Chapter Text
The recorder clicked on. With the session over prematurely after her client had walked out, the only thing left to do was to make her notes. She walked over to the couch her client had just abandoned and laid down to stare at the ceiling. Taking a deep breath in and out, she let out some of her own stress from the difficult session and then she started talking.
“Client is an adolescent boy who has just recently started high school. Presents with abandonment issues deflected onto his sister, as well as poorly hidden depression and anxiety likely stemming from being subjected to parental delusions (see client folders for JF and MF). Besides ending this session early, the client has been showing a number of avoidant behaviors, spurred on by his underdeveloped frontal cortex, a lack of proper adult supervision, and his own denial of his troubled mental state.”
She paused here to gather her thoughts.
“During this session the client discussed issues at school that could be related to bullying, though he engaged in behaviors to hide their impact on him. Client has long been subject to a phenomenon I believe is a mass hysteria started by rumors, but he has been ostracized due to a ‘bad vibe,’ since early elementary school. Ostracization later turned to bullying which had been an issue throughout junior high school, however, due to his burgeoning sense of identity and his need to mark his own worth against his peers, the client has begun to hide more elements of himself to fit in. Client has also recently started to doubt