Chapter Text
Jazz sat at the kitchen table, scrolling through Facebook and trying not to wince. Even now, almost four weeks later, dozens of videos continued to pop up about Danny. She looked up at him, his bowl of cereal untouched, eyes staring off into the distance, and she swallowed as she realized his chest did not move. Danny remained impossibly still, as if he were carved from marble rather than flesh, and she barely suppressed a shudder as she stared at him. “Danny?”
The spell broke in an instant, a breath passing through his lips as he turned and blinked at her. “Yeah?”
“How’s school going so far?” Ugh, what a silly question to ask. She knew how it was going, and it definitely wasn’t what she wanted to talk to him about, but she didn’t know where to begin. Things were still so awkward between them since he came back. He raised an eyebrow but gave a half-smile, rolling his eyes.
“Fine, Jazz. The ghosts haven’t been attacking much,” he said, “so I’ve been able to get my homework done. Mr. Lancer’s giving me a quiet space and some help with my assignments a couple of days a week, too.”
“I can tutor you again, too, if you want,” offered Jazz. “I don’t have much to do until I go back to school next semester.”
“You’re definitely going back, right?”
“Tired of me already?” she teased.
“No, it’s just–if something like this were to happen again, I’d want you to keep living your life instead of worrying about me,” he said as he stared down and swirled the cereal around in his bowl with his spoon. “The world deserves to have a brilliant psychologist like you.”
She ignored the compliment, an attempted misdirection on Danny’s part. “You think it could happen again?” They knew so little about his disappearance, only that the Observants and Fright Knight kept him confined to Pariah Dark’s Keep, refusing to let him leave until Clockwork apparently convinced them to let him go. She still didn’t know a lot of the details, although she and Tucker and Sam were trying to keep each other in the loop since they knew he was hiding something from them. More than once she found herself occasionally waking up in the middle of the night, checking his room to make sure he was still there. Danny teased her about it, but he didn’t understand what it was like for them when he was gone, worrying endlessly as they wondered if he was alive or dead, if they should tell their parents his secret or not. They only chose not to because they had no way to prove it and at some point, it didn’t seem like it mattered if he was fully dead and gone.
He shrugged. “Anything’s possible, right?”
That was definitely not the reassuring response she expected from him. “Right, but I thought Clockwork convinced them to let you go. Why would they kidnap you again?”
“It’s not like they’re always rational about this stuff, Jazz. And there was always a chance something like this might happen, or that some other ghost would come after me or something. I don’t exactly have a lot of friends in the Ghost Zone.” He forced himself to take a bite of his cereal, wincing slightly.
“Mom and Dad not giving up on the decontamination procedures?”
“Nope. They’re going to do them until I’m fully dead, I think. They–they hate this,” he said, gesturing to himself. “They never noticed any of the weird stuff about me before, but now I can feel them staring at me all the time. Every little thing puts them on edge.”
“You do seem a little more ghostly since you came back,” said Jazz carefully. She knew Sam and Tucker were tiptoeing around it, not wanting to make things harder on Danny, but she felt like at this point he should know. At first, they thought that the weird atmospheric shifts and the other changes were temporary, just side effects from being in the Ghost Zone for so long, but after a month it was getting harder to believe there wasn’t more to it than that.
“Oh?”
“You’ve been using ghost speech more,” she said, and he grunted as he shoved another spoonful of cereal into his mouth. “And you’re paler and the air around you feels . . . weird?”
“What?” His hand stopped mid-bite as he stared at her, his gaze so intense it made her squirm.
“It’s like, um . . . cold?” She bit her lip, trying to think of how to explain it without getting him upset. “Most of the time it feels kind of like a snowstorm is coming, but sometimes there’s this kind of edge to it when you’re angry. Sam says it smells like a thunderstorm.”
“That’s great. Just great,” he groaned, dropping his spoon and putting his head in his hands, and sure enough, she could feel the chill worsen. She rubbed her arms, shivering as Danny scowled. “Am I doing it right now?”
“Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She really hoped she could get a better handle on her own reaction so he wouldn’t notice next time, but surprisingly, Danny didn’t seem upset with her.
“No, no, it’s good to know,” he said as he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “That didn’t happen before?”
“I don’t think so.”
Danny picked up his spoon again, stirring his cereal, the colored pieces leaving rainbow swirls as the dye leached out into the milk. “Anything else?”
