , especially not their food and water. 

“Hmm? No,” Phantom said. “All this stuff is mine.” 

Jazz looked at him, his feet barely skimming the ground, much less moving any dust. 

“ You have a sleeping bag? You sleep?” 

Phantom looked like he was about to roll his eyes but then froze. “No. Of course not. Ghost's don't sleep.” 

“Then?” 

He shrugged. “It adds to the ambience?” 

Jazz didn't push the issue, but she was confused. 

Phantom winced, a hand going to his stomach. When Jazz looked at him, he held up his other hand in reassurance. 

“I'm okay,” he said. “Duplicate got blasted. I'm fine though, just… doesn't feel good. I haven't figured out how to have the rest of the senses without the pain part.” 

“Are you not the duplicate?” 

Phantom frowned. “No. Why?” 

“ Why? Why are you here?” 

“Oh, right. Would you listen to me if I told you not to worry about it?” 

Jazz stared at him. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at her sheepishly, another gesture that was painfully human. If it weren't for the stark, faintly glowing white hair that hung over his ectoplasm-green eyes, Jazz could have believed he was human, and the weird voice and chill in the air was some other illusion. She didn't care how human he looked, though. She had questions she wanted answered, and she was not going to just stop worrying about it. 

“That ghost hunter. He said I was bait. But I don't- I don't know you. My parents hate you. Why would I be the perfect bait?” 

Phantom tensed, his jaw working. He wouldn't meet her eyes. “You're not, you just- Ugh.” He shut his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and he really looked human then. Until he flickered again. 

“Look, it's not you, okay?” Phantom continued. “I like people. Humans, I mean. Obviously. I spend most of my time keeping you guys out of ghost trouble. Skulker knows that. He figured if he threatened a human, I would take the bait, and he was right.” 

“But why?” 

Phantom shrugged and gestured flippantly towards her. “I don't know. You're the wannabe psychiatrist.”

“But that's different, isn't it? What I'm studying.” 

“Is it?” 

“I'm studying human psychology.” 

Phantom just shrugged and looked at the floor. Jazz didn't know what to do with that. He was clearly implying that they weren't that different, but he was wrong. 

Wasn't he? 

Sure, some of the ghosts had once been human. But they weren't anymore. 

They weren't. 

Jazz couldn't forget that. She couldn't. Her whole life would crumble if she started getting ghosts and humans too mixed up; how would she be able to handle it if her parents were wanting to rip apart sentient beings ? She reminded herself again that Phantom wasn't human, but when she looked at him, it was hard. Maybe it was his name, or his age, or the way he seemed like he didn't know what to do with her being in his space, but she couldn't stop thinking of her little brother every time she looked at him, and it hurt. 

“Danny?” She asked tentatively, experimentally, and her heart clenched when his eyes snapped to her. They were wide and still shining unnaturally. He frowned at her, head tilted slightly. The air was colder than it had been a moment ago, but not in the snapping, bitter way it had been when she brought up his death. He looked at her for a long moment before his expression softened sadly.  

“Never mind,” he said quietly, looking back at the floor. “Phantom's fine. It's… weird when you call me that.” He rubbed a palm against his chest and ran his other hand through his hair. 

“Sorry,” Jazz said, and she was surprised to find she meant it. She didn't like seeing him upset, and she didn't like that she felt that way even more. 

“I, uh, I have- had- a sister,” Phantom said after a long moment of silence. His voice was soft, slow and uncertain. “She's a lot like you, actually.” 

Jazz thought about that, about the fact that this boy had had a family, and oh, God, it hurt. She couldn't imagine losing Danny like his sister had lost her brother. She wondered if whoever the girl was was still alive, and if she was, if she recognized her lost brother when she saw Phantom, or if he was so transformed by his death that she couldn't see him in the ghost he had become. 

“Do you miss her?” Jazz asked. Phantom looked at her, met her eyes, and smiled softly. The glow that haloed him seemed softer, but he had stopped flickering. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Every day.” 

“I'm sorry,” Jazz replied. Phantom shrugged.

“C'mon,” he said. “Fight’s over. Let's go to school.” 

Jazz reached out and let him take her hand. She shivered when he made them intangible, but she was shocked to realize that she trusted him. She wondered if it was because of how much he reminded her of Danny. When she realized this, it made her skin crawl. She had met another ghost before who appeared almost perfectly human, and she had also trusted her, but trusting Spectra had been a mistake. Jazz still struggled on occasion with unraveling the web of poison Spectra had woven into her mind, and thinking about it always left her feeling cold and with a taste of the misery Spectra had made her feel in order to feed on it. 

Jazz wanted to believe that Phantom wasn't like that, that the way he presented himself was honest , but she didn't like how comfortable she felt with him. She shouldn't let herself be vulnerable with a ghost. 

No matter how similar he was to her brother. 

Chapter Text

Jazz Fenton taught herself how to cook. Maddie helped, of course, until Jazz decided that it was easier to figure it out herself without her parents interfering. She thought she was decently good at it; she could make lots of easy things, like ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and spaghetti, but there were lots of things she still hadn't figured out. While she loved making lunches and dinners for her and Danny, her favorite things to make were sweets. Jazz liked baking, maybe because it was more fun than cooking, or maybe because she didn't need to bake. She had also decided that her little brother needed to learn how to cook, also, but she knew he wouldn't want to do anything that wasn't fun, so she decided that teaching him how to bake a cake would be the best beginning dish for him. Jazz liked teaching her brother things; it made her feel smart and useful at the same time. 

Jazz flipped through her mother's recipe book while Danny watched, curious and wide-eyed. 

“Okay, Danny. Do we want to make yellow cake or chocolate cake?” 

Danny's face scrunched up in thought, his tiny eight-year-old features taking on a serious demeanor as he debated. 

“Chocolate,” he said. “Dad will think it's very yummy!” 

“Okay, you're right. Let's make a chocolate cake.” 

Jazz carefully instructed her brother on how to gather and mix the ingredients. She helped him to pour the batter into the pan and let him lick the spoon while they waited for the cake to finish. When the oven timer dinged and they opened the oven, the smell of fresh chocolate cake filled the air. 

“Okay, Danny, we have to do a little bit more waiting, okay? We get to do frosting next but the cake has to be colder first.” 

Danny nodded seriously. Jazz pulled out some buttercream and food coloring. 

“We can make our frosting while we wait, okay?” 

“Okay,” Danny echoed, and he reached for the red food coloring. 

Together, they divided the buttercream into different frosting bags and colored them with the food coloring. Jazz had big plans for how she wanted to decorate her side of the cake; she wanted to do a rocket ship and outer space for Danny. She could picture it perfectly, and she knew exactly what colors she needed. 

“What are you going to do on your side?” Jazz asked Danny as she put the cooled-down cake on the counter. 

“Dunno,”  Danny said with a shrug. “Something cool.” Jazz giggled. She made herself focus intensely on decorating her side of the cake. She wanted it to look good, and she wanted Danny to have fun. She thought it was very important that Danny have fun, so that he'll like baking, and then he'll like cooking, too, and she can teach him how to cook. Then if she was ever at a sleepover or girl scouts trip or something, Danny could make himself food instead of eating whatever gross glow-in-the-dark food their parents made. She liked that idea, even though Danny didn't seem to mind the yucky food as much as she did. 

Jazz began to feel stressed and frustrated as she continued to decorate. Drawing with frosting was hard , and she couldn't quite get it right. She kept scraping off bits of frosting, and then the top layer of the cake started to peel up with it. Her rocket ship was wonky and the colors kept blending together with cake crumbs into some gross mud color. Jazz kept trying, but she kept failing, and she started to feel hot and flushed with anger at the cake and anger at herself for not being able to do it right. The final straw was when she went to scrape off some more frosting and she dropped her butter knife, sending it clattering to the floor where it was glued down by the frosting. Jazz screamed in frustration as tears began to spring from her eyes. 

“Jazz?” Danny asked cautiously, his blue eyes peering at her while she cried. “Why are you sad?” 

“I'm messing it up,” she said, and she felt horribly stupid about the whole situation. 

“That's okay, look at mine!” 

Jazz used the back of her hand to wipe the tears from her eyes and looked at Danny's side. It was awful; the cake and the frosting were hardly separate, with big chunks of cake having been mixed in with the sickening swirls of every color imaginable. Danny grinned proudly. There was frosting on his face. 

“It doesn't look very good but I think it'll be yummy!” he declared. Jazz felt her sadness dissipate a bit at that. Danny didn't care that she messed up, he just wanted the cake. It didn't have to be perfect. 

Jazz cut the cake into slices and gave them both a piece. It was still warm. It tasted good. Jazz was proud of her brother, and she was proud of herself. 

***

Jazz didn't see Phantom again for a long time. Danny, for the most part, seemed to be acting normally. Jazz knew he barely scraped by his finals, and he had had to spend a lot of hours with Lancer after school for attendance recovery, but he'd made it, and she was proud of him. She tried not to push as much as she had been in the past, and he seemed less eager to push her away as a result. Summer break appeared to be helping with his sleeping, too, and the circles under his eyes faded significantly. He seemed brighter, more energized, even if he spent most of the morning sleeping and most of the afternoon and evenings out with Tucker and Sam. At first, Jazz was worried he was drinking heavily, or doing drugs, but he seemed better than he had during the school year, so she overruled that as a conclusion and instead determined he was just falling into the natural circadian rhythm of a teenage boy. 

Jazz worked on a Sudoku puzzle while Danny chewed pensively on a piece of soup-soaked bread and their parents fiddled with their newest invention. 

“Do you like the soup, Danny?” Jazz asked without looking up from her puzzle. Danny nodded in her peripheral vision and she smiled. She'd tried her hand at a new recipe in an effort to save them from the semi-sentient and severely contaminated sausages being stored in their fridge. She'd worried, at first, that Danny wouldn't like it, mostly because it was a hot soup and the weather was steadily climbing into a sweltering summer, but when she peered up at Danny, he seemed to be relishing the warmth. Jazz wondered if there was something wrong with his circulation, or maybe his iron levels. Was Danny anemic? 

“Danny, do you ever experience dizzy spells?” 

“Do I- what?” 

“Or a craving to eat ice? Or chalk?” 

Danny frowned and set his soup spoon down. “No?” he said, crossing his arms. “You've finally lost it, haven't you?” 

Jazz rolled her eyes. “I just thought you might have low iron. You're cold a lot, you know.” She said it nonchalantly, but Danny stared at her as if she'd just pointed out some freakish quirk he had. 

“It's perfectly normal, Danny,” Jazz said. “Lots of people have problems with circulation that can make their hands and fingers cold.” 

“I don't- I'm not- my circulation is fine!” 

Jazz hummed in false agreement. “If you say so.” 

Danny grumbled and went back to his soup. Jazz returned to her puzzle. She couldn't quite figure out the right combination for the answer, and she knew she was overlooking something, but she couldn't quite figure out what it was. 

“Dann-O, how ‘bout you help your mom and me with this new Fenton Ghost Zapper?” Boomed Jack. He patted some sort of electric fly swatter lovingly and Danny's eyes narrowed. Jazz didn't blame him. It seemed like Danny specifically made the Fentons’ sketchy tech go on the fritz, but whether that was because of some sort of anti-Danny properties they possessed or just because he was unlucky enough to be deemed the guinea pig child and thus was always there to bear the force of the inevitable malfunctions was anybody's guess. 

“Thanks but no thanks, Dad, I'm trying to eat this soup.” 

“Let him eat his soup! He's a growing boy!” Jazz chimed. She put her puzzle down and stood, placing her hands on the table. It was cartoonish and petulant but she didn't care; her dad seriously needed to leave her brother alone. 

Jazz's movement wasn't forceful, but Danny's soup wobbled precariously in its bowl anyway. 

“Careful, Jazz, you're gonna spill it,” he muttered before grabbing the bowl off the table. Just when he was using his other hand to bring a spoonful to his mouth, Jack swung, and the Fenton Ghost Zapper hit him in the back with a loud thwack . Danny screamed through clenched teeth. For a moment, Jazz thought she saw the arc of electricity racing through Danny, or at least the fading remnants of it. It was only a split second, but it looked like his skin was marked by it, pale lines of branching lightning patterns stretching out across his arms and chest from his torso. Even his eyes seemed to flash. Then Jazz blinked, and Danny's scream cut off, and she immediately started rationalizing it. She saw a spark, sure, but nothing else. 

Danny stared wide-eyed at the wall behind Jazz in the seconds after being electrocuted. One moment his soup bowl and spoon were still in his hands, the next they were clattering against the table, and Jazz's brain short circuited as she processed that Danny's fingers and hands hadn't moved. It was as if the objects he was holding had fallen through him. But that wasn't possible. He was corporeal. He was flesh and bone and he was her brother . 

