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His parents were of the firm belief that ghosts were nothing more than echoes of post-human consciousness.
In a way, they were somewhat right, ghosts were echoes–just, not every day.
When a ghost dies in a bad way–horrifically, drawn out, or even hopelessly–the energy lost there can leave an impression. A scar, if you will.
The world remembers things. It holds things in its grasp and lets memories resurface when they’re ready to be remembered.
There are caves, holding pictures, hopes, thoughts and dreams, that have become unearthed by the shifting of tectonic plates, cities that have emerged from the depths of the sea as the world allowed them to.
History is meant to be remembered, but if this history is lost to time?
Well.
Let’s just say that history has a way of repeating if you aren’t careful about it.
And all ghosts knew that was often in the very literal sense.
A ghost's Death Day was sacred.
No ghost would dare even approach the lair of another when their Death Week was coming upon them.
It was private, it was sacred, and it was terrifying.
Death Day’s represent the loss of life, the theft of time.
To the ghosts who have the unfortunate luck of being in the presence of another’s Death Day, it is a painful reminder of everything they try to forget.
They are forced to reconcile with the fact that something has been taken from them, and they were unable to do anything to change that, that they are unable to change it.
Death reminds ghosts of their lives, and in that life, they respected the dead. For what they represented, for their reminder, and for the emptiness that each person leaves behind.
The dead are no different when it comes to paying their respects.
It’s an unassuming week in November when the ghosts feel a crackle of electricity shoot through them as they pass through the Gate and into the Amity Lair.
It starts with Skulker, brushing off the staticky feeling as a wire in his suit gone loose, intent on facing off against the ghost child and finally claiming his prize.
It’s a regular fight, all thinly veiled aggression behind flashy theatrics and property damage.
Skulker fires off one of his new launchers when the static sparks and Skulker sees the ghost child flicker and double.
If it hadn’t been for the flicker, Skulker would have categorized it as another failed attempt on the Ghost Childs part to duplicate, but the flicker was there, and Skulker cannot dismiss it.
None of the ghosts in the Infinite Realms know how the halfa child died, it isn’t their place to ask, and they certainly didn’t want to invite the boy's own questions regarding their deaths to surface.
It was out of fear and respect that ghosts never pried. It was the least they could do when most ghosts didn’t receive even that much in life.
The boy flickers, but he doesn’t seem to notice, and Skulker realizes that the Death Week must already be upon him if he hadn’t felt the disruption to his core.
Skulker drops like lead to the ground, carefully conscientious in not damaging the human pavement as he kneels.
The halfa stops, yells something in a taunt, but Skulker doesn’t listen, doesn’t want to know how far in his Death the boy was and how far Skulker had intruded.
Doesn’t want to be reminded of his own ghostly status.
Skulker dislodges the skull that hangs around his neck and lays it on the ground gently.
It’s important to him and his core aches at the loss, but he is the one grievously in the wrong, and it will take something of equal value to make up for it.
He lays it as the offering it is before Phantom, before ducking his head and flying off as quickly as he can back to the Ghost Zone.
Phantom, fists still blazing with green energy, allows them to extinguish as he watches as Skulker all but runs away.
He sinks to the asphalt and picks up the necklace, staring at it with confusion.
The boy will take it and go back to his friends, reverting into his human self so they can theorize on how weird Skulker was acting.
The halfa will hold the small skull in his hand, warm even against his icy output, and will place it on his dresser.
The human half might not realize it’s importance, but the ghost half will accept it as equal value and display it accordingly.
The next day there is a pile of charms and trinkets, none smaller than a finger or bigger than his fist, but all laid out carefully, relinquished with heavy but unwavering hearts.
Danny counts himself lucky that he patrols in the early morning that Tuesday morning and as he heads down to the portal to dispose of some non-sentient wraiths, he is the one to find the makeshift shrine and not his parents.
He gathers the offerings quickly, scooping them cautiously, not exactly sure what their purpose is, but sure that his parents do not need to know about or see them.
He phases through his ceiling and into his room.
He spreads the objects out on his bed.
There's an electric green guitar pick with a cartoonish doodle of his logo on one side and a flame on the other. There’s a small skillet that has seen better days, knicks and scratches marring the side of it but remarkably clean all the same, a calculator missing it’s cover, and a small velvet ring box with nothing inside.
There’s also a lucky 8-ball keychain that looks like it came from a gas station, an empty lipstick tube that only holds an arcade glow-in-the-dark spider ring, and an orange HotWheels car that Danny can flip the hood up on.
The other items are smaller but no less cared for. A light blue ribbon that’s fraying at the edges, a gold quill nib, what Danny guesses is a canine tooth (although it looks longer than it should), a silver button, an apple pendant that’s tarnished from age and has a speck of bronze peeking through the otherwise immaculate red finish, a glass charm in the shape of a natural crystal, what Danny thinks is a metal tie pin, and beaded tassel with coins attached to it.