“You kind of forget to breathe sometimes, I think,” she said, and he seemed less surprised by that than she expected as he forced down another bite. “Like you get too still, and it’s . . . um . . .”
“Freaky?” he finished bitterly, and Jazz winced. She tried so hard to avoid using that word, knowing how much it triggered him after Spectra.
“I was going to say weird. Or maybe a little scary in the worried-about-you kind of way, not in the you-seem-scary kind of way,” said Jazz. “Maybe you’ve always done it since your accident, though. I didn't watch you this closely before you were kidnapped.”
“It’d be nice if you wouldn’t watch me so closely now,” he said as he stood up, putting his bowl next to the sink. At least he ate about half of his breakfast this time. She worried it wasn’t enough - he was so thin now - but she knew pointing out his weight only made him more upset and less likely to eat. It wasn’t his fault. She knew he was trying, but as long as her parents kept up the decontamination procedures, he would keep feeling too nauseous to get anything down.
“Sorry, Danny. I’m just–we’re all just worried, that’s all. We still don’t really know what happened to you.”
She felt the static charge in the air, his frustration bubbling over as he turned back to her. “Why does it matter?”
“What?”
“It’s been a month. I want to go back to normal, okay?” He hugged himself, his arms trembling as his fingers dug into his sleeves. “I want to go to school, hang out with my friends, and play stupid board games with you and Mom and Dad on the weekends again. I want to go to the movies and go to the Humpty Dumpty concert next month. But I can’t get back to feeling like everything is fine again as long as Mom and Dad keep putting trackers on my phone and forcing me through endless decontamination procedures no matter how much I beg them to stop. And, like, even you and Tucker and Sam spend all your time examining me like you think I’m going to break or hurt someone if you stop watching me. I just–I want to be normal .”
Frost formed beneath his feet, spreading out in thin tendrils from him, and goosebumps prickled up and down her arms. She worried if this kept going that her parents would find him and assume the worst. “Sorry, Danny,” she apologized as she stood up, putting a hand on his shoulder even as the contact with him made her teeth ache from the cold. “We–we can try, okay? I can’t control what anyone else does, but I’ll do my best to give you some space until you’re ready to talk about it.”
He swatted her hand away. “And if I never want to talk about it?” He took a step back and looking at the floor he winced, running his hands through his hair. “Crud. Of course. I literally can’t even get through talking about being normal without being some kind of freak.”
“Danny–”
“--forget it, Jazz,” he said, stomping out of the kitchen and up the stairs as she watched him go.
“Way to make it worse, Jazz,” she sighed to herself as she stared at the frost on the floor, wondering how on earth she could possibly clean it, but then she noticed it evaporating into a faint, blue mist. Sitting back down at the table as she waited for it to all dissipate just in case her parents came upstairs and she needed to distract them from it, Jazz picked up her phone and saw a new email from a student she used to tutor at Casper High. It was a request to sign some petition to . . . Oh.
‘Force Casper High to remove the ghostly threat from our school!’
She paused for a second before scrolling down to read the full description, dread pooling in her stomach.
‘Three months ago Daniel Fenton was kidnapped. We all rejoiced when we thought he was returned to us, but the thing sitting in class with our children is not Jack and Maddie Fenton’s missing child. Students have reported that it does not breathe or eat and that it uses its powers to make the classroom an inhospitable environment for learning. When concerns about the ghost posing as a former student were raised at the school board meeting this month, administrators dismissed the allegations and refused to listen to ( and EVEN SUSPENDED! ) the only teacher brave enough to speak up and defend their students! We have notified the Ghost Investigation Ward, but while they confirmed they have an active investigation ongoing, they are refusing to take the action needed NOW to protect our kids!
Will you sign and share this petition demanding that administrators remove this ghostly imposter from our schools?’
“Oh, no.” She doubted the petition had any real teeth. They could not demand Danny be forced out of school, or at least she didn’t think they could, but that mattered way less than the fact that it existed at all. Currently, there were just over three hundred signatures and counting, with comments from his classmates and local parents about Danny being an inhuman freak who should be locked away in a government facility or sent back to the Ghost Zone where he belonged. She seriously hoped Danny didn’t know about it. She couldn’t imagine how negatively this would impact his delicate psyche.