Jazz stared at the mess of soup spilling over the table and the floor and Danny until Danny finally blinked. His face twisted and he stood, pushing away from the table and the mess of soup. 

“Jeez, Dad, did you really have to zap me?” 

Jack was looking down at his anti-Danny invention and frowning, brows drawn together. 

“That shouldn't have happened,” he said. “This Fenton Zapper should have only worked on ghosts .” He stared at the zapper for a long time, humming in thought, before shrugging. “Well. Back to the lab!” 

He hopped away, not paying any more attention to his freshly zapped son. Jazz looked at Danny. He was scowling after their father, but when he turned to look at her, his expression softened slightly. 

“Are you okay?” she asked gently. “You looked like- It looked like that hurt a lot.” 

Danny shrugged. “It's fine, Jazz. Happens all the time.” 

It really shouldn't , Jazz thought, but she didn't say anything. 

“Sorry about your weird puzzle book thing,” Danny said, gesturing to her now soup-soaked Sudoku. His hand shook slightly when he did. 

“I'm more worried about you than Sudoku, Danny.” 

“I don't even know what that word means ,” Danny quipped, and it made Jazz feel better than he was joking. He seemed to have recovered from the slight electrocution. He was also weirdly not covered in soup, even though Jazz swore some of it had to have gotten on him- it was on the floor beneath where he was sitting, even. If it weren't for the soup literally everywhere else, just by looking at Danny, it wouldn't be hard to believe that nothing had happened at all. Jazz tried to convince herself that it couldn't have been that bad- it was literally a tweaked bug zapper - but she couldn't banish the thought of Danny's choked scream, or his face, or his wide eyes. 

“You're sure you're okay?” 

“Yeah. It was just a little zap. It just startled me, that's all. Or, well, shocked me. Literally.” Danny grinned, and Jazz grinned back, laughing slightly at the dumb joke. Danny helped her clean up while Jack remained in the basement lab. Neither of them said anything, but Jazz knew both her and Danny were glad it was just them in the kitchen while they cleaned. 

***

Danny's skin was still buzzing slightly long after he and Jazz finished cleaning and he retired to his room. The electricity had long left his body, but he still felt it, that tingle. It reminded him too much of dying. He was proud of himself, though, for keeping it mostly together. He had gone intangible for a moment, but anyone would have dropped their spoon and bowl, so it definitely was okay. Definitely. For sure. Entirely certain. 

Danny's heart was still beating too fast. He kept convincing himself the look Jazz had given him was just the normal shock of seeing your brother electrocuted, and not anything worse. She had been her normal, over-worried self while they cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, hadn't acted weird at all when Danny excused himself to his room. 

It was almost dinner time, and Danny decided he would be extra observant of his sister. If she was paying extra close attention to him, he would assume she had noticed something, but if not, he was safe. 

Danny sighed. There was one other thing from the incident at lunch he needed to take care of. He made himself intangible and sunk through the floor, letting gravity do its work and pull him into the lab. He hovered close to the ceiling while his dad tinkered on a wrist ray. Danny counted himself lucky that at least he wasn't working on the zapper, but when Danny looked closer, he realized he wasn't that lucky. The racket-like weapon was directly in front of his father on the work table, only inches away from his current project. Danny grit his teeth and floated closer. Jack shivered, but didn't pause his work. It was a good thing the lab was always a little cold. 

Jack seemed focused entirely on what he was working on, but Danny knew his dad wasn't dense enough that he wouldn't notice if the zapper suddenly disappeared right in front of him. Danny swallowed down a frustrated sigh. He didn't have time to wait around for his dad to take a break; dinner was almost ready, he was supposed to be in his room, and he needed to get the zapper to Tucker as soon as possible so that he could make sure it wasn't missing long enough his parents would notice it. Ideally, Tucker could disable it against Danny's ecto-signature by the morning, and Danny could run it back to the lab before any damage was done. Not that Danny expected anyone to notice it was gone, anyway. After the incident at lunch, Danny was tempted to tell Tucker to just get rid of it. He'd stolen enough equipment, though, and was worried about risking it, especially after he explicitly referenced having a Fenton thermos to Jazz as Phantom. 

Danny flew to the other side of the lab and grabbed a screwdriver that he hoped wasn't souped up in any way that would make it dangerous. He eyed his dad carefully while he picked up the screwdriver, but he was paying no attention to anything other than whatever gadget he was tweaking. Danny brought his screwdriver halfway up the stairs and dropped it. When it became tangible again it clattered to the ground, rolling down the stairs. Danny quickly flew to where his dad was, the man standing up and looking bewilderedly towards the stairs. Danny grabbed the zapper while Jack was distracted, bringing it with him up through the house until he got to his room and settled on the edge of his bed. He quickly messaged Tucker to let him know he got the zapper and would be bringing it to him after dinner. 

After Tucker confirmed he'd gotten the message, Danny set his phone down and took a deep breath. He felt oddly jittery, his heart still racing despite the relative ease of his operation. He figured he was still rattled from lunch. He was ready for that zapper to not be able to zap him. In general, he would be a whole lot happier if nothing his parents whipped up in the lab could do anything to him, but he'd long ago accepted that wouldn't be possible. There were a lot of weird weapons, and Tucker was only one person. There also was never a guarantee that the equipment could be tweaked to not hurt Danny. 

Danny put his head in his hands and groaned. 

There was a knock on the door and he straightened, hastily shoving the zapper under a pillow.

“Yeah?” he asked. The door opened slightly and Jazz peeked her head in through the crack. 

“Dinner's ready,” she said. “Mom says it's your turn to set the table.” 

“Okay.”

Jazz stared at Danny for a long time. He blinked at her, suddenly feeling too observed. It made him squirm. 

“Are you okay?” she finally asked. “You seem a little…” 

“I'm fine,” Danny said. He stood up from where he was sitting at the edge of the bed. “I'll go set the table.” 

***

Jazz picked at her baked potato, stretching the melted cheese with the tines of her fork while Jack yapped about the Fenton parents’ latest invention and Maddie filled in the technical moments he was missing. Danny was eating quickly, not even pausing before biting into his sizable pile of sausage and rice despite their past experiences with ecto-contaminated meat. Jazz figured she couldn’t shame him, though, as she remembered his lunch had been ruined. He paused and looked up at Jazz, eyes narrowing when he met her gaze. She tilted her head slightly, a silent question, and looked away. He was acting weird, like he was looking for something in her behavior. It felt like they were investigating each other, but Jazz didn't know what either of them was looking for. 

“So, kids, your father tells me the Fenton Ghost Zapper is a no go?” 

Danny grimaced. “Big time.” 

“Ah, well,” Maddie said with a sigh. “Sorry ‘bout that, Danny. Hopefully your father will think longer next time.” 

“I wouldn't bet on it,” Danny muttered, twirling a rice grain around his plate. 

“Danny!” Maddie chided. Jazz didn't say anything in Danny's defense. She knew he was right, and justified in what he was saying, but she also knew the last thing any of them needed was a dinner table argument. 

“Sorry,” Danny said, glancing at their frowning father. 

“Don't worry ‘bout it, Danny boy,” Jack replied good-naturedly. “I'll make sure the next invention will be absolutely human safe before letting either of you kids near it.” 

“Okay,” Danny said. He was picking at his food again and Jazz was struck with the realization that he looked terribly tired. He might have been better rested than he was during the school year, but Jazz worried that their parents’ work was really draining him. There was an exhaustion in his attitude that she hadn't noticed before, and it was much, much deeper than surface level. 

Jack released a heavy sigh and looked gloomily down at his own dinner. “It’s a shame this one didn’t work, though. I would have liked to give that Phantom a good zap.” 

Danny huffed and Jazz’s eyes immediately cut towards him. 

“Maybe,” Danny said tightly, stabbing at his food. “We should all just leave Phantom alone so he can do his job.” 

The silence at his proclamation was uncertain and heavy. Jazz eyed Danny alongside her parents. She was baffled; Danny hadn’t necessarily been overly supportive of their parents’ work, and often expressed outright dislike of it alongside Jazz, but he had never explicitly spoken against it, not even to her. Danny seemed to notice he had killed the discussion and he looked up from his food. To his credit, he looked regretful, but whether that was because he didn’t mean his words or because he hadn’t meant for anyone to know he genuinely thought that they shouldn’t hunt Phantom was anybody’s guess. 

“Danny,” Maddie said carefully. “You know that, even though Phantom seems to be helping us against other ghosts, he’s not actually on our side, right?”

“Sure.”

“He’s a ghost. He’s dangerous.” 

Jazz watched as Danny took a breath, not looking at any of them. An unsettling feeling was building in her stomach; she held her breath, silently begging Danny to drop it. 

“But what if you’re wrong?” Danny lifted his eyes, staring directly at their mother and putting his fork down. 

“Wrong about him being a… a ghost?” 

Danny looked taken aback for a moment but recovered quickly. “No! I mean, of course- of course he’s a ghost , I just mean what if, maybe, I don’t know, he is actually helping? What if he genuinely doesn’t want to hurt anybody?” 

Maddie, for her part, was remarkably patient with her son’s outburst. Jazz could tell she was frustrated, but she remained calm. Jack stayed silent. 

“That’s not worth the risk, Danny,” Maddie continued. “You know that. We can’t let ourselves be fooled by him, no matter how much he appears to be on our side. That’s just the way his imprint behavior presents-” 

“Does it not still make a difference?” 

“What?” 

“Even if his motivation isn’t real, or is just from an emotional imprint or whatever you think, isn’t he still doing something? He catches more ghosts than you- than we do- so isn’t he still on our side?” 

A muscle in Maddie’s eye twitched. Jazz’s stomach hurt, but she didn’t think there was anything she could say that would ease the situation. She felt helpless watching the argument unfold. 

“Not if he doesn’t care about human life, or the repercussions of his actions. You’ve seen how irresponsibly he fights, we all have.” 

Danny stiffened. He suddenly jerked his head towards Jazz. “Jazz met Phantom,” he said. “Tell them what happened, Jazz.”

Jazz blinked at her brother incredulously as the focus shifted towards her. “Well, um, he, uh, I was on my way to school, and another ghost attacked me, and he- he split himself in two to get me away from the fight. But I never told-” 

“See? He’s not-” 

“Daniel James Fenton!” Maddie’s voice was suddenly intense. Danny had finally pushed her patience. “Phantom is a ghost. He is dangerous, and it is dangerous for you to believe otherwise. The last thing we need is you going out and getting yourself killed because you’re not taking this threat seriously.” 

“But-”

“No. I’m serious, Danny.” 

Danny swallowed and bit his tongue. He crossed his arms and sunk into his chair, glaring at his mother. Jazz was still reeling. She had no idea how Danny knew she had been with Phantom. She hadn’t told anyone, in part because she was afraid of her own mixed feelings regarding Phantom’s humanity, for lack of a better term. He had seemed genuinely protective of her, and he had told her that the other ghost had even used that care for human life against him, but Jazz still sided with her mother. It was too hard to believe otherwise, and how Danny had come to that conclusion baffled her. She hadn’t told him about her experience with Phantom. There was no one else around when he had stolen her from the fight, so unless Phantom himself had told Danny, then there was no way he could have known. 

Unless Phantom himself had told Danny.

Which would actually explain why Danny was defending him so vehemently. Did he somehow know the ghost boy? 

Jazz looked at her brother and suddenly he seemed entirely different. It was so striking she had to clear her mind. That wasn't possible. Danny was just empathetic; he cared a lot about the ostracized. It was ridiculous of her to think he could have some sort of secret friendship with a ghost. 

Although, the more Jazz thought about it, the more it almost made a weird sort of sense. It would explain the similarities between Phantom and her brother; it wasn’t uncommon that ghosts mimicked the behavior of the humans around them. 

But why wouldn't he have told her? 

The moment Jazz thought it, her chest tightened. Of course he wouldn't tell her. They weren't that close anymore. She already knew Danny was keeping secrets from her, what was one more? 

Jazz quietly spooned a few more bites of her potato. Danny wouldn't answer her honestly if she asked him, she knew that. 

Danny wasn't the only one who could give her an answer. 

The rest of dinner passed silently. Danny was brooding, and her parents refused to acknowledge it. She tried to focus on not seeming suspicious. Her heart was beating quicker than normal; it wasn't like her to sneak out, much less sneak out to talk to a ghost , and the uncertainty of it had her nerves on edge. She wasn't even sure she knew how to find the ghost boy, much less if he would answer questions honestly. 

He had been remarkably open with her that time he saved her. Maybe she could trust him at least that much. She could look around the old observatory, and if he wasn't there, head home. Easy as that. 

Unless something went wrong. 