It’s an odd collection of things, but something inside of him relaxes when he looks at all the bits and baubles.
He clears out a space in his top drawer for them all, tucking them (and Skulker’s necklace) away, safe. They’re all much too precious to leave out in the open, even if there’s an itch that says to display them with pride. He’d rather they stay protected however and that soothes whatever itch was there in the first place.
They weigh heavily on his mind even when he heads to school and the mundanity sweeps him away.
He drops more pens than he remembers ever dropping before, even when he was just getting the hang of his powers, and Sam and Tucker have to nudge him three times to remind him to keep breathing throughout the day.
His ghost sense doesn’t go off at all and he’d be off-put by his luck, but his mind is too far away, thinking, to really worry about it.
Wednesday is a Bad Day.
There are no ghost attacks, so that was a welcome reprieve, but Danny’s had Good Days and Bad Days ever since he was eleven and today was just such a day.
He’s twitchy and irritable, even looking at food makes him nauseous and he feels a bone-deep weariness settling inside his skin, making it too tight and stretch across his bones uncomfortably.
Being Phantom usually helps. He doesn’t have bones, or real skin, in that form for one matter.
He doesn’t need to eat or even breathe while he’s a ghost and there’s something relaxing about the rhythmic sway of the breeze as he drops intangibility and lets it cradle him.
But today, his ghost form just makes him feel cold. He feels… disrupted in a way, hazy, like he might just float apart if he doesn’t hold himself together.
He quickly returns to being human, because at least the gravity lets him feel grounded literally even if he didn’t much feel that way figuratively.
Jazz thinks it’s because it’s the anniversary of when he got shocked in the portal this Friday.
Danny doesn’t know.
He hadn’t forgotten about it, and when he’d seen it on his calendar, he’d known that was the day his life changed. The day his life half-ended, but he hadn’t paid it any mind.
Sure, he might fake a cold so he could get out of school, because it was a painful reminder and he’d really rather not deal with Dash on the day he died but he hadn’t wanted to dwell on it. He’d gotten over it.
He hadn’t died, he’d gained superpowers. He was unique now and that was a good thing.
It was just another day out of the year and just because something happened to him last year on the same day, didn’t mean that anything would happen to him again.
(And if he made sure of it by just avoiding it all together, well, more reasons that prove him right, right?)
If Wednesday was bad Thursday was worse.
Danny felt like cotton balls had been stuffed in his head, through his ears and his eyes, clogging up his senses and dulling him to the world.
Jazz had to shake him awake, all concerned murmurs and worried eyes.
She’d felt his forehead, but couldn’t seem to find anything amiss with his ever-dismal temperature.
He’d managed to get dressed, but it was a blurry recollection and he skipped between moments, unsure how he got to one place and the next.
Danny walked into school looking more dead than alive and his two best friends had shared a worried look, although he didn’t seem to notice.
“Hey, Danny,” Sam hedged, peering into the pale face of her best friend, “How ya feelin’?”
Danny didn’t respond, instead he kept walking and Sam and Tucker jumped out of the way to avoid him, but his elbow phased through Tucker's side when he wasn’t quick enough.
Ghostly wisps of Danny’s skin trailed behind him and the human’s expressions turned alarmed.
Eventually it reformed and sunk back into solidity, but something was definitely wrong with their friend.
“Danny?” Tucker hesitated to touch his friend, wary of just passing through him, but then Danny flickered, like a T.V trying and failing to put the channel’s picture on the screen.
Tucker flinched back and Danny flickered again before disappearing entirely.
Footsteps appeared behind them and the remaining pair spun around, seeing Danny repeating his walk down the hallway.
Sam and Tucker parted, watching as Danny made his way towards and past them once more, stopping at his locker to dial his combination in.
Sam calls Danny’s name again, but Danny just pulls open his locker door only to flicker again. The door doesn’t make a noise, but suddenly it’s shut again and Danny is redialing his combination into the lock.
“Tuck, what’s wrong with him?”
Tucker shrugs, and watches as Danny’s body flickers in between the visible plane and not. The longer they watch him the stranger he looks.
Over the previous year, they had clocked several key changes from when Danny was a normal human and when he became a halfa.
For one, breathing was optional to him now. He could still breathe and when he did he didn’t look quite as pale, but he wouldn’t suffocate if he forgot. Which, he did. Often.
The action wasn’t involuntary anymore. Danny needed to provide a certain amount of focus into the action now, but sometimes when he was focused on something else, like a test or particularly difficult math problem, his chest would still.