She needed to tell her parents, though. They should know, especially if they were talking to the school about Danny, and Jazz headed downstairs to the lab. Her Dad and Mom were sitting at a workbench reviewing some data printed out on a massive stack of paper, making occasional highlights as they scanned through it, and the doors to the portal were shut tightly, with a half-dozen new alarms attached to alert them to the presence of any ghost that might try to come through. Like everything they changed since Danny was taken, Jazz doubted it would stop the ghosts from kidnapping him again, but she didn’t say as much to her parents. They needed to feel some semblance of control, as if there were a way to prevent this from happening, and she wouldn’t take that from them since so far none of it was really hurting Danny, either. “Hey, sweetie,” said Mom, noticing her first. “You okay?”
Jazz shook her head as she handed her phone over with the email open. Leaning to the side, Dad peered over Mom’s shoulder as the two of them read it together, their expressions darkening as they finished it. She saw Mom scroll through the comments for a minute, biting her lip. “Oh, hon. They probably can’t expel him this way.”
“I know, but Danny’s already struggling with adjusting after everything,” said Jazz. “If he sees this, then I can’t imagine how traumatizing it would be.”
“His teachers mentioned that some of the other students are still getting used to him being back,” said Dad, which felt like an overly polite way to describe what was probably bullying or harassment directed at Danny by his peers. “We talked to Mr. Lancer about it at our meeting yesterday, and we’re working on a 504 plan for him. We can let his teacher know about the petition in case he hasn’t seen it.”
“Maybe we should look into counseling, too. Danny’s been opposed to seeing a therapist when we’ve brought it up, but it might be time to make it mandatory,” said Mom. After Spectra, Jazz doubted he would willingly get within a hundred feet of another therapist of any kind (something she tried not to take too personally), but there was no question Danny should be getting support from someone besides his family and friends. “I’ll ask his doctor for a referral after his appointment next week.”
“He’s going to the doctor?” They knew from the past couple of years that nothing really showed up in Danny’s check-ups beyond a reduced body temperature and heart rate, but she felt a twinge of uneasiness, worried this time would be different because of the changes.
“I think he’s losing weight. He says he’s nauseous all the time, most likely because of the ectoplasm in his system,” said Mom. “We hoped the decontamination procedures would work better, but the ecto contamination is incredibly pervasive. It’s altered him on a molecular level. We didn’t think that was even possible.”
Dad clenched his fists tightly as he scowled. “I never wanted our work to get you kids hurt like this. It’s not fair that the ghosts took him and changed him this way as some kind of sick revenge against us.”
Jazz blinked, her mind trying to catch up. “Wait, so you think the ghosts kidnapped him to make him more ghostly or something?” She knew that wasn’t it, but it wasn’t as if her parents knew Danny’s secret, so she couldn’t be surprised they were jumping to their own conclusions about the Fright Knight’s intentions.
“Danny’s teacher suggested it, and honestly, what else could it be? They never insisted on anything from us, they didn’t kill him or demand we stop being ghost hunters in return for getting Danny back,” said Mom. “No doubt they hoped we would reject him or thought it would be funny to torment us by torturing Danny this way.” Jazz swallowed. What would they do now if they learned the truth? Getting their parents to accept Danny being Phantom would have been a challenge before even as they knew it was possible given the other timelines and realities Danny experienced, but now, after his kidnapping, it felt way more likely their parents would accuse him of being an imposter or something else instead.
Ugh, she was going to have to try to push back on this crazy idea, wasn’t she? She had no idea how to really do that without talking about Danny’s secret, though. “We don’t know for sure that’s what they were doing, Mom. They could have a dozen reasons for taking Danny that have nothing to do with the two of you.”
“Like what?” asked Dad.
“Like maybe they thought he was the reincarnation of their old king or some ex-boyfriend or something,” she said. Oh, geez, that was a completely ridiculous idea, but Dad frowned, considering it for a moment despite the absurdity. “Or maybe they thought he was already a ghost and believed they were helping him. A lot of the ghosts aren’t monsters.”
“You’re seriously defending the creatures that kidnapped Danny?” Her voice was tense, Mom’s disgust evident as she scowled at her. “I know that you and a lot of the other teenagers in town think that they’re not all bad because of Phantom, but it’s a trick, hon. All ghosts are manipulative, vile creatures and liars. They don’t do good for the sake of helping others or out of some sense of altruism. They do it because they have some other motive, usually the fulfillment of an obsession like Phantom’s hero complex. I don’t doubt that Phantom’s caused half of the incidents he’s supposedly rescued you and everyone else from.”