The longer Jazz thought about it, the less sane she felt, but at the same time she knew she wasn't going to be able to drop it. She had already made up her mind, and nothing, least of all herself, was going to change that. 

“I'm going to go work on my college applications,” Jazz said as soon as she finished eating. It felt a little too quick, and maybe it was, but no one questioned her. 

Danny shifted his leftovers around. “I'm done too,” he said. He cleared his plate quickly and bounded up the stairs. Jazz followed him up and went to her room for her shoes and cardigan. She waited a few minutes, listening intently, and once she decided no one was going to see her if she slipped out the front door, retraced her steps and left the house. 

The air was warm outside. The sun was slowly dipping below the skyline as Jazz walked quickly down the street that Fenton works was placed on. She only vaguely remembered how to get to the observatory from her house and it took a long while for her to find it. She kept getting mixed up, taking wrong turns and heading into dead ends. A chill breeze brushed against her skin several times, and each time she stiffened, suddenly afraid that there would be another ghost attack and she would be caught all alone, defenseless, in the fading dusk. It didn’t seem statistically likely that Phantom would find her and save her a second time. 

When Jazz finally made it to the observatory, night had truly fallen, the sky a fading gray and the stars beginning to wink at her. It was darker out by the observatory. Even though it had been abandoned for as long as Jazz could remember, there was still an electrical dark zone surrounding the observatory to limit light pollution that might obscure the view of the stars.

Jazz wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself and walked up to the entrance. Doubt was beginning to creep up her spine. She suddenly felt very, very stupid, but she had spent much too long finding the building to leave at the front door. 

When Jazz got to the grand double doors at the front of the observatory, her stomach sank. She realized she wasn’t sure if she would even be able to get into the building. Before, Phantom had used his intangibility to get them in and out of the building. There wasn’t any barricading that she could see, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t boarded up from the inside somehow, or that it wasn’t simply locked. She took a deep breath and reached toward the door. 

“What are you doing here?” came a cold, soft, inhuman echo of a voice.

Jazz jumped, a sharp, startled scream escaping her mouth before she clamped a hand over it. She spun around to see who had spoken and relaxed only slightly when she saw Phantom. He looked especially eerie in the darkening night. He was floating several inches above the ground and there was a hazy glow about him, like the white of his hair was being illuminated by black light. The green of his eyes bled into the black air like ectoplasm. He was cold, too. Even several feet away, he emanated a chill that made Jazz feel like she was standing near a freezer. She shivered and he frowned, backing away slightly. 

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s… I didn’t think I wouldn’t want you here. But it’s making me uneasy.” 

“What?” 

He shook his head. “I don’t think I could explain it. It just… feels weird. Not so bad right now, now that we’re talking, and I know it’s you and not- well, someone else, I guess, but it’s… sorry, I’m not making any sense.”

“Do you… is this the place you haunt?” 

He cocked his head at her. “Is this my Haunt?” 

“Yes?” 

“No, it’s not. But I guess I’ve started viewing it as a safe space. It scared the shit out of me when I suddenly felt like someone… like someone was invading. This is… new. Weird.” 

“I’m sorry.”

He looked confused by her apology. 

“I’ve brought you here before,” he said. “I should be okay with you being here, but I really, really didn’t want you to go inside. You couldn’t have, anyway. It’s deadbolted.” 

“When you brought me here it was on your own terms. I imagine that this is different.” Jazz was shocked to hear her own analytical explanation. Phantom looked at her for a moment before nodding thoughtfully, and Jazz was put off by how much it made sense. It was almost a human logic, only heightened by ghostly possessiveness and overprotection. It was like the difference between having a guest and an intruder. 

“I’m an intruder,” she said, almost unintentionally. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t be here.” 

“No, it’s… it’s okay. I’m not upset.” 

Phantom hovered closer to her and lowered himself until his feet were skimming the ground. He was less cold now. Jazz realized he was only barely taller than her. 

“But why are you here?” Phantom asked again. “Why aren’t you at home? You said-” He stopped abruptly. “I mean, your family. Why aren’t you home with them?” 

“I was looking for you.” 

Phantom’s eyes widened, glowing so intensely Jazz’s eyes started to hurt looking at him until he disappeared completely. The chill in the air intensified rather than dissipating, though, so Jazz suspected Phantom hadn’t completely ran off. He was just hiding.

When Jazz realized why, her stomach sank. 

He was afraid.

He was afraid of her. 

Jazz had forgotten for a moment what she might have accidentally insinuated by saying she had been looking for him. She was from a family of ghost hunters, after all. Guilt gnawed at Jazz as she realized how thoughtless she had been. She was almost outright threatening him, showing up at his self-proclaimed safe place and incidentally implying that she had done so to hunt him.

“Wait! I’m sorry!” Jazz said to the empty air. “I just wanted to ask you something, I swear! I wouldn’t-” Jazz stopped. She didn’t want to lie; if Phantom ever turned on her, her parents, or God forbid, her brother, she wouldn’t hesitate to fight back. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not like my parents.” 

There was a long moment of silence. Jazz started to wonder if she had actually scared him off, until she heard a quiet sigh. 

“Fine. If you say so.” 

Phantom’s voice came from above her and a few feet away. He was still invisible, but after another moment, he flickered back into visibility. Jazz imagined that was his gesture of trust. His arms were crossed, though, and he was frowning at her. 

“What did you want to ask?” 

“Um, my brother-” 

“What about your brother?” 

The temperature once again dropped severely and Jazz shivered. Phantom didn't apologize this time. 

“Do you.. Have you ever met him?” 

“I've seen him. I've seen you.” 

“You've talked to me. Have you talked to him?” 

Phantom's brow furrowed. “No.” 

“Someone told him about when you saved me from that hunter ghost and brought me away from the fight, so I was wondering if, for some reason, you did, which would be okay I think, but I just need to know-” 

Jazz stopped speaking when Phantom sighed. 

“Is this seriously why you came all the way out here? To ask a ghost if he's gossiping with your brother?” 

“Yes?” 

Phantom sighed again. “Just go home. And maybe try, I don't know, leaving your brother alone. You could have asked him instead of hunting me down.” 

“Danny doesn't tell me anything.” 

“And you thought I would?” 

“Well-” 

“Whatever. It's fine. Bye.” 

This time when Phantom disappeared, the cold feeling vanished with him, and Jazz knew with certainty that she was alone. 

Chapter Text

Danny only checked on Jazz twice on his flight home. He couldn't help it. He wanted to get straight home, before anyone could realize he was out, and especially before Jazz got home and put two and two together that he wasn't home at the same time she ran into Phantom. He couldn't not check on her, though, once to make sure she was back to streets she knew, and another soon after to make sure there was nothing in her vicinity that would set off his ghost sense. He was careful not to get close enough that she could feel the cold he brought with him, and once he was sure she was safe, he sped home. 

She was safe, but what had she been thinking? Had she lost her mind? 

If it wasn't Danny she was talking to, if Phantom was any other ghost, she could have been killed. And all because she wanted to talk to him? About himself? And why hadn't she just asked him? Not Phantom-him, but him -him. Danny-him. Why risk talking to Phantom, who she barely trusted anyway? 

The longer Danny thought about it, the more his shock and worry shifted into anger. He knew part of the frustration was bleeding from the residual stress that had been triggered in his ghostly half from her showing up at his observatory, or from the brief moment he had panicked and thought she was there to kill him , but he didn't care. Jazz was being nosy again, and it could have gotten her hurt. He didn't know what he would have told her if she had asked him how he knew about Phantom saving her, and he knew he screwed up mentioning it, but he could have thought of a lie. He did it all the time.

Danny slipped quietly through the wall to his bedroom. The door was still closed, no one had checked to make sure he was actually in his room. He sighed and de-transformed, flopping down on his bed. He was sure Jazz still wasn't home. If he wanted to, he could tell their parents she had snuck out. It would be petty of him, but it would still be satisfying. He considered it for a long moment before deciding it wasn't worth the trouble. Besides, he snuck out so much more than she did, and he could always hold it over her head if she ever found out he wasn't at home. 

Danny ran a hand through his hair. He hadn't heard of any ghost attacks, and he wasn't expected to patrol, but he badly wanted to go out anyways. He was on edge. His skin itched with unshed stress, from being shocked and from the argument at dinner and from his run in with Jazz. There was almost a guaranteed chance that he'd run into at least one ghost at the rate that they leaked into Amity. Danny would even take a fight with the Box Ghost if it helped him focus on what he was good at and not the mess he was tangling himself into with Jazz.

Jazz was the main reason he came back home at all, instead of spending the night out patrolling. He didn't expect his parents to check up on him, they were busy, but he knew that Jazz would interrogate him as soon as she got the chance. He also knew that he had instigated it by telling her she should have asked him in the first place, but that didn't mean he couldn't be ticked off about it. 

Sure enough, moments after Danny heard Jazz's feet padding up the stairs, there was a sharp knock on his bedroom door. 

“Yeah, come in,” Danny said unenthusiastically. Jazz peeked her head in through the door frame before slipping through and closing the door gently behind her. She looked quizzically at Danny when she saw him just sitting in bed in his T-shirt and jeans, doing nothing. 

“What?” Danny challenged. 

“Nothing,” Jazz replied, holding her hands up in surrender. “Just… I wanted to ask you something. Is that okay?” 

Danny shrugged. His stomach felt cold but he fought it down. If his panic made him too ghostly, Jazz might get a chill and then she would really know something was up. 

“How did you know about Phantom saving me from that ghost fight?” Jazz crossed her arms, fully in big sister interrogation mode. “Did Phantom tell you somehow?” 

Danny took a deep breath and focused on staying composed. If anyone would be able to tell he was lying, it was Jazz, but he couldn't tell her the truth. 

“Some kids at school saw him fly off with you. How the hell would he have told me anything?” 

“I don't know. If you were friends, or something.” 

Danny looked down at the blanket he was sitting on. It was easier than looking Jazz in the eye as he lied. 

“Didn't you hear Mom and Dad?” Danny swallowed down a sour taste rising in his throat. “He's a ghost. He's dangerous. We're not friends.” The place between Danny's chest and stomach where his core rested felt hollow. 

“But you don't believe that.” 

Danny looked up at Jazz, expecting to see her expression hardened into a no-bullshit challenge. Instead, her eyes were soft, and her arms had relaxed at her side. Her head was tilted slightly. She looked open, vulnerable. Danny felt itchy again, like if he looked at her too long all of his secrets would spill out of his mouth like ectoplasm. Or blood.  

Danny bit his lip and shrugged, not sure if it would be worse to lie or worse to tell the truth. He swallowed again as his stomach clenched and his mouth flooded with the sour taste of his next words. 

“They're the experts, aren't they?” 

He couldn't look at Jazz when he said it. 

***

Jazz giggled as she watched her 10-year-old brother stick his marshmallow on a stick straight into the licking flames. 

“Danny, you know it's gonna burn if you do that?” 

“Yeah, I like it burnt,” he replied, tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth in concentration as he watched the marshmallow catch flames. He watched it carefully as it burned and began to droop, pulling it out of the fire right before it fully started to fall and frantically blowing out the flame. What was left was a blackened marshmallow that he squished between two graham crackers and a chocolate square. 

“Let me try it,” Jazz said, holding her hand out. Danny glared at her for a moment before reluctantly handing over his s’more. Jazz bit off a piece at the corner and chewed slowly. 

She didn't like it. 

“Gross, Danny! It tastes all burnt and it's cold in the middle!” 

She must have been making a face because when Danny started laughing, it was wild and loud. He leaned into himself, a hand to his stomach as he giggled. Despite herself, Jazz started laughing, too, and the sound filled her warmth and contentment. She didn't care if Danny burned his marshmallows; he was her little brother, and she loved him, and she was happy. 

***

Danny slept in too late, but it was nice. He was enjoying the late mornings of the summer. It made it so much easier to patrol well into the night, and even though he hadn't done that the night before, his body had years of lost sleep to catch up on. 

When Danny was jostled out of sleep, it was to Jazz's hand shaking his shoulder. Danny startled at first, barely stopping himself from flashing his eyes or outright snapping into invisibility. When his mind processed that it was Jazz, he relaxed, and let himself sink further into his bed. 

“Why're you waking me up?” he grumbled, half into his pillow. He wormed his way deeper into the warmth and covered his head with his comforter, shutting his eyes. “It's too early.” 

“It's noon.” 

“It's summer.” 

“Mom and Dad told me to wake you up so you have time to pack your bag.” 

Danny's eyes snapped open and he sat up, pushing the blanket to the side. “My what?” 

Jazz tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. “Danny, did you seriously forget we're going camping this weekend?” 