Danny had taken to wearing a baggy jacket, or even a size up in clothing to hide whenever his chest didn’t rise naturally.
That was the most noticeable difference, but that wasn’t the only one.
His ears had ever so subtly pointed as the months had worn on and his teeth had received the same treatment. His nails grew into points more often than not and his skin was paler than even his ghost form.
They weren’t obvious physical changes, but they were there nonetheless.
Danny isn’t wearing his usual red zip-up hoodie, he’s just in a normal t-shirt, the white one with the plain red circle and red hemlines.
But while his skin was pasty and somewhat translucent, his ears weren’t pointed and his nails were bitten to the quick, something Danny hadn’t done for a long time considering whenever he tried to bite them the nail would cut his tongue or lip.
His chest, although still flickering, was rising and falling in steady increments.
“I don’t know, but he can’t stay in school like this. He’ll be found out the second someone looks at him.”
Sam looks like she wants to argue, but to be fair, she always looks like she wants to argue.
But she doesn’t, she just nods towards Danny, “So what do we do? Suck him up in the thermos? He can’t hear us so how do we get him to leave?”
Like he was waiting for the best possible moment, Danny turns and his ice blue eyes, duller than usual, focus on the pair of worried friends.
“Oh, hey guys, when did you get here?”
“Danny?”
Sam steps towards him, hand outstretched but hesitant.
They explain what they’ve noticed and Danny watches as his hands switch between visibility and invisibility, face drawn and wary.
Danny heads home, straining his core to keep him invisible as he heads off campus.
His core is pulsing out power, in sync with the surges going through his body and he finds himself repeating walks down turns he’s already taken.
Danny doesn’t get afraid a lot, it’s kind of hard to feel genuine fear when you’ve already experienced death, already reached the end of the rainbow so to speak.
But he’s afraid now. He doesn’t know what’s happening, he doesn’t know why his powers are acting up as they are.
It’s been a year since he’s been surprised by some new snag in his powers.
He’d defeated countless ghosts, powerful ghosts that wanted to take over the world or who wanted to destroy it. He’s next in line for Ghost King for fucks sakes.
Why is he having trouble now? What’s going on? He hadn’t even noticed something happening.
Danny makes it home an hour after he leaves Casper High’s campus and collapses into bed.
He locks himself in his room, watching his hands flicker and repeat aborted movements that he can’t remember taking.
Hours later, he finds the trinkets have somehow made their way in bed with him.
He hears some of the objects shift as his body flickers, but they’re comforting and his flickering dies down to manageable levels. He doesn’t understand why the baubles help, he doesn’t know what they mean and why they were left for him, but he holds them close as his core slows its fluttering.
He sleeps, clutching a small wristwatch with a broken clock-face that appeared sometime when he was sleeping.
He doesn’t wake up Friday.
Jazz wakes up at 6:30 am, the fifth consecutive alarm she sets for her mornings because it’s always difficult for just one alarm to break through her subconscious.
Her back pops as she stretches, listening to the opening notes of her alarm play on repeat until her phone reaches its top volume and annoys her enough to properly wake up and shut it off.
She lays there for a moment before groaning and slowly getting out of bed.
She’s 17 and much too young to feel this run down in the mornings. It’s nothing new, however, and so she proceeds with her morning, shuffling through getting ready so she has enough time to eat and drive to school and still have enough time to ask some questions about last night's homework.
No one can ever say that Jasmine Fenton ever half-asses anything.
She sighs and brushes through her hair, using her elbow she opens her door and walks down the short hallway.
“Danny, it’s 7:00!” She tugs at a knot at the back of her head and kicks at his door with her ankle.
She doesn’t hear any of the usual shuffling signifying her brothers less than graceful waking.
Jazz stops brushing her hair and knocks correctly, “Danny?”
Still nothing.
Hesitantly, she opens the door to his bedroom, half expecting to see him lying with a pillow over his head and dead to the world, but there’s just a rumpled bed empty of any teenagers.
Though the bed isn’t quite empty of anything at all.
She picks up the skillet, wondering why her brother was sleeping with a kitchen pan and where he even got it from when Danny’s bedside lamp and overhead lights burst.
She shrieks and shields her face.
“Jazz!”
She hears the thundering steps of her mother and father come bustling up the stairs.
“Jazz, honey, are you okay?” Her Dad wraps her in a hug and Jazz breathes deeply, comforted by his larger frame dwarfing hers.
“Yeah, I’m okay-”
“Jazz, where's Danny?”
Her Mom’s standing to the side of them, hand placed reassuringly on her Dad’s shoulder, but her face is knit with worry.
“I-I don’t know, I came in here to wake him up, but then the lights burst.”
Jazz pulls away and her Dad lets her, turning to face her Mom.