“That’s ridiculous, Mom! Phantom’s never hurt anyone.”
“So the bank robberies and that time he shot the mayor were what, then? Accidents?” Jazz opened her mouth to argue and then stopped, biting her lip. They didn’t care what she would say. Mind control would sound like a convenient excuse, despite it being something they knew could happen since even Dad had been overshadowed before. But they weren’t willing to extend that same grace and understanding to the ghosts as they were to each other and Jazz knew it.
“I think that we don’t have all the information we need to know for sure, and those are two incidents out of dozens, if not hundreds, at this point,” said Jazz carefully. “But even if you can’t find it in yourself to think that there might be a chance that not all ghosts are the monsters that you think they are, you should consider how it must sound for Danny right now to hear you say that. He’s clearly got a few ghostly traits, and while you might make a distinction between him and the ghosts, Danny might not do that himself. Hearing you talk about the ghosts like they’re past redemption might make him think you believe the same thing about himself.”
“Hmm. You might have a point,” said Dad. “We’ll try to be careful around him. It’s not his fault he’s been changed this way, and he’s still a good kid, no matter what those spooks did to him.”
Despite Dad’s willingness to consider it, though, Mom was quiet for a moment, clearly far less convinced. “Are we sure, though?”
“What?” She didn’t get why Mom wouldn’t be willing to try and be kinder about it around Danny when it genuinely could hurt him.
“The people in the petition saying that maybe this isn’t Danny. Maybe they’re right,” she said, and Jazz felt her blood boil at the very idea. “We’ve never seen anything like this before, where a normal human could become altered on this level from exposure to the ectoplasmic radiation in the Ghost Zone.”
“Mom, of course that’s Danny!” snapped Jazz, her tone harsher than she intended, but her parents deserved it. He didn’t need his family doubting him, not after everything. “And not seeing anything like this before doesn’t mean it’s not possible. How many humans do you know that have spent three months in the Ghost Zone or that have even been exposed to that level of ectoplasm long-term without some kind of protection?”
“That’s fair, hon, but it still seems like a question we should ask, at least,” said Mom. “If we’re wrong about Danny being back, then it might mean that the real Danny’s still lost somewhere.”
“So what, then? Are you going to go upstairs and start quizzing him on every memory and making sure they line up perfectly with yours? Are you going to run experiments on him? Cut him open just to be sure?!” Dad flinched, but Mom remained stone faced as Jazz crossed her arms, her frustration bubbling up as she tried so hard to stay calm and talk to them rationally, but they were just so frustratingly stubborn and arrogant sometimes. “I can’t–do you know how much it’ll hurt him to hear you say this?! To even realize that you’re thinking this? Like, seriously, Mom, I just–are you literally so prejudiced against ghosts that you’d start pretending he’s not Danny to make yourself feel better or something?!”
“It’s not prejudiced to describe the ghosts as being precisely what they are, Jazz, but we have to take every possibility into consideration! You’ve seen how Danny is, how he–” She threw her hands up, shaking her head as she looked to Dad for support, but he remained quiet, an odd expression on his face. “How can you be so certain it’s Danny?”
“Because I know my brother, Mom! I know him better than either of you! You’ve barely paid attention to anything but the ghosts since that stupid portal opened! It took Danny getting kidnapped for you to even care about him again!” she shouted, and oh, she had not intended to say that out loud. Her hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide, and Jazz could see the hurt reflected in her parents’ faces as tears burned in her own eyes. “I–I’m sorry. I didn’t–”
“You have no idea what we’ve sacrificed for the two of you,” said Mom coldly. “How much we’ve given up, how much of our time is spent on raising you and keeping you safe. To say that we don’t care about your brother, when everything we’re doing now is for his sake, has always been for his sake and yours . . . To act as if we don’t love you both dearly and wouldn’t give up everything for both of you. I–You’re an adult, Jasmine, so I can’t ground you or force you to go to your room. But maybe you should go and think about what you’ve said.” Dad tightly gripped Mom’s hand, so impossibly small and quiet then as he refused to look at Jazz, the hurt in his eyes clear as day.
“I–fine,” she sputtered, turning away and storming up to her room, and she wiped the tears from her face on her sleeve as she sat down on her bed and held Bearbert tightly. She continued to cry despite her best efforts to stop. Crying always made her feel childish, even as she knew it was important to let emotions out, to release them and not push them down, but Jazz never really had the luxury of letting herself feel what she needed to over the years, not when she needed to take care of her brother and everything else in the house. She used to hope studying psychology would help her find a way to cope without crying or expressing herself, and found the science left her wanting, all the evidence pointing to how necessary it was to take these moments to process.