A weird, dreadful tightness gripped Danny's body. He never liked leaving Amity; It always made his core twinge painfully, his Obsession too tied up in the safety of the people in Amity Park, Tucker and Sam especially. The past few nights had been quiet, though, and their most dangerous foes were still safely biding their time in the ghost zone. Still, Danny felt queasy at the thought of leaving Tucker and Sam alone. It was frustrating, too, because he wanted to go camping with his family. It sounded… nice. Relaxing. But he knew he would feel uncomfortable and tense the whole time, that slight underlying buzz of Obsession  pulling him back to Amity. 

“Do I have to go?” Danny groaned. Jazz frowned, and Danny regretted complaining, because she seemed genuinely upset at his reluctance. 

“Danny, we're all going.” 

“I know, I'm sorry, I just-” Danny rubbed at the place between his chest and stomach under which his core rested. “I don't feel very good, is all.” 

“It's probably last night's dinner,” Jazz responded, wrinkling her nose. 

Danny dimly recalled the green-tinged sausage. “Probably,” he said. Exto-contamination didn't even affect him; he was already too contaminated himself, but Jazz didn't know that. 

“Are you really too sick to go?” Jazz asked, her sadness mingling with concern. Danny felt a twinge of guilt. He shook his head. 

“No, just, uh, a little nauseous. Nothing some time outdoors won't help, right?” He gave Jazz what he hoped was a convincing grin. She rolled her eyes

“Good choice, Ferris Bueller.” 

“Seriously, Jazz?” 

“Pack your bag before Mom and Dad come upstairs,” Jazz declared in response. She gently shut Danny's door behind her as she left. 

Danny rubbed his face with his hands and groaned. He let himself float rather than walk to his closet and phased the duffel bag through the door rather than digging it out. It was partially for convenience and partially because it eased the tightness in his core slightly to use his abilities, although he didn't fully understand the logic in that. He figured Jazz would probably understand the psychological reasonings, but it wasn't like he was going to ask her anytime soon. 

Danny took his time packing, the dread building in his stomach with every article of clothing he tossed into his duffel bag. When he was done, he trudged slowly down the stairs, duffel bag bumping against his leg. His phone started ringing in his pocket halfway down the steps, and he picked up the pace. The phone was about to stop ringing when he got to the floor and pushed it to his ear. 

“Hey, Danny, it's Tuck. We safe?” 

Danny looked around. None of the Fentons were in the living room, or anywhere that he could see, so he figured they were outside packing the RV. Danny's stomach churned in a completely human way when he thought about the RV. 

“Yeah, we're good. What's wrong?” 

“Oh, you know, just the usual summer Tuesday,” Tucker replied. In the background, Danny heard Sam scream, and then shout a loud stream of very angry, very vulgar obscenities. 

“Tucker,” Danny said, low and warning. “Are you calling for, I don't know, a ghost-” Danny whispered the word, afraid his parents would hear and rush into the living room, anti-Danny weapons blazing, “-related problem that may or may not need a super cool ghostly superhero to help you out with?” 

Tucker laughed a quick you're-funny-but-you're-right-and-we're-still-in-danger type laugh. “How'd you guess?” 

“Ghostly intuition.” Danny grinned; it felt good to joke with Tucker. It was easy, carefree. 

“When can you get over here?” 

Danny opened his mouth to answer when he remembered why he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with a duffle bag. 

“I- I can't.” 

“What?” 

“I can't, Tuck, we're leaving Amity today to go camping. Can you and Sam handle it without me?” 

Tucker took too long to answer. Danny's stomach was churning. His core ached and his chest felt tight. He needed to help Sam and Tucker. He needed to help them. 

But he couldn't. 

“Tuck?” Danny prompted again. 

“Sorry, yeah, we have it.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Positive. It's just Kitty.” 

Just Kitty . Kitty could do a lot of damage if she wanted to, but Tucker and Sam could handle her. Danny knew that. He knew it. So why couldn't he stop the tightness rising in his core? 

“And you two can keep things okay when I'm gone?” 

“Absolutely.” 

“You're sure?” 

“Danny. Seriously. Don't sweat. You deserve a break anyway. See you when you're back from camping, ‘kay?” 

“Yeah. Sure.” 

The line clicked off and Danny stood in the middle of his living room, alone with his duffle bag. He knew Tucker and Sam could handle anything, and Amity would be perfectly safe without him, but his skin was still itching as he thought of a thousand possibilities in which he would he desperately needed in Amity Park, and a thousand different ways Tucker and Sam could be hurt covering for him, and a thousand different reasons they might not be able to contact him if something went horribly wrong. 

And then Danny felt very pissed off because he couldn't remember when, exactly, he'd gotten so paranoid and anxious. His inner monologue sounded like Jazz, and that wasn't a good thing. He could clearly recall being easily ignorant and shirking off his duties without it giving him that awful mix of nausea, headache, and vertigo he was working up to at that moment. How much of it was him, and how much of it was his Obsession? It made Danny sick; he wasn't supposed to be like the other ghosts, driven so strongly by their Obsessions. He was supposed to have a choice. His humanity gave him free will. So why was he feeling like this? Besides, it wasn't fair to not have any faith in Tucker and Sam. They could handle it. 

They could handle it. 

It was okay. 

The front door cracked up and Jazz poked her head through, her ginger hair falling in a curtain behind her. 

“ C'mon, Danny, we were supposed to leave an hour ago!” she said. 

“Right. I'm ready.” 

Danny hauled his duffle bag out the front door and shoved it into the back of the RV. He swallowed down his anxiety and the prickle of discomfort his Obsession was giving him and prepared to at least make an effort at having a good time camping, even if he felt almost sick the entire time. 

***

“Um, Danny?” Jazz prompted gently. “Are you sure you're okay?” 

“I told you,” he replied. “ I'm not sick! ” 

Jazz raised her hands in surrender, but she didn't stop eyeing her little brother warily. They were both sat in their seats in the RV, but he was slouched over in a way that went beyond his usual bad posture. His face was pale, too, and there was a slight but distressing green tinge to his skin. Other than that, though, he didn't necessarily look sick , more unbearably stressed, which Jazz didn't fully understand. The worried tension in the lines of Danny's face and body went beyond the usual fear that came with being in the backseat with Jack Fenton behind the wheel. He was wringing his seatbelt, too. 

“Are you sure-” 

“Just shut up, Jazz,” Danny snapped. Jazz blinked at him, shocked, then turned away to watch Amity Park pass by. They'd already gotten away from the most populated parts of town, but they were still within the city limits. Jazz watched as they passed the town's border, the “Welcome to Amity Park” road sign passing by in a blur.

Jazz felt a thrill of excitement, but when she turned to look at Danny, it vanished. One hand was digging at the edge of his seat, the other was clutching at his sternum. He was tense, rigid in an unnatural way, his body and arms tightened at jerky angles that reminded Jazz of crime scene photographs from a forensic science class she had taken the previous school year. He was corpse-pale, too, and Jazz suddenly felt cold. He didn't even look like he was breathing. 

This is what Danny would look like if he died. 

Jazz inhaled sharply, trying to banish the image, and Danny's head jerked towards her. He was grimacing, and the hand that was gripping the seat suddenly clutched her arm. 

“I need to go home,” he said quickly, all in one breath. “Right now. We need to turn around, I can't be here, I have to be home-” 

“Danny, what-” 

“I need to go back to Amity, I thought I would be okay, but somethings really really wrong, wrong at my core , and I need to go home before -” 

“Danny, stop, slow down! What's wrong? I don't know-” 

Jazz broke off as Danny made a strange, almost whining sound, curling in on himself and shutting his eyes tight. He had said something was wrong at his core , was it a stomach ache? A heart attack? Appendicitis?  

“Is everything alright back there?” Maddie asked. 

“Mom, I think- I think Danny's really sick.” 

The grip on her arm tightened. His hand was shaking. Jazz shivered, and then realized it wasn’t just her insides that felt cold, the entire RV was freezing.  

“Uh-oh, does he need some medicine to hold him over until we get to the campsite?” 

Danny's eyes snapped back open and he stared hard at Jazz. 

“I need to go home ,” he said, voice tense. “Please, Jazz, please just take me home.” 

Jazz's stomach clenched. The pleading in his voice filled her with dread.

“Mom, I think we should go home, he doesn't seem okay.” 

“Well, honey, we're already out of Amity-” 

Jazz's arm was squeezed impossibly tighter. Danny straightened, rigid, and then tilted forward and vomited onto the floor. 

“Mom, Dad, Danny just threw up,” Jazz said. She felt terribly helpless that that was all she could do. She heard her Dad heave a heavy sigh, though, and the next thing she knew they were pulling over and turning around. 

Danny's eyes were half lidded and he was leaning back against his seat, one hand absently rubbing at his temple while the other remained pressed against his sternum. He'd released his grip on Jazz, at least. He looked too pale. 

“Gross,” he groaned, wrinkling his nose. Maddie passed back a water bottle and Jazz grabbed it, unscrewing the cap for Danny before handing it to him. He only stared at it for a long time before he finally took a drink, grimacing as he swallowed. 

“Sorry for puking on your shoes, Jazz,” Danny said. 

“You didn't-” Jazz started to say before she looked down and saw that he had, in fact, gotten her shoes, and then she herself felt sick. 

“You definitely shouldn't have eaten that sausage, Danny. You're puke should not be green and glowy like that.” 

Danny looked suddenly alarmed. “No,” he said. “It really shouldn't. We're going home now, right?” As he said that, they crossed Amity lines, and Danny visibly relaxed. Some of the color even seemed to have been returning to his face, and his eyes seemed brighter. If the evidence weren't right in front of her, Jazz would have thought he had been faking sick. Danny couldn't- and wouldn't- fake that, though. 

“Sorry for ruining your camping trip,” Danny said. Jazz tried to look at him to read his expression, but he was facing away from her, looking out the window, arms crossed. “I know you were excited to go, Jazz.” 

Jazz rested her hand on his shoulder and rubbed it soothingly with her thumb. To her surprise, he leaned closer into her touch. She smiled. They were alright, and he was alright, and that was all that mattered. 

Chapter Text

Danny felt infinitely better the moment they crossed back into Amity. Physically, at least. Mentally, though, he was reeling. He'd thrown up. That wasn't right. His vomit had ectoplasm in it. That really wasn't right. It was actually very, very concerning, because his Obsession shouldn't have been that strong. Resisting his Obsession shouldn't tear apart his insides, or cause his ghost self to bleed over into his human self so that his blood wasn’t blood. Not like that. He wasn't just a ghost, he was human, and humans weren't ruled by Obsession. Neither was he. It should have just been a minor feeling of discomfort. Danny knowing that Sam and Tucker were in direct danger likely didn't help, but even still, he couldn't be stuck in Amity Park. It was his home, not his Haunt. 

“Are you feeling better, Danny?” Jazz asked softly. “We're almost home.” 

Danny didn't look at her, but he nodded. He hated to admit it, but he was glad she was there with him. Jazz could be comforting, when she wasn't digging into things she shouldn't. Her hand was warm on Danny's shoulder. He leaned in closer, and she unbuckled his seat belt and pulled him into her side, wrapping her arm around him. It was pleasant. Soothing. It reminded Danny of the month after the accident, when he was violently ill as his DNA tried to make sense of itself and his insides continuously rearranged so his core could solidify and develop. The weeks before his core finally stabilized, Danny felt worse than he had in his entire life, save for the moment of death itself, but Jazz was always there. Danny remembered her making him warm foods to raise his hypothermic body temperature, even though he had trouble keeping anything down, and holding a warm cloth to his forehead, or talking softly, telling him encouragements or what his friends were up to at school. With all the time she spent with Danny while he was sick, it was honestly a miracle she never noticed any of the accidental bouts of invisibility or sudden shifts into ghost form that would constantly grip Danny before he stabilized.

Danny wished, suddenly, that he could tell her everything. Explain to her why he had been sick then, and why he'd just been sick now, and maybe everything would be okay because she would tell Danny that it was okay, that she still loved him, even if he was the strange, in between thing that he was, and she would comfort him and hold him, just like she was doing now. 

Then Danny thought about the jumpsuit she had that was identical to their mothers. He thought about how she had also had the same weapons training from a young age, and she had also been taught ghost's couldn't feel, and to shoot on sight. Her hands had held the same blasters that their parents had, and she knew how to use them, and she had used them. He had seen her tear Spectra apart with the Fenton Peeler. 

He thought about how she had said nothing in defense of Phantom at dinner, even after he had saved her. 

Danny felt cold again. He felt Jazz shiver. It was probably his fault. She held him tighter, but it no longer felt as comforting as it had. He no longer wanted to be held, or to tell her everything, or to pretend like he could tell her everything. 

All he wanted was to go home and patrol alone so he could soothe his Obsession. 