“It was just a power surge, but we need to find your brother, make sure that it’s all it was.”
Jazz nods and they split up.
Danny sometimes will fall asleep in the oddest places, most often in the Fenton Ops Center, stargazing and whatnot, but sometimes they’ll find him catching a few extra minutes at the table before breakfast, sitting on the couch, and in one memorable occasion, sticking halfway out of his closet and bundled in blankets.
Her Mom heads to the Ops Center while Jazz checks his closet and her Dad heads downstairs to check the kitchen and entry room.
There are no misshapen lumps of her brother in the closet, Jazz even kicks around a pile of laundry just in case, but to no avail.
She finds her Dad coming back in from the backdoor, presumably checking the shed.
Her mom jumps down the ladder from the Ops Center and meets her husband's side.
“He wouldn’t have gone to school early would he?”
Maddie Fenton likes to play at tough love, but it’s only after she knows her children are safe and unharmed that she’ll feel comfortable enough to be stern with them.
Jack Fenton, the most boisterous man probably to ever roam the planet, always falls silent when he’s worried. It’s a struggle for him to articulate words properly on his best days and downright impossible for him on his worst. His actions speak louder than his words ever could and from the anxious twist of his lips, Jazz is betting that he’s also feeling the coil of dread that Jazz has blooming in her stomach too.
The lights in the kitchen flare for a moment before those lightbulbs burst too, her Dad shielding his wife and daughter as the glass shards fall.
“What is-”
Maddie’s question is interrupted by the most bloodcurdling scream that Jazz has ever heard.
Her face pales and adrenaline rushes through her as her body categorizes what her mind cannot.
It’s a dying scream, the scream of something that is helpless to stop whatever torment is being inflicted upon it, but not so compliant as to have given into it either.
It rattles her bones and goosebumps break out over her skin, her teeth set on edge.
It’s cut off a few long, dreadful seconds later. Abruptly enough that Jazz’s ears ring from the deafening silence left in its wake.
Her parents share a look before hustling down the steps to their lab, Jazz following shakily a few steps behind.
“Oh god…”
Jazz pushes through the wall her parents have unintentionally formed, half expecting to see some horrible ghost exiting the portal, but what she sees is far worse than any random ghost could ever be.
The portal is off and there are wires sparking in the upwards panels, but laying at the entrance of it is a pair of legs and a charred, smoking body, lying still–too still–in the archway.
Black rubber insulated boots lie motionless at the foot of the portal's entrance, hints of white barely visible from the position it’s contorted into.
Jazz’s heart breaks, “No…” She goes to rush forward, but she’s held back by the unyielding grip of her mother.
However, her movement prompts her parents into motion.
“Jazz you don’t have any PPE, it’s okay, stay still,” Her mother’s voice is quiet, a tentative grip on her strength, but it’s enough to spark them into motion.
The portal is still spitting out electricity, but Jack rushes into it without a glance towards the sparks, scooping up the body with gentle, quick hands.
Her Mom chokes on a sob as Jack lays their son down on their examination table.
Jazz’s stomach turns and she takes wobbly steps over to the trash can to empty bile into the bin.
Her fear had been choking her before, but now it’s the smell. It smells like burning tires and burnt meat that Jazz refuses to classify as human.
It mixes with the tang of citrus that her parents’ ectoplasm samples naturally give off and the chemical odor of bleach and other chemicals that her parents use to sterilize their workplace.
“Dann-o? Hey, bud, you gotta wake up okay?”
Jack softly taps Danny’s slack face, avoiding the cheek that is charred from–gods–the electricity that must have coursed through him from the portal.
Jazz knows Danny’s half-dead already, what if this has killed him all the way? Is he even going to be a ghost anymore? His obsession was finicky at best as a halfa, would it be strong enough to keep him here? Would she want him to become a full ghost regardless?
Tears run down her face and she wipes her mouth, but she’s got to pull herself together.
Right now, she knows more about Danny than her parents and if he’s simply passed out and hasn’t fully died then he’s going to need her to run interference.
She walks over to her parents, where Maddie is struggling to get the melted HAZMAT off of Danny’s body so they can see the damages.
It’s not even burns that coat his side, it's simply black, charred skin with bits of the white hazmat infused into the tissue.
Wait, white?
Jazz takes a step closer to her brother's corpse body and realizes that the HAZMAT is back to its original form, the inverted version of Phantom’s HAZMAT.
She’s about to say something, she’s not even sure what she’s about to say, when Danny’s body shimmers, rippling and distorting like water, into Phantom.
Her parents' hands fly off of Danny and take a step back, Jazz wants to analyze her parent’s reaction, what this might mean for Danny regarding their acceptance of his secret, but she’s distracted watching as Danny’s Phantom form flickers and disappears.