But she still hated it, was still too accustomed to being ashamed of her own tears, and Jazz pushed her hair back and out of her face as she curled in on herself. It wasn’t right. She didn’t mean to throw out the accusation, didn’t mean to say out loud that she and Danny were always used to coming second until things were too late regardless of how true it was or not, but there was no taking it back now. And though it was harsh, she wouldn’t apologize again. She hated that she said it out loud, but Mom didn’t deserve another apology, not after the things she said about Danny. Not after accusing him of being an imposter.
Someone knocked at her door, and she wiped away the tears even as they stubbornly kept coming. Great. It was probably Dad, wanting to chide her for the way she spoke to Mom. “Go away, Dad. I don’t want to talk right now.”
“It’s, um, not Dad,” said Danny, cracking it open and peeking in at her. “Are you okay?”
“Mom and I just had a small argument, that’s all,” said Jazz. Ugh, why couldn’t she stop crying? Danny walked over and gave her a long hug, his arms cold even through his hoodie, but she didn’t care. She needed it, then, and leaned into it for a moment as she forced herself to try and calm down, taking slow, deep breaths and counting silently to herself.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked as he released her and sat down on the bed beside her.
“No.”
“Pfft, of course, you don’t. Always want me to open up but never want to do the same,” he teased, fingers picking at a loose thread on her bedspread, and she smiled despite herself. How could anyone think he wasn’t Danny? He might be a little stranger now because some of the supernatural aspects of his ghost half were more pronounced, but deep down, it was still him. Still the same obnoxious yet sweet brother she grew up with. “Sorry about before. In the kitchen. I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you, I know it’s not your fault and I just . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Danny.” And it was. Really. “And I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“Thanks,” he said as he continued to fidget, his eyes carefully locked on a spot on her floor. “Were you, um . . . was your fight with Mom about me?” She could hear his voice breaking a little as the words came out, the air around them feeling like a thin sheet of ice coated everything.
“Maybe.” She wanted to lie, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“Sorry,” he whispered again, and she could feel him shaking a little. “I feel like I just keep messing everything up.”
“It’s not your fault. None of this is, okay?” She reached over and gently squeezed his hand, ignoring how icy his fingers felt in hers.
“Easy for you to say.” There was an edge of static and looping echoes behind his voice as he stared at the clock on her nightstand, mouth twisted into a bitter smile, and then he sighed, his shoulders relaxing as he looked back at her. “But I appreciate you sticking up for me with Mom and Dad.”
“How do you know I did?”
He shrugged. “Because it’s you. I can’t imagine you doing anything else.” But he could imagine their parents not defending him all too easily, couldn’t he, and the thought made her heart break a little. She knew, despite what she said downstairs, that their parents did love them and care about them, but there was a not-so-tiny grain of truth buried in the resentment she felt as she remembered the last couple of years. How they never figured out that Danny was Phantom, even after all this time, despite the dozens and dozens of clues in front of them. How they never noticed how much she struggled to maintain her grades while taking care of him, making sure that both her and Danny were fed and that the house was cleaned and that he had support with his homework. She knew enough psychology and read enough articles to know it for what it was–parentification–but Jazz struggled to let herself feel upset or frustrated about it when there wasn’t any time for it.
And the end result of that was exactly what happened down in the lab, where she finally exploded and said something cruel she couldn’t take back even if it may have been a bit deserved. As a psychologist in training, she knew better. As a person, though, she still struggled to take the advice of the dozens of therapists and psychiatrists whose words she so admired and trusted.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Danny shivered, his breath fogging in front of him. “Ghost?”
“Yeah,” he sighed as he stood up.
“I’m right here if you need help, okay?” she said, and he nodded as he transformed. She hadn’t seen him switch since he returned, but it was the same as she remembered. Black and white jumpsuit, white hair, and glowing green eyes. His aura seemed strangely brighter than usual, but she said nothing about it, not wanting to upset him. And no matter what her parents or anyone else might say, she knew it was definitely Danny in front of her now. It had to be.
“I’ll be fine, Jazz. Promise.”
She knew Danny was probably right, but she found herself watching the window anxiously, Bearbert in her lap as she waited for him to come back, unable to relax until he finally returned.