***

Jazz was worried about Danny. She couldn't help it. He seemed… alright as they walked dejectedly back into Fenton works. He told everyone he was feeling a bit better, but still not great, and that he was going upstairs to shower and sleep. 

And he really did seem fine. Jazz continuously reminded herself that everything was okay, he'd just eaten something bad and gotten sick. 

But he had looked so awful, and Jazz couldn't get the image of him, pale and rigid and corpse-like, out of her mind. And he had felt so, so cold when she held him. It brought back bad memories. Jazz started to worry that maybe it was more than just the dinner, that somehow he'd gotten a worse ecto-contamination sickness, like he had after the portal activation. Jazz didn't like remembering how sick Danny was in the weeks after the portal was first activated. They didn't fully understand why he had gotten sick, only concluding that it must have been from exposure to high levels of ectoplasm. It didn't seem likely that something like that would happen again- the portal was stable now- but Jazz couldn't help but recall a cold, corpse-like, ecto-sick Danny, and herself terrified she was going to lose her brother. 

He had seemed better, though, after they got home. He went upstairs to shower and go to sleep, and if he was as sick as he was before, he wouldn't have been able to do that. But even so, there was still something off. There was a distance in his demeanor, like he wasn’t really paying any attention to what they were actually doing, or like he was lying about something. Jazz worried that he was lying about being okay. Danny was a tough kid, and she knew that he was reluctant to open up about things that were bothering him, so she worried that he might have been sicker than he was letting on. 

Or she could have been projecting his previous distancing onto the current situation. Either way, Jazz decided it wouldn’t hurt to go and check up on him.

When she went upstairs, the bathroom door was open and the shower was off. There was still lingering steam, though, so Danny had definitely taken a shower, at least. 

“Danny?” she said, knocking on his door. “Are you dressed?” 

There was no response. 

“Danny?” she asked again. She was met with silence. “Okay, I really hope you're dressed because I'm coming in, okay?” 

She pushed the door open cautiously and peaked into Danny's room. 

It was empty. 

Jazz's stomach dropped. 

There was no way he could have faked being sick just to sneak out, she knew Danny had been actually, genuinely sick, but why was he sneaking out when he was sick? 

Cold anxiety thrummed through Jazz. She thought about telling her parents, but she was cautious about getting Danny in trouble. She felt like involving her parents would make things worse. He would probably completely shut down instead of maybe, maybe opening up to her. Jazz would have to find him herself instead. 

She started by calling Tucker. 

“Hello?” he answered hesitantly. 

“Hi Tucker! It's Jazz. Have you seen Danny?” 

“I thought you all were going camping today?” 

“We were, but the plans changed. You haven't seen him?” 

“Uh, no.” 

“Tucker, who is that?” came the distant sound of Sam's voice. If Tucker and Sam were together and not with Danny, that meant he was alone. Jazz listened to their short, muffled conversation before Tucker got back to her to say goodbye and hang up. 

“Wait!” Jazz said before the line could disconnect. “Do you have any idea where he might be?” 

There was another muffled conversation, during which Tucker must have given the phone to Sam, because she said, “No offense, Jazz, but if he didn't get in touch with us, he probably left to get some time alone.” 

“I know, I just… I'm worried about him. He was really sick.” 

“Wait, Danny was sick?” 

Jazz was taken aback by Sam's shock. 

“Yeah,” she said. “We were supposed to go camping, but he threw up right when we left.” 

“When you left your house, or when you left Amity?” 

“When we left Amity.” 

Sam cursed and then had another conversation with Tucker that Jazz couldn't understand. It was starting to frustrate her at that point. They obviously knew something she didn't, but that didn't make sense. What could they possibly know that would explain Danny being sick? And why wouldn't they just tell Jazz whatever it was so she could help her little brother?

“Okay, Tucker and I are… busy right now, but you might be able to find him at the park. You know the fountain?” 

“Yeah?” 

“There's a little clearing through some of the trees behind it. There's a weird little worn down duck statue and parts of a bench, we think it used to be a different section of the park before they changed things around. Point is, you can't miss it, and Danny sometimes goes there to… think, I guess. See if he's there. If he's not, just forget about it and go home. If you can't find Danny, chances are he doesn't want to be found, but sooner or later he'll end up home again.” 

“Okay. Fountain, clearing, duck.” 

“Yep. Bye, Jazz.” 

“Thank you, Sam. Really.” 

The line went dead sometime before Jazz finished her sentence, but she moved on, breathing deeply. 

It wasn't a long walk to the park, but it was long enough that Jazz was able to imagine every awful thing that could happen to Danny, and every awful thing he could have been thinking or feeling. It wasn't like him to sneak out like that. Danny was a good kid. 

At least, Jazz thought he was, but she was realizing more and more that Danny kept a lot of things from her, maybe even more than she knew. 

The park was unseasonably vacant, and it made Jazz even more uneasy. There wasn't any chill in the air that might have hinted at ghosts being the reason the people of Amity were avoiding the park that day, so Jazz elected to blame it on the hot afternoon sun instead. The park wasn't completely empty, either, only sparse, but the farther Jazz followed Sam's instructions, the fewer people she saw, until she was completely alone in a part of the park she had never seen before. Sam must have been right, though; it was clear that the small clearing she was in had once been an actual part of the park, but now it was abandoned and deteriorating. The bench was rotting. Weeds grew over the washed away dirt paths. The odd statue of a duck was tarnished and water-stained. 

It was also, apparently, empty. 

“Danny?” Jazz called anyway, scanning the clearing. He wasn't there, though. Jazz sighed and sat on the ground (she didn't trust the bench), worn out from her wild Danny chase and at a loss of where to go from there. Home, she supposed, but she couldn't stop worrying about Danny, and it felt like a form of failure to return home without finding him. 

It was colder in the clearing, Jazz realized. She hoped it was because it was more shaded than the rest of the park, but years of dealing with ghost attacks had Jazz glancing around nervously. 

And then the temperature really dropped, and sharp unease jolted up Jazz's spine as she jumped to her feet. 

“Who's there?” she called to the empty air. “I should warn you, my parents are very serious ghost hunters! And I know Taekwondo!” 

Jazz heard a small bout of laughter and she whirled around toward the sound. She hated how much of her fear dissolved when she saw it was Phantom. She tried to summon back her unease, but it was impossible when he was laughing at her in a completely lighthearted way. He was supposed to be scary. He was scary; he was one of the most powerful ghosts in Amity Park, but right then, he just looked like a teenage boy, just like Jazz's little brother, and it was impossible for Jazz to feel even a healthy modicum of fear. 

“Serious ghost hunters? Seriously? Have they ever even actually caught a ghost?” Phantom asked Jazz, his arms crossed as he floated a few feet away from her.

“Of course they have!” Jazz defended, although, when she thought about it, it was difficult to think of an example. “And I wasn't bluffing about the Taekwondo!” 

Phantom raised his hands in mock surrender. “Believe me, I know.” Before Jazz could ask him what he meant, he added, “What are you even doing here?” 

“I'm looking for my brother.” 

Phantom looked taken aback for a moment before he half laughed and looked at Jazz pointedly. “Here?” 

“His friends said I might find him here.” 

Once again, Phantom's cocky grin slipped. “M- his friends told you about this place?” 

“Why is that a problem?” 

Phantom frowned. “It's not,” he said, defensive in an almost whiny way. “What did you say to them?” 

Jazz crossed her arms. She didn't know what it was Phantom was trying to get her to admit, or what exactly was making him act so weird about her looking for her brother, but she was getting fed up. 

“Have you seen Danny or not?” 

Phantom laughed. He opened his mouth to respond, but before saying anything, he shivered and his entire body went completely rigid in a way Jazz didn't even think was possible for a ghost. His eyes widened, burning brighter, and he clenched his fists. Jazz would have thought he was upset at her, except his eyes were frantically searching the air around them.

“You need to go,” he said, suddenly serious. His voice was low and hard, but there was a slight edge to it. He was afraid. 

“What's happening?” 

It suddenly started to rain. It didn't begin like a normal rain, either, with a few gentle drops building into a downpour. It was like the sky had been sliced open and the rain was spilling from it like heavy blood. The wind picked up, whipping Jazz's hair around her face. The temperature plummeted, too, but Jazz suspected that that particular detail could be attributed to Phantom, judging by the intense glow of his green eyes and the energy she could almost feel crackling around him as an ecto-blast built in his hand. Jazz stared at him, bewildered by the sudden downpour and his reaction. It had been hot and sunny less than seconds ago. The rain was supernatural, Jazz was certain. A spike of fear stabbed into her stomach when she remembered Danny was somewhere out there, likely somewhere close if she trusted Tucker and Sam, which she did. She needed to find him. She needed to keep him safe. 

Jazz glanced nervously at Phantom before pulling out her phone. She was, in a way, risking his life- or whatever it was he had- but if she had to choose between her brother's safety and Phantom's, Danny took top priority. Phantom was strong, she didn't doubt that, but the slight edge of fear in his voice wasn't reassuring. He needed backup- even if that backup wanted to tear him apart molecule by molecule. 

911. ghost. park. 

The three words were quick and easy to type, and Jazz sent them off. She couldn't help but inhale sharply after, ready to do her own part to find her brother. As soon as she made any sound, Phantom glared at her. The intense burn of his eyes sent a shiver of fear up Jazz's spine. 

“What are you still doing here?” he asked, and in the state he was in, his voice crackled with angry static like an old walkie-talkie. 

Jazz raised her chin and put her hands on her hips. “Tucker and Sam said Danny would be here,” she said, forcing as much level calmness into her voice as she could and ignoring the fact her hair kept hitting her in the face because of the wild rain. “Which means he's around here somewhere; I'm not leaving without him.” 

Phantom scowled, brow furrowed in annoyance. “You don't understand. You can't be here. I can't-” he broke off, scratching as his stomach in a way that looked frighteningly familiar, before shivering again. “Vortex is powerful. I was barely able to beat him the first time I faced him, and those circumstances were… a little different. I can't duplicate myself this time, I can't protect you and fight him!” 

“I'm not asking you to protect me, I'm asking you to let me find my brother.” 

Phantom sighed. “Okay, fine, you asked me before if I've seen Danny, and I have. He was on his way home, and he's super safe, far away from the park. Happy? Now please just get out of here!” 

Jazz shook her head. She opened her mouth to tell Phantom that he was a terrible liar, but before she could say the words he was shot to the ground by a bolt of lightning. There was a loud cracking sound as the electricity met with his own energy and forced him into the dirt. For a barely solid being, he seemed to hit the ground hard, and when he stood, he was shaking slightly, arcs of electricity still flickering out around him. 

He looked terrifyingly angry, but he wasn't paying attention to Jazz anymore, so she backed away from the fight and towards the tree line, searching for a sign of Danny. He was probably terrified. 

“I hate,” Phantom said through gritted teeth, “being zapped.”

As frightening as Phantom was, his scare factor was nothing compared to the ghost that emerged, raging, from the air above the clearing. He was a living tornado, sharp and jagged with supernatural power. An almost primal dread froze Jazz in place, as if she could feel the thousands of years of evolutionary fear warning her to flee from the wild, temperate storm. Every inch of Jazz knew she was not safe, and as her body flooded with adrenaline, she almost allowed her flight reaction to take over and get her out of there. That was before her logic caught up to her and she was reminded of a need even deeper than that to survive: the need to protect. She had to find Danny. He needed her, and she couldn't leave him behind.

“Danny!” Jazz screamed over the howling wind. Phantom's attention snapped towards her, the din of battle and the crackle of lightning lulling temporarily as he did. 

“I told you,” he said to Jazz, voice full of echoes and static, his white hair whipping wildly and the green fire of his eyes casting an otherworldly glow around him like an ectoplasmic halo, “Danny isn't here. Now LEAVE!” 

Jazz couldn't help inhale sharply with fear at the force of Phantom's voice. She felt the chill all the way through her bones and it pushed her fear into an even stronger panic. Even still, there was a catch in his voice, a slight shift to his burning eyes. Even as he begged her to leave, he was lying, and Jazz didn't care why he was, or how much danger she was in, she couldn't leave her brother at the mercy of Phantom's battle. 

Besides, her parents were likely only minutes away. She only needed to find Danny and hide until they could get some weapons in their hands. 

Jazz went back to searching the tree line, weaving her way around the clearing and paying extra attention to the shadowy hollows where he might have been hiding. With each empty place, Jazz felt her panic build more and more. She shouted Danny's name, but once again there was no answer. 