“That ghost!” Her Dad’s hands clench, hard enough that she can hear his knuckles pop.
Maddie whips out a Fenton Ecto-Pistol, grief and terror switching to fury faster than Jazz can blink.
“He tricked us! I’m gonna kill-”
“I don’t know, guys. It doesn’t work anyways, there’s nothing to see.”
Danny’s voice cuts off whatever tirade her mom was going to unleash.
All three confused Fenton’s whip towards the portal once more, seeing Danny standing at the lip of the portal in his favorite white shirt with the red circle and hemlines, light-wash jeans that were worn soft from how often he wears them.
A broken sound comes from one of her parents but Jazz is entranced, watching as the vision of Danny trembles and splits, like TV with a bad signal.
His form is blurred, smudged at the edges, giving the impression that he’s not as solid as he should be.
His head turns to look at something that isn’t there, listening, before his face twists and he frowns.
“Just because you added ‘triple-dog’ before the dare doesn’t make me want to do it more.”
The elder Fenton's watch as Danny’s shoulder’s curl in on themselves, eyes flicking to invisible people before biting out a disgruntled, “Fine, fine! Okay, stop with the peer pressure already, geez.”
Danny’s customary grumbling as he’s handed his HAZMAT, invisible to them until his hand makes contact, almost makes Jazz’s lips quirk up with fondness, but as Jack’s face on the HAZMAT is ripped away only to disappear the second it’s off kills whatever normalcy Jazz could have found in the situation.
Danny zips the Hazmat all of the way up, turning before the machine with something that Jazz thinks is fear masquerading as caution.
His figure destabilizes for a moment, flicking to the left about a foot away and then back to the right two feet away before settling back into the middle, just as Danny takes a step into the portal.
The silence is stifling, Jazz hears her Mother’s gun clatter to the floor, but none of the Fenton's give any attention to it.
Danny’s voice warps as it echoes, either because of the inside of the tunnel or because of whatever is allowing them to watch him, “Not really, it’s pitch black in here!”
It’s still for a moment before his voice trickles out once more, “Actually, I think I found-!”
The portal bursts into toxic green swirls, making Jazz’s ears pop and eyes burn in her head, sparks coming off of the edges of the machine as the Ghost Zone and the Human World meet.
Danny’s scream is somehow worse the second time, now that Jazz has context, has seen how unsuspecting Danny had been just moments before.
She hadn’t realized how alive he’d been, how unsure he’d been, before everything–before this accident.
Jazz collapses to the floor, understanding washing over her in waves.
His screaming cuts off just as suddenly as last time and the portal goes Dark, Danny’s shoes just barely visible again as he lays in the same position they found him in when they came down here.
Something bangs behind her and her mother wails, grief stricken and broken hearted. There’s the sound of papers flying and glass breaking as her mother screams.
Her Dad is mute and if Jazz hadn’t known he was there, hadn’t known that he’d never leave, she would have thought him missing from the picture.
Danny’s form glitches once more into Phantom before he vanishes.
A moment passes.
“I don’t know, guys. It doesn’t work anyways, there’s nothing to see.”
Jazz holds herself as she breaks down.
She had known so little of what Danny had gone through. She wasn’t there and he hadn’t told her anything beyond the basics. She knows the ending to the story playing out before her, but she doesn’t know what’s happening now, doesn’t know which turn will come next or why and she doesn’t want to.
Her dad sinks to the floor next to her, face ashen and pale as, well, a ghost.
She leans into him, searching for support, for comfort, and he leans back just as much, offering as much as he’s taking.
Her mom has stopped screaming but she’s beating up what sounds like the table, either with her fists of some object that was within her reach.
Jazz doesn’t know how long she sits there with her father and her mother in anguish behind her, but it’s enough for Danny’s intermittent screams and words to burn themselves into her mind, long enough that Jazz knows it won’t be stopping anytime soon.
She stands slowly, weakly, pulling on her Dad’s arm to get him up as well.
Her voice is soft, raw from her tears even though she had not made a sound, “Mom. Mom, c’mon, let’s go upstairs.”
Her Mom is sitting in a hurricane of her own grief, slouched over and gripping the table above her head with white knuckles.
Jack floats over to her, never had she seen him so, untethered, hollowed out.
He manages to coax Maddie's grip to loosen enough to lift her and Maddie throws an arm around her neck, tears running thick down her face and shoulders shaking.
Jack passes a hand over Jazz’s hair and she offers a watery, wretched smile, getting one in return before settling across her shoulders.
They make their way up the stairs, wobbly and much too close in the small stairwell, pretending that they can’t hear Danny’s screams echo in repetition.
They collapse on the couch as a fractured family, missing something vital and knowing that it was out of reach.
They stay pressed against one another, tears somehow not running dry even though it must have been hours since they emerged from the tainted lab.
Eventually Jazz manages to separate from her parents long enough to get each of them some much needed water.
She places them down on the coffee table, although none of them make a move to drink, and Jazz begins to tell the rest of the story.
She tells them of when she saw Danny change, when Spectra attacked the school. She told them about how she was worried at first, how she didn’t know how to approach Danny about what she had learned, how she had pieced together that Danny was pulling away from them because he was Phantom.
Jazz didn’t confront him about it, and going over it out loud, she wishes she would have because Danny went through so much that she never noticed even when she knew his secret.
Her Mom holds her Dad’s hand in a vice grip, flinching whenever Danny’s screams would echo upwards, but they listen to her, not interrupting despite the questions she knows they must have.
She tells them about what they’ve learned, what they’ve accomplished ever since Jazz was officially in the ‘know’. Jazz doesn’t know much about Danny’s physiology, it’s something that Danny has always kept close to his chest, so she gives him what she does know.
She tells them about Vlad and about the ghosts Danny’s come to know and fondly tolerate, how she left it up to him to decide when to tell them, but it had been eating him up since he knew he was… different.
After Jazz has drained her water, head pounding steadily against her skull from dehydration and the emotional turmoil, they sit together for another long while.
The doorbell rings around noon and Jazz, probably the one with the least to process, untangles herself from her parents and goes to answer.
Vlad Masters stands on the porch, turning to face her as she cracks open the door. There’s a town car idling on the curb, a man with dark glasses standing at rest by the door, no doubt a superfluous bodyguard Vlad insisted on having for prestige alone.
“Ah, Jasmine, lovely to see you,” He opens his hands, like he was offering a hug although they both knew Jazz would rather get ecto-acne instead.
Jazz sighs, much too raw to deal with the asshole that is Vlad right now, “What do you want, Vlad.”
Vlad’s posture drops minutely, displeased, “I’m afraid I’m not here to make a social call, I’m sure your father has some part in this, but nearly five blocks in a circle around Fenton Works have lost electricity. I’m here to put an end to whatever half-baked experiment is the cause of this.”
Jazz goes to answer, confused, but also curious as it occurred to her that maybe Vlad would have some insight into Danny’s issue even though she didn’t necessarily trust him or his motives.
But they’re interrupted by another one of Danny’s rattling death screams, somehow louder than before.
The bodyguard springs to attention, already taking steps towards Vlad and the front door, but Vlad raises a hand that halts him in his tracks.
Vlad’s pale face turns to her warily, “Jasmine, what-”
Jazz scrubs a hand over her face, “Just, come in, Vlad.”
The halfa does, flashing a three with his fingers to his bodyguard who, looking very much against it, heads back to the car to wait.
He steps into the foyer, closing the door behind him quietly, almost as if he was afraid of making too much noise.
“Jasmine,” His tone is hushed and faintly trembling, a tone she’d never expected a narcissistic man like Vlad to ever adopt, “Your parents–they haven’t?”
Jazz pauses, eyes pinched in confusion before they widen and she rushes to shake her head. “No, no. They’d never–Vlad, they’d never do that to Danny.”
Jazz had almost forgot that the terror of doubt plagued Vlad as much as her brother.
She had told her parents that Danny didn’t tell them because it had been so long, that he’d never found the right time, but that was far from the only reason.
It was dangerous for them to know. The ghosts wouldn’t have to hold back in battle if they knew the truth, they could even be taken hostage to get to Danny quicker. A multitude of dangerous reasons for them.
But also for Danny.
It had plagued her little brother practically the second he had put the two pieces together, after her parents had displayed their hatred of Phantom casually once too many times.
No matter how many times Jazz had reassured him that he was their son, that they would love and accept him half-ghost or not, that just because they were scientists didn’t mean they’d disregard their morality…
It was never enough to assuage the lingering fear Danny held, nor the niggling doubt that plagued the darkest corner of her mind. A thought that she refused to acknowledge even as she pretended it didn’t exist in the first place.
Vlad, while narcissistically insane and certifiably evil, also housed that niggling fear and doubt about what Maddie (and Jack) would do if they ever discovered his secret.
Vlad exhaled, tension not quite leaving his body, but the relief evident all the same.
Jazz bit her lip, “They do know, though.”
And the fear was back.
“I had to tell them because,” She sighed, “Well, just come with me, maybe you can help.”
Jazz was hesitant to take Vlad to the basement, to let him see probably one of the most private aspects of Danny’s life–his death.
She would show him if he insisted, didn't have much of a choice in the matter, but she’d take him to her parents first to see what they had to say.