Jazz was moving to make a break towards the other side of the clearing to search the next quadrant when something slammed into her. Phantom had always seemed so solid to her, even when he had grabbed her and turned her intangible, so it took her a long while to realize that it was him that had hit her. His body felt cold and smoky, and less like solid bone than dense, heavy mist. It was the first time, Jazz realized, that he really, truly felt like a ghost to her. She couldn't understand why, but the reminder frightened her. It was impossible to dwell on the thought, though, as all her breath was forced out of her. Her head slammed into the ground after her body, and she yelped in pain. Phantom was immediately off her, scanning her, his face twisted in fear. 

Jazz didn't have time to warn him before the other ghost sent a cyclone of wind at him. It wrapped around his torso and tail like a coil of rope and brought him towards the other ghost. Jazz watched helplessly as Phantom struggled, clawing against thin air. Another shock went through her when she noticed he was still staring at her, panicked, and all of his struggles were to get him to her. The other ghost said something that Jazz couldn't catch over the roar of wind, and Phantom's efforts doubled. 

Suddenly, his eyes widened, and he grimaced after coming to some sort of decision. He clapped his hands over his ears and stared purposefully at Jazz, yelling something she couldn't hear. Jazz's confusion must have shown because he did it again, and then again once more, and then Jazz understood. She repeated the motion, hands clamped over her ears, and she saw Phantom's face fill with relief before he steeled himself again, turned towards his enemy, and took a deep breath. 

Then, without any more warning, Phantom wailed. 

Even with her hands tightly covering her ears, and the screaming wind, the depth and volume of Phantom's wail made Jazz's teeth chatter and her entire body go fuzzy and cold. She watched as the force of the reverberating sound hit the other ghost and unraveled him. He was forced to the ground, and Phantom dropped, too, but he was still screaming. Jazz saw him fumbling with something, too, and she saw a glint of metal. When Phantom stopped, he slumped forward, and whatever was in his hands slipped from him and rolled towards Jazz. The other ghost was weakened, too, but Jazz didn't know how long that would last. She ran towards Phantom, and when she saw that what he had been holding was a Fenton thermos, she didn't hesitate to aim it at the tornado ghost and suck him into the small steel cylinder. 

“Phantom?” she asked immediately after. She closed the distance between her and the ghost. “I, uh, I caught the ghost.” 

Phantom tried to push himself back up, but Jazz saw that he was shaking. He was halfway to at least sitting on his knees when he fell forward again, this time completely sprawled out, and Jazz knew that he had passed out. 

No sooner had she come to the realization that ghosts could faint than a ring of white hot light appeared around Phantom and split, washing over him. Jazz watched, frozen in shock, as Phantom's limp body became the body of her little brother. 

Chapter Text

Part Two: Rift

When Danny came too, he couldn't remember for a long while what was going on. He was on the ground somewhere outside, cradled in Jazz's lap as she stared at him, wide-eyed. 

Then he heard his parents squawking about ghosts, and it all hit him at once. He lifted a hand to his face. Human, no glove. He could feel his heart beating in his chest and the warmth of the blood in his veins. He was Danny. Which meant- 

Danny looked back at Jazz's frozen, wide-eyed expression. 

Jazz knew.

***

Jazz stared down at Danny, holding tightly to his body, cradled in her lap. He was warm. He was warm. 

But he hadn't been. 

She could still remember the feeling of Phantom crashing into her. How he was cold, more mist than body, a ghost. 

And now he was Danny, and he was warm and solid in her arms. 

But he had been Phantom. 

He was Phantom. 

Danny was Phantom. 

***

Jazz knew. 

***

Danny was Phantom. 

***

Jazz knew. Panic was starting to build in Danny's stomach. He fought the urge to turn invisible as he searched his sister's face. She was still only staring at him, hardly blinking, completely frozen. 

Because she knew. 

***

Danny was Phantom. 

Phantom was Danny. 

Danny was Phantom, and Jazz was holding him after he had passed out overextending himself in battle, but now he had come to, and he was staring at Jazz. 

And he looked- 

He looked scared. 

Jazz didn't know what to do, so she just held her brother tighter. 

***

Danny was panicking. He knew that that was what was happening when he couldn't get a good hold of his spiraling thoughts as him and Jazz just stared at each other, both unblinking, and his chest felt heavy and tight. He couldn't quite breath right. Jazz was holding him tightly even as goosebumps erupted across her skin from Danny's fear induced cold. 

Danny had to say something. 

He couldn't say something. 

God, why had she brought their parents there? They were tromping around the clearing now, searching for the ghost that had attacked their children. 

Danny froze. From where he was on the ground, held by Jazz, he searched for Vortex, realizing too late that of course he was gone, Danny couldn't sense him. 

Danny's head was pounding, but he fought through the pain and the post wail-induced pass out haze until he vaguely realize that Jazz had captured him in Danny's thermos. The thought settled Danny's nerves until he looked back at Jazz, blinking at him slowly and shivering. Guilt twinged in Danny's gut and he immediately pulled himself away from Jazz, standing shakily to his feet. Jazz watched him, motionless. It was impossible for Danny to read her expression; it was entirely blank shock. 

That was, until her eyes darted to her parents, and then to Danny, and then back and forth again, and suddenly there was something new in her expression that had Danny's fear skyrocketing. 

This wasn't happening. Jazz couldn't tell them. Jazz couldn't know, none of them could. Danny couldn't be there.

Danny had to get out. 

In his panic, for a moment, Danny's control slipped and his instinct to flee, to go invisible, to sink through the ground and get out of there, took over. He pushed the feeling away the moment he registered it, but when Jazz's eyes widened, horrified, he knew the damage had been done. He'd… flickered.

His suspicions were doubly confirmed when he tried to take a step back and realized too late he'd sunk slightly during his brief lapse of control over his powers. His feet had sunk an inch into the soft earth, even though he'd only been intangible for a brief second. He tilted backwards at the unexpected resistance, and when he tried to regain his balance, over compensated and tipped forward instead. He hissed in pain as his hands and knees slammed to the ground. It hurt even more so because of the previous fight and his subsequent overexertion. 

Jazz was immediately on him, helping him back to sitting and examining his hands and knees. She was watching, struck, as blood began to well from the scrapes on his knees. 

“What?” Danny asked, even though he knew exactly what. 

“You're bleeding.” 

“I still bleed, Jazz.” Danny's traitorous voice cracked on his sister's name, because, oh, God, she really did know now. And she could do anything with the information. He could tell by her previous glances that she was already debating telling their parents, which was, probably, the absolute worst thing she could do. 

Jazz didn't say anything. She just kept looking at him, at his blood, at their parents, her brow furrowed and her face set in calculating concentration. 

Danny wanted to say something, wanted to beg her to keep her mouth shut, maybe even wanted to explain, but their parents were right there, and he had already risked a lot making that comment about blood, and, frankly, he still wasn't sure he wasn't going to flicker again. It was bad enough Jazz saw that. 

When Danny raised his hands to wipe the mud and blood from his knees, he realized they were shaking. His whole body was trembling. He paused, not sure what to do, and Jazz misinterpreted that as an invitation. She reached out and grabbed his hands and Danny was so skittish that it happened again. Her hands fell through his and she looked perplexed until realization dawned on her. 

“Danny-” she started, but Danny shook his head. He stood up and turned away from her. He needed to process this himself, without her making him feel guilty for being afraid. He was breathing too fast, too, but he couldn't seem to slow his lungs.

“Danny, stop!” Jazz said, but Danny didn't know what exactly she wanted him to stop until he saw their parents rubbing their arms and looking around warily, as if they expected a ghost to pop out at any moment. He looked at Jazz and saw that her arms were lined with goosebumps and her hair was frizzing and he swallowed, hard, tightening his grip on his powers and pulling them inward. 

Get a grip, Danny, he thought to himself. It's just Jazz- there's no way this could be worse than any ghost you've fought.

The thought calmed him somewhat. He'd literally died, and then almost died again countless times. Was he really this freaked out about his sister? 

But then again, wasn't this his worst fear? His family finding out? 

But Jazz wasn't their parents. She'd said so herself, when she questioned him at the observatory. Danny really, really hoped she was right. 

***

The only thing Jazz wanted to do was talk to Danny.

She had to talk to him, because there was no way anything she had seen had been real. 

Danny was Phantom. 

Danny could not be Phantom, nor could Danny have flickered, or caused her hands to fall through his, or made the air cold and electrified, because Danny was Danny. Danny was human. He was flesh and blood. He was her brother. 

But Jazz had seen… something. There had to be some explanation, and Danny definitely had it. 

The only problem was, Jazz couldn't ask him, not with their parents right there. If Jazz so much as looked at their parents, Danny freaked, and she could take a hint. 

As soon as Jack and Maddie determined that whatever ghost had attacked their kids was long gone, they quickly switched their focus towards Jazz and Danny. Jazz felt disconnected from her body as Danny shot her one last glance, his jaw clenched, his body rigid and shaking slightly, before he calmly explained to their parents that there had been a ghost, and yes it tried to attack them, but Phantom scared it off before any real harm was done, and then ditched Danny and Jazz when the Fentons showed up, and yes, him and Jazz were fine, and no, the scrapes on his knees weren't from the ghost, they were from just then, when Danny tripped and fell because the ground was still muddy from the freak rainstorm. He explained everything so calmly, so smoothly, that for a moment, Jazz almost convinced herself he wasn't lying. 

His hands were still shaking, though, even as he tightened them into fists. His parents might have thought it was because he was scared from the ghost attack, but Jazz knew better. 

Jazz knew. 

“What about you, Jazz?” 

Jazz blinked at her mother's worried face, suddenly conscious that she had been asked something. 

“Hmm?” she asked. Her mother’s frown deepened and she rested a hand cautiously on her shoulder. 

“Honey, I was asking if you were alright. You seem a bit shaken,” Maddie explained. 

“I'm okay,” Jazz said, but her voice was thin, almost distant. “I'm fine.” She was lying, and it wasn't believable, but Maddie didn't push it, and Jazz was grateful for it. That is, until Maddie determined that since they were safe and not too banged up, it was time for the reaming. Maddie put both hands on her hips, and though she was wearing her goggles, Jazz could tell from the tilt of her head she had one motherly brow arched above a piercing glare. 

“Now what exactly were you two doing out here?” she asked. “Your father and I were under the impression that both of you were safe at home.” 

Jazz floundered. She'd never really snuck out before- save for the other night- and she didn't have a ready excuse. 

“I- I, um, well-” she started, wringing her hands. 

“Sorry, Mom, it was my fault,” Danny cut in, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “I still wasn't feeling well, and I really needed some fresh air, so I asked Jazz to take me to the park. And this is the only part of the park with no people.” 

Jazz nodded along, but inside she was reeling. Wasn't Danny supposed to be a terrible liar? How was he saying all of this so calmly, so smoothly, without even a minute slip up, while Jazz couldn't even think of a single word to say? 

Jazz was quickly realizing that her brother was more of a stranger to her than she thought. Her stomach soured. She felt like the distance between them had suddenly grown immensely, and she didn't know, at this point, if it could be repaired at all. 

Not if Danny was- 

Jazz put a stop to the thought. What she saw was wrong. Danny was not a ghost. Danny was not dead. He couldn't be. He'd scraped his knees. He had bled, and the soft weight of his body had been warm and solid in her arms, not the whispy coolness of Phantom. Because Danny wasn't- Danny couldn't be-

Something had happened, something Jazz didn't understand, and so she would do what she always did, and she would find out what the answer was. 

Maddie seemed like she wanted to say more, but luckily for Jazz and Danny, her motherly need to fuss over them seemed to win out. In Jazz's opinion, whatever they had faced had been punishment enough for not telling their parents they were leaving, and she believed Maddie felt the same. 

Jazz watched as Maddie wrapped Danny into a tight hug. Danny didn't return it, but he didn't pull away, either. His face was blank. Jazz wished that she could see what it was he was thinking, what he was feeling, what he had done. 

He caught her staring and met her eyes over their mother's shoulder. His blue eyes were steely and serious. For a moment, Jazz thought they might have flashed a sickening ectoplasmic green. Her stomach felt cold. A new thought wormed its way into her mind, and it made her sick. 

Was this even her brother? 

Or had some ghost- some long dead thing- stolen her baby brother away and taken his place in her home, wearing his skin, his face, speaking with his voice and in his words, a mythological changeling. But no, no, that couldn't be it. Jazz would have known. She would have. It was her brother. He was warm, and he had bled. Ghosts didn't bleed. 

But she'd already been wrong about a lot of things. 

Jazz didn't speak to Danny as they were shuffled into the RV and driven home, and she didn't speak to him when they got home, nor did she stop him from immediately disappearing into his room- or maybe even out of the house- after a quick safety lecture from their parents. 

Jazz wanted to talk to him, she did. More than anything, she wanted to know what had happened at the park, what she'd seen and what it meant. But Jazz was afraid. She wanted answers at the same time she was terrified of them. More than that, she was painfully aware of how many lies she had missed from Danny, and how easily he had lied to her parents. She didn't think she could trust him anymore, and that realization felt like a stab to the gut. 

If Jazz wanted answers, she couldn't get them from asking Danny. She had to get them herself. 

***

Jazz didn't expect her little brother to show up for family dinner. She wasn't exactly sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't that. However, when she was called down for dinner, there he was, at his usual place at the table, picking at some sort of casserole.  

Jazz paused. She knew she was staring, but she couldn't help it. Danny was just… sitting there. Completely normal. As if nothing had happened. As if he was completely normal. 

“Jazz?” Maddie prompted. “Your food's getting cold, dear.” 

Jazz blinked away her daze and settled herself at the table. Danny frowned at her, and it made her feel, for a moment, that she was the crazy one. He might have been acting normal, but the way he looked at her was anything but. It was almost accusatory, a ‘how dare you’ against her offending stare. Jazz quirked her head in response, and Danny pointedly looked away, straight towards nothing as far away from her eyes as he could look. Jazz silently spooned some casserole onto her plate and took a bite. 

The air was thick and tense with everything unspoken, but Jazz wasn't going to be the one to break the silence. She felt like it had to be Danny; he was the one making her keep some weird, freaky secret from her parents. He was the one who kept that secret from her. He was the one hoarding an explanation. Danny was the one who did something. Jazz was just a witness. So, no, Jazz was going to keep her mouth shut, and Danny could do with that what he willed. 

Danny didn't look at Jazz, but his frown deepened, and she saw the hand next to her clench into a tight fist below the table. Jazz took another pointed bite of her food and chewed slowly and deliberately. 

Maddie looked back and forth between her two children. Jazz recognized the look in her eyes; she wasn't yet upset, or worried, but she was curious. She could sense that something had changed, and that they weren't quite acting right, and the entire situation was like a puzzle to her. Jazz chewed harder. She knew her mom loved solving impossible puzzles. It was what made her such a good scientist, and what kept her sane all those years of doing work to study something that hadn't even been proven to exist. 

Jazz also knew her mother was like that because Jazz herself had inherited the trait. Wasn't that what she was intending to do now? Weasel out information from her little brother so she could solve him like he was some equation in her SAT prep books? 

Jazz remembered Danny collapsed in her arms, shaking and terrified. Danny scrambling away from her, bloodying his knees, too afraid to let her touch his trembling hands. 

Guilt crept up Jazz's throat like bile. She swallowed it down with another silent bite of broccoli and cheese casserole. Danny refused to look at her, and they both ignored Maddie's inquisitive gaze. 

***

Jazz didn't mean to avoid Danny. Jazz didn't want to avoid Danny. Every time she saw him, though, her stomach went cold. She didn't turn away from him, but she wouldn't speak to him, and after a long moment of silence he would fix her with an intense, scrutinizing glare and leave himself. 

It was easy for Jazz to be busy enough to force Danny's… situation out of her thoughts. She had SAT prep, summer projects, summer reading, college applications. And Danny was never home. Jazz tried not to think about why. She turned off the TV when it reported anything about Phantom, especially when ghost attacks conveniently coincided with Danny being gone. Even when they didn't, Jazz had figured out that her thinking Danny was home didn't mean he was actually home. 

Jazz's anxieties grew. She knew she needed to talk to Danny. The whole situation was getting to the both of them. He was quieter, sullen and silent, and she was… she couldn't explain what it was she was feeling, but it was getting worse, and it was obvious that everyone could tell she was slowly losing it. 

Jazz didn't approach her brother, though. She didn't want to admit it, but she was terrified. She felt like they were balanced carefully on a tiny thread, stretched tight over an enormous rift that had split open that day in the park, that had maybe even begun to crack long before that. Jazz was afraid that, one way or the other, the not knowing was the only thing that was keeping them from falling. Whatever happened, whatever it was that was going on with Danny, whoever- or whatever- Danny was, something had shifted, and Jazz was painfully aware that there would be no unlearning whatever knowledge he would give to her. 

Jazz didn't like how scared she was. Never before had she been scared to find the answer to a question, but everything was going wrong around her. She had thought she knew her brother, and she didn't. She had thought she knew, or at least somewhat understood, Phantom, but she didn't. She thought she knew ghosts, knew the world, knew herself, but here she was, and here was everything scoffing at her expectations. Jazz was used to knowing things. She was used to knowing what to do. But now, she was shattering, and she was too afraid to even talk to her little brother because of what he might tell her.

***

Danny kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He couldn’t understand why Jazz was avoiding him, why she hadn’t approached him. He had expected an immediate interrogation, or for him to come home one day and immediately be locked in the lab for whatever painful decontamination process- or worse- their parents would deem necessary if she told them what she had seen in the park that day. He had not expected this tensity between them, an electric field of uncertainty that had Danny frustrated and paranoid. He ran through several possibilities. Jazz could be blackmailing him somehow, dangling this power she now held over him. She knew he didn’t want their parents to know; that much he knew had been conveyed to her, by his unsubtle facial expressions and, hopefully, her own understanding of their parents and how they would react. If she were anyone else, she could have taunted him, threatened him with exposure. But that would have been out of character for Jazz. Not only that, but if that was her goal, he imagined she would have at least had a conversation with him by now, if only to tell him to do her chores or some bullshit. Which, he hated to admit, would work. He would do anything to keep their parents from finding out. He had nearly resorted to threatening Jazz himself, but he’d restrained, instead settling for pointed glares. 

Which brought him to the next option. Jazz was scared of him. He knew it was true. Regardless of if that was the actual reason for avoiding him, it was true. He had seen the fear in her eyes when his own panic caused him to loosen his grip on his energy. As much as it tore at his heart and made his stomach ache, she had a right to be afraid. He was powerful. He was dangerous. He wasn’t human. 

Something in him also believed that Jazz was punishing him with her silence. She was petty like that, sometimes. He had numerous memories of silent treatments when they were younger for various reasons he couldn’t remember. She had pushed and prodded for an explanation, and he had lied every time. This wasn’t an ideal way for Jazz to have found out. If it had been up to him, she wouldn’t have found out at all. Of course she would be angry; he’d been sneaking out, lying to her, being a complete asshole to her every time she wouldn’t stop bugging him. He didn’t deserve worse, but if her silence and avoidance was the worst, then he could take that. He should take that. He was okay with taking that.

Until he remembered this was his sister. His stubborn, annoying, compassionate sister. He thought about how kind she had been to him, to Phantom-him, all those weeks ago at the observatory. She had been gentle, apologetic, sympathetic. When she’d returned, and he thought she was an intruder, she’d seemed guilty. And understanding. When he thought about that, he felt an ache in his chest, and he wished desperately she would just talk to him. Maybe, if she let him explain, she would understand. She was smart, and she knew lots of stuff about psychology, and she cared about him, hopefully enough that maybe, maybe, she wouldn’t freak out and tell their parents he’d been possessed or something.

Danny was afraid too, though. He found himself also avoiding her, worried he might say the wrong thing, or push her limits too far somehow, and she would go running for a blaster and a thermos or their parents. So he stayed silent, and he kept patrolling, kept soothing his Obsession, kept pretending everything was normal, even though nothing had been right or normal since he was fourteen and still fully alive. 

***

Jazz was barely keeping it together, and she knew everyone could tell. Her hair was frizzing. She was scattered. Danny kept looking at her everytime they passed each other in the hallway, and she couldn’t decipher what it was he was thinking, even though she should have. She should know what those blue eyes were telling her- and she shouldn’t keep imagining them flashing green. Because that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be, and she really just needed to talk to Danny to clear up her misunderstanding, because Jazz couldn’t have been that wrong. 

She couldn’t have been wrong about her baby brother being alive. 

Jazz was trying to work on annotations for her summer reading assignment. Trying, and failing. She couldn’t focus. She kept readjusting her headband so much that she knew her hair was a mess, and the clock continued to tick later and later into the night. Exhaustion began to pull at her as much as her anxiety, and the words of the novel weren’t making it to Jazz’s brain. Her mother, graciously, didn’t comment on Jazz’s fidgeting. 

Danny wasn’t home. Jazz knew that. He was, according to him, watching a movie at Tucker’s house with the other boy and Sam. Jazz wasn’t sure if she believed that. While she was grateful he at least wasn’t sneaking out, she couldn’t stop the worried tangents her mind kept following, imagining the worst places he could be, or the most dangerous things he could be doing. She couldn’t help but remember the pained expressions Phantom had made when he was with her at the observatory, or the way he had casually mentioned the pain of being blasted by an opponent, and imagining that being Danny. Everytime she followed that line of thinking, she slammed it down, mentally forcing back up her walls of denial. Those walls were starting to crumble, though, and she was grateful that her mother had turned off the news in favor of a yoga instructional video she was now following after Jack had retired for bed. That way, at least Jazz wouldn’t be confronted by potential news footage of the ghost boy’s latest public showdown. 

Maddie’s video came to an end and she paused, sitting butterfly on her yoga mat and frowning at the clock and then the door. 

“Danny’s out past curfew again,” she said, brow creased. Jazz’s stomach swooped slightly. 

“They probably just started the movie too late,” Jazz said, but her words felt hollow. She didn’t believe them, as much as she wanted to. She was saved from spiraling too intensely when she heard the tell-tale jingle of Danny’s keys in the front door lock. He pushed the door open and closed quickly and locked it behind him. When he spun towards the stairs, he froze, blinking at Jazz. 

“Oh. Hi, Mom. Hi, Jazz,” he grumbled, looking at his feet. 

Maddie raised an eyebrow. “Daniel James Fenton, do you know what time it is?” 

“Yeah, I know, I’m sorry,” he said, eyeing the stairs like he wanted to bolt. 

“I thought we agreed curfew was eleven.” 

“We did, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again, now can I go to my room?” Danny tripped through the words quickly, but he looked exhausted. He scratched at his shirt unconsciously. Jazz first realized how scuffed the white T-shirt was, and then her eyes fell on the spot below his collar. Maddie saw it at the same time she did, but while Jazz was frozen, stomach slowly turning cold, Maddie immediately descended on Danny, grabbing at his shirt and examining the offending fabric more closely. 

“Danny,” she asked, frowning severely. Her voice was oddly clinical. “Is that… ectoplasm on your shirt?” 

Jazz swallowed. Hearing the word made it true. Hearing the word made it real. If she and her mother both saw it, she couldn’t deny that splotch of glowing green liquid dried right under the collar of Danny’s shirt. It was small, hardly noticeable at first glance, but it was there. And it was undeniably ectoplasm. 

Danny pulled his shirt from his mom’s hand, shaking her off. “Of course not,” he said with a shaky laugh. He caught Jazz’s eye over their mother’s shoulder and a tensity came over his features. “That would be crazy.” 

Jazz knew then that he was lying, and more than that, he was very heavily implying that she keep her mouth shut about it. 

“Are you sure?” Maddie said, brow furrowing. “Because it looks a lot like-” 

“It’s paint,” Jazz blurted. The words were falling out of her mouth before she could catch up to them. “Glow in the dark paint. Danny said he was going to help Tucker and Sam paint some stars on Tucker’s ceiling, like Danny’s.” 

“Yeah,” Danny echoed. He blinked at Jazz. “I must have dripped some on myself. I should- I should go shower and change.” 

He brushed past Jazz and Maddie. When Maddie wasn’t looking, he paused on the landing, turning back towards Jazz. Her head was reeling, and she didn’t know what expression she might have been making, but something warmed in Danny’s expression, and he smiled a small, soft smile at her before ducking upstairs.

“I'm going to go to sleep, too,” Jazz said, hardly registering her own voice. Her mother said something, but whatever it was, Jazz didn't hear. She walked carefully to her room, mechanically, step by step. She could hear her heart thumping dully in her chest as her thoughts started to spiral. The ectoplasm on Danny's shirt was burned like an imprint over her eyes. 

When she got to her room, she closed the door softly, and didn't move. She only stood, staring at the door, completely still, not entirely sure what she should be doing, what she should be thinking. She was crumbling. Every moment since that day in the park was slamming down on her, crushing the fragile denial she had tried desperately to build up. 

That single spatter of ectoplasm was damning. It was real. It was tangible. It couldn't have been induced by a misunderstanding, or panic, or some bizarre ghostly illusion. 

Somehow, Danny was Phantom. 

Somehow, Danny was dead. 

Jazz's body felt heavy. Her chest tightened. Her eyes burned and she realized with a shock that she was crying. She moved to sit on her bed and let herself cry, pulling her knees to her chest and holding herself tightly. 

She thought the words over and over, and each time felt like a new wound, a new pain, a new reminder that she would never be able to repair her relationship with her brother, not truly, not if he wasn't her brother anymore. Not if Danny was dead.