For all his posturing and peacocking around, Jazz can see the rigidity in the way Vlad holds himself as he steps into their living room, eyes tracking the way her parents lifted their heads to look at him.
“Vlad.”
Jack’s voice was rough and his face twisted, but didn’t take a sip of water to soothe it.
Maddie's hands clenched in her lap, but Jack put a hand on her shoulder and the angry twist of her lips loosened somewhat as her husband stood up.
Jack Fenton was a big man, towered over others without ever meaning to and big enough to withstand nearly anything.
But Jazz had never seen her Dad look so small as he did right now.
Jack takes a few unsteady steps over to the halfa, who takes a step back seemingly out of instinct.
Tears coated Jack’s already bloodshot eyes and Jazz watched as her Dad pulled his once best friend into a hug. It was tentative, her Dad displaying an act of consideration that was so foreign to her, letting Vlad pull away if he chose.
The mayor is stock still in the grip of the jumpsuit-clad man, but after a moment he collapses into his self-proclaimed enemy and holds him tightly, probably tighter than he’d ever let himself acknowledge.
Jazz, underneath the grief, was shocked.
Vlad had frequently and very vocally dismissed and degraded her Dad nearly constantly every instance she was in contact with him.
Vlad had hated Jack with a burning passion, going so far as to stage assassination attempts against him all in the name of turning Maddie's affections onto him.
But the man clutching her father is anything but the vengeful, obsessed man Jazz knows.
The couch squeaks as Maddie lifts herself off of it, coming to settle beside her husband and rest a hand against her friend's shoulder.
It seems as it’s all that she’s able to do, considering everything Vlad had done to her family, of which she knew a surprising amount about.
When her dad whispers an apology beyond even the usual genuineness of his words, an apology for so much more than his ignorance, Jazz sees Vlad’s eyes go misty before he turns and his expression is hidden again.
Jazz hadn’t told her parents all of the details, hadn’t told them the extent of the dangers or the problems Danny had faced, and she’s sure that they won’t be left out or forgotten in the coming days, but this is not about these things, this is something that should have happened years ago.
Jazz is content to let them have their moment, even knowing how much the situation has warped.
Screaming cuts through the haze Vlad’s appearance had thrown them into and Vlad and her parents separate awkwardly.
“Vlad,” Maddie starts, voice notably stronger than her husbands, “Do you know anything about this? Danny, he’s–”
Grief crumples her expression, words stuck, but she doesn’t have to continue because Vlad is already shaking his head.
“I have never experienced it myself. By the time that I had recovered enough to recognize and categorize my,” a slight pause, “ghostliness, I had already sequestered myself away in Wisconsin. It was, well, years later that I learned of Death Echoes.”
“Death Echoes?” Jazz can hazard a guess, but she’d rather have as many concrete facts as she could, even if the facts were from Vlad.
Vlad nods, absently fixing his collar and ribbon tie as he continues.
“It occurs on the yearly anniversary of a ghost's death. Supposedly, the ghost will relive a handful of moments prior to their death, trapped in a loop in order to recement their obsession and determination to stay in the material plane.
“Having never experienced it myself, I assumed that young Daniel wouldn’t either. Being the way we are, we are the exception to many things and I believed this to be one of them.”
“So, there’s nothing we can do to stop it?” Maddie's voice hinges on the edge of desperate, “My son is stuck suffering until, what, he dies completely?”
“As far as I’m aware, it should only last until the hour of his original death. I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done except wait it out. I’m… I’m sorry Madeline, Jack.” To Vlad’s credit, his remorse does seem genuine, but it is not the answer her parents were hoping for.
Vlad spends another hour in the Fenton household, explaining the nature of his own partial death haltingly, uncomfortable in the vulnerability he was practically forced to display, but not unwilling.
Eventually, Vlad picks himself up and leaves, having put together the nature of Daniel's death and the effects it was having on Amity Park and needing to deal with it as quickly and quietly as possible.
Jack cooks something light, a much better cook than Maddie but unfortunately for them all, tended to get distracted too easily.
The day has been too draining and Jack’s food is done before the Fenton women can register it and it’s comforting and warm even with the chilling screams still filling the house.
Sam and Tucker come by as soon as school lets out, worried due to the absence of both Jazz and Danny at school today, especially since Danny had gone home the day before.
Jazz catches them up and the pair has enough time to offer a few more of the less concerning details to the Fenton parents before Danny’s scream startles them into silence.
After their shaking had stopped, Sam’s eyeliner and mascara had been ruined and Tucker's hands too shaky to type, they had both revealed what part they played in Danny’s half death.
Their guilt was palpable and the two teenagers held each other through the pain of it all. The wound of being partially responsible for their best friend's death reopened as they realized it had never really healed.
The Fenton's are much too hollowed out to show any real reaction, they offer their arms to the children who collapse into them and soak up the forgiveness they were sure they wouldn’t get.
Sam checks the time and breathes a wobbly warning, letting them know that Danny had died around 5:30 and that not a minute later was he already up again.
They all head downstairs at 5:10, all mourning for different reasons.
Danny’s form has more color now than it did hours ago. If she tried, Jazz thinks that she would be able to make out the near faded freckles that mark Danny’s face.
His place in the room switches between three places, all in different positions.
One is a vision of him sitting on one of the lab tables, hand propped up and holding something near his mouth. They’re able to see his eyes crinkle and mouth split into a smile, but his form splits and vanishes before they can hear his laugh.
Tucker says they were eating leftover pizza a few hours before the accident.
Danny is seen next coming down the basement stairs, looking weary but pleased at whatever is happening in front of him. This apparition repeats a few times, his steps even as they go down the stairs and yet never reaching the bottom.
Sam tells them that she and Tucker had been impressed by the inventions that had been out in the lab and Danny had been proud, if not upset, on his parents behalf that the reason they were down there was because their portal had still failed to work.
Sam and Tucker didn’t notice this the first time around.
In the third glimpse they get, they can see Danny standing motionless, head turned towards the portal and for all the world looking as if he knew something was about to happen there.
The lost look sticks in his eyes, almost distant and nearly unreadable before the moment breaks and he turns towards whatever Sam and Tucker had been doing that fateful day.
The only reason any of them catch the look is because of its repetition, it’s quick, barely an instance in time, but there’s something haunting about it that they all know will stick with them long after the loop ends.
Finally, 5:32 comes and Danny has entered the portal.
5:32 and Danny screams for his life, but as 5:33 hits, Danny does not stop screaming.
Maddie makes an aborted move towards the portal, but the entrance is still sparking and whirring, unsafe for anybody to get any closer.
“Danny! Can you hear us?” Jack’s booming voice makes Jazz startle, but it does make Danny’s screaming stop.
“Danny?” That’s Maddie, holding a hand over her heart as she takes a hesitant step towards the portal.
There’s a shuffling sound and uneven footsteps echo for a moment, bouncing off the rounded walls of the portal's structure ominously.
Something drips audibly on the ground and Jazz can make out Danny’s figure before the light of the lab reaches him and ice-white hair comes into view.
He’s in his Phantom form, but it’s wildly different than the one she’s come to know.
Phantom’s left side is the same charred flesh that Jazz and her parents had seen earlier on Danny’s echoed body, but there are marks now that race through the black like lighting, pulsing in time like a heartbeat. The marks are glowing the same ectoplasmic green that all ghosts have making up their bodies, but this green is interrupted by bright glowing sparks, almost like stars.
Jazz feels sorrow roll through her, the comparison making her feel physically ill at the bastardization of something that Danny loves so dearly.
The left side of his face is charred beyond recognition, taking part of his ear, but stopping before reaching his hairline so the white wispy, almost smoking hair is left alone.
His eye had been closed when her parents had laid him on the table, hiding what damage must have been underneath the lid, but now there is a pit of green in the place of Danny’s left eye.
There’s no iris or pupil, just plain green with the same glowing sparks lightly dispersed throughout the ectoplasm.
Phantom is holding his left arm with his right, almost shielding it behind his body, but the large claw-like digits are hard to hide behind his skinny frame.
If this had been the Phantom that Amity, that their parents had first come to know–Jazz knows that Danny wouldn’t have stood a chance at gaining any sort of sympathy from Amity Park.
“Jazz?”
Jazz hiccups, somehow crying again even though she’d thought her tears had dried out hours ago.
“What-? What’s going on?”
Phantom’s eyes flicker towards their parents and Jazz inhales quickly, “I had to tell them, I’m sorry.”
His breathing picks up and his eyes dart between Jack and Maddie.
“Danny, honey, we don’t understand everything, but we love you. We’ll always love you.”
A rivulet of green ectoplasm falls from the pure green eye, tears following from the other eye not a moment after.
Danny sinks to his knees just as the portal bursts to life behind him.
With the portal returning to its natural state, the haphazard group rushes forward to their friend, brother and son.
If anyone in Amity Park noticed that from that day on, Phantom’s form flickered to something a little more monstrous, a little more unnatural, a little more dead–well, they were much too preoccupied with the fact that Phantom seemed happier.
He and the Fenton's had called a truce a few months earlier and everyone had chalked it up to the weight of being shot at on the daily being finally lifted from their young protectors' shoulders.
Of course, no one noticed that young Danny Fenton was also much happier, but that was how it was supposed to be.
Those that knew the truth were simply happy that echoes eventually faded.