Danny was dead. 

Danny was dead. 

Danny was dead. 

***

Danny was at his wit's end. He couldn't exist in this weird limbo space with Jazz anymore; he had to talk to her. Plus, after she'd covered for the ectoplasm on his shirt, he began to feel some hope. Hope that, maybe, his sister wouldn't freak out on him if he fully explained everything. Or, at least, she wouldn't run straight for the ecto-containment center in the lab. Or a blaster. 

Danny steeled himself for what would inevitably be the scariest conversation of his life and left his room, crossing the hallway towards Jazz's room. It hadn't been long since he'd heard her close the door to her room, so he knew she was in there, and she hadn't gone to the bathroom to shower, so she couldn't have been sleeping. 

He didn't know why he hesitated before he knocked. He didn't want to admit it might have been because he was scared. Regardless of the reason, he paused at Jazz's closed door, and in the silence that hung over the house, he heard… crying. Danny's brain short circuited. Without thinking of the whole massive intrusion of privacy thing, Danny slipped into invisibility and stepped through the door. To keep his distance, he hovered in the corner of the ceiling. He blinked down at Jazz. She was sitting rigid on her bed, hand over her mouth and tears streaming down her face. Danny's core ached. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Jazz cry. He knew it must have been his fault. He almost dropped to the floor and went visible then and there before the logical part of his brain caught up to him and he realized that would only scare her more. Instead, he returned to the outside of her room, checked to be sure he was alone in the hallway, and dropped his invisibility. Then, with a steeling breath, he knocked on his sister's door. 

***

Jazz startled at the knock on her door. She cleared her throat and wiped furiously at her wet eyes. 

“You can come in,” she said, sitting up straighter and adjusting her headband. She expected her mother to open the door. Instead, it was Danny who took a slow, hesitant step into her room. Jazz swallowed and hoped it wasn't too obvious she had been crying. Danny stared at her, expression unreadable, while she struggled to think of something to say. Finally, after a far too long moment of silence, he clenched his jaw and shut the door. 

“Look,” he said, crossing the room to stand in front of where Jazz was sitting on the bed. “We can't keep doing this, okay?” 

Jazz didn't speak. Danny blinked at her and frowned. 

“Mom and Dad- or at least Mom- is going to realize something is up, and I can't- they can't-” He swallowed. “I can't let them find out because you’re being weird, and I can't stand always being terrified that you're one second away from telling them.” 

“You think I would tell them?” Jazz didn't know how to feel about that. She wasn't even sure what it was exactly she knew, but she had thought that Danny could trust her. 

Danny hesitated for only a moment. “No,” he said with finality. “No, not anymore. Thanks, by the way. For the, uh, the paint thing.” He picked at the spot on the fresh shirt he was wearing where the old one had sported the ectoplasm splotch. He chuckled drily. “Who knew a nosebleed could cause so much stress?” 

“Of course,” Jazz said quietly, choosing to ignore the latter half of his statement. “Danny, I-” She stopped, not sure how to continue. Danny swallowed and nodded. He moved to sit on her bed, pulling his legs up to sit cross legged facing her. 

“I know,” he said, picking at a scab on his knee and not looking at her. “I should have told you sooner. But- you get why I didn't, right?” 

“No.” 

Danny winced. 

“I'm sorry,” he said. 

“No, I mean, I don't understand anything,” Jazz continued. She pushed one hand into her hair, fingers raking at her scalp. “I don't know what I saw, I don't know if you're okay, I don't know whether or not you're-” Jazz choked. She couldn't say the word out loud. 

“Phantom?” 

“Dead.” 

The word hung heavily between them in the silence that it brought. Danny's face was unreadable, but he had drawn into himself, and he was staring hard at Jazz's lavender duvet. 

“I- I'm not. At least, not fully.” 

He met Jazz's eyes and the confusion that must have been clearly displayed in them. Danny sighed.  

“I'll explain everything, okay?” he said. “Remember the accident with the portal?” 

Jazz was silent as he continued, going over the details of his accident, and the aftermath. Jazz felt cold, and she knew it wasn't because of any supernaturally affected temperature. 

“So now you're-” Jazz didn't know how to continue. 

“Not dead,” Danny supplied. “But not not dead. They- the other ghosts, I mean- call me a halfa. Or liminal.” 

“The ghosts know what you are?” Jazz didn't say other ghosts. She didn't like that Danny did, that he thought of himself as one of them. She didn't like it even more if they knew a huge part of her brother's life that she didn't. 

Danny huffed a short laugh. “Yeah,” he said, as if it was obvious. “They seriously do. But it's, uh, kind of different. To them. There's not really secrets between ghosts, unless someone is being intentionally deceptive, or if they were, like, a pathological liar or something when they were alive, or something. Otherwise it's seriously what you see is what you get, and everyone is aware of the big names.” He paused, then added as an afterthought: “Except me, I guess. I miss out on a lot of the memos apparently.” 

“But you're a big name? To them?” 

Danny shrugged, looking sheepish. “Phantom is,” he said. “It's mostly because I'm… different. New. And powerful, when I know what I'm doing. Plus, I've been knocking them around since I was fourteen.” 

Jazz nodded slowly. Her head was still spinning, overloaded by revelation after revelation. It was still hard to believe what Danny was saying. She knew it was true, knew he wasn't lying, but it still didn't compute in her brain to picture him white-haired green-eyed and ghostly. 

“You're really him,” she said quietly. “You're really Phantom.” 

Danny gave her a strange look. “But I'm still me, too, Jazz,” he said. “I'm not- Phantom- he's me, okay? He's just another part of me. I can transform, sure, but I'm always Phantom. And Phantom is always Danny. You get that, right? 

“I- I think so.” 

Danny looked relieved. There was a comfortable silence between them for a moment as he slowly smiled. Jazz's heart warmed, and she felt like she must have been glowing from the sudden rush of hope that filled her. This was scary, and super weird, sure, but it wasn't impossible. Jazz could deal with her brother being a little bit ghostly. He wasn't dead, and he didn't hate her, and, thank God, he wasn't possessed or anything worse. He was just… a little different. Jazz could handle that. They would be okay. 

“So, wait,” Jazz continued after a while. “You can just… go ghost? Whenever you want?” 

Danny nodded. 

“And then you're Phantom, and you have all these powers, and you fight ghosts.”

“Basically. But, uh, I can use my powers when I'm not transformed, too.” To demonstrate, he held up his arm and suddenly his hand was invisible. He held it up for Jazz to gawk at then shook it out and allowed the visibility to return. 

“And it doesn't… hurt?” Jazz couldn't help but ask. 

“Nope. Just feels a little cold. And it takes more energy when I'm human ‘cause my core has less ectoplasm to draw on. Which- okay, I'll explain that one later. It's kind of… weird, and complicated, and I don't really understand it that much.” 

Jazz vaguely remembered her parents talking about ghost cores, about how they're essentially what stabilizes a ghost's form, and makes up the center of their truest essence. 

‘You… have a core?” 

“Mmhmm.” 

“Always? Even when you're-” Jazz felt weird saying ‘human’, because in her mind Danny was always human. “-not transformed?” 

“Yeah,” Danny answered. 

“How do you know?” 

“I can feel it. Sometimes. It's-” his hand hovered vaguely over his torso between his chest and his stomach, “-somewhere around here.” He tapped gently at the spot, then rubbed it before letting his hand dropped, and Jazz was struck with the memory of their aborted road trip. 

“When you were sick in the car,” Jazz said, the realization coming to her as she spoke. “That was- that was a- a ghost problem. A problem with your core.” 

Danny's expression darkened. “Yeah,” he said. “It shouldn't have been a problem at all.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Danny sighed. “I don't really want to go into detail about the why,” he said. “It's kind of- well, not embarrassing, just… personal, I guess. It's not really- It's not really something we share. Not in words, at least.” 

We. Him and the ghosts. Jazz's stomach curled. 

“Basically, though, I can't- I can't really leave Amity Park. Not right now. And not if-” He broke off. “I'm just- I'm stuck here. For now. Maybe forever, but-” His face suddenly tightened. “I really, really hope not.”

That at least explained why his sickness vanished as soon as they crossed back into town lines. But still- 

“That's awful, Danny,” Jazz said. 

Danny shrugged, picking at a stray thread on Jazz's duvet. “S'not too bad,” he said. “It's not like I'm ever going to go anywhere anyway.” 

Jazz stared at him, shocked at the casual way he said the words, as if he completely believed them. 

“What are you talking about?” Jazz asked, voice sharper than she intended to. “What about college? What about moving out? What about… hopes? And future dreams?” 

Danny blinked his big blue eyes at her and she watched as a heavy sadness slowly settled across his features. 

“I can't, Jazz,” he said. “This- Phantom, Amity, the Zone, all of it- that's all I have now.” 

“No,” Jazz replied quickly. “That's not right. I can't accept that.” 

“You know what my future dream was, Jazz?” 

Of course, Jazz thought. You're my baby brother. You have stars on your ceiling. 

But she stayed silent, settling into the mood Danny had set and letting him speak.

"I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to work at NASA." His voice trembled. Jazz could feel the heavy force of his sadness pressing against him, could see the way he was fighting back the tears welling in his eyes. She wanted to grab him and hold him, but she was afraid to touch him. It wasn't too long ago that he had startled out of her touch. She was afraid his skin would be cold. He looked frighteningly small, sickeningly young, lips tight and blue eyes wide and shiny. 

"You still can," Jazz said, softly and slowly, as if he was a stray kitten. 

"You really think I could pass even a normal physical?” Danny's voice was suddenly hard. “They're not going to let me into space! My resting heart rate is barely pushing double digits!" 

Jazz swallowed. He was angry, he was so angry. Gone was the vulnerability as he blinked away his tears, fists clenching tightly. Jazz could almost feel the energy she knew was crackling through him. For a moment, only briefly, the blue of his eyes flickered into an electric green that cast an otherworldly sheen over his skin. Her little brother was terrifying when he was angry. But Jazz wasn't afraid. She could never be afraid of him, this small boy. She had held him when he was born, blinking curiously at the bright new world around him. She had fed him, read to him, stayed up late helping him with his math homework. They shared candy. She taught him how to bake. She could never be scared of him. His anger only made her sad. Something in Jazz broke then. She felt it, like a taught cord being cut. She knew that Danny would forgive their parents for the portal accident. He was too kind, too guilty, too self-sacrificing. Traits, she realized suddenly, that connected him to Phantom. But Jazz would be angry until she died. They had taken so much away from her baby brother, and she would never forgive them. 

Danny sighed deeply and slouched into himself. "I'm sorry, Jazz. It's not your fault. I didn't mean- I'm sorry." He looked back at Jazz. His eyes were no longer glowing, or green, just blue. Blue and hollow. Jazz felt another stab of pain, of rage. He might still be half alive, but their parents had killed her little brother. 

"It's just- they're not gonna let a kid who sets off an EMF scanner onto a space station," he continued. "Or into a government facility at all. And if they did, it wouldn't be because I'm a good astronaut, it would be because- because-" He stopped, eyes darting away. Jazz's stomach clenched. "Well, they're scientists." He said the words with sour venom, and Jazz understood. They would experiment on him. They would study him. Force him into a lab and analyze everything about him that made him tick, the mechanisms that kept him alive, the differences written into his blood, his DNA. She knew this. This had been the steady background to her entire life. 

“That's why you don't want Mom and Dad to know.” As Jazz said the words, she knew it was true, and she felt like a complete idiot. Of course Danny would be terrified. They hated ghosts. They were completely close minded when it came to any alternative viewpoints regarding ghosts. They hated Phantom. 

Danny winced. “Yeah,” he said. “Don't really feel like getting torn apart molecule by molecule anytime soon.” 

Jazz was horrified. Her anger flared again. 

“I won't ever tell them,” she said. “I swear. This is- I'm so sorry, Danny. I'm so sorry you've been alone in this.” 

“S'okay,” Danny replied with a shrug. “I mean, Tucker and Sam have always known, so I haven't been completely on my own. They help me patrol and fight, too. And, uh, of course there's also the other ghosts. They're not all Obsessed with messing with Amity. Or me. I have… friends, in the Zone and around Amity.” 

“I'm glad,” Jazz said, and she meant it, even though it made her skin crawl to think of Danny chatting with ghosts, regardless of his connection to them. She wouldn't easily forget the way she had seen ghosts manipulate people- including herself- in the past. 

“I'm sorry that you- that you were afraid to tell me, too. I won't- I would never do anything to hurt you.” 

Danny smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.” 

Then he hugged her. Jazz was startled for only a moment before she wrapped her arms around her baby brother and held him tight. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest. His skin was warm. He was breathing. She held him tighter. 

“I love you, little brother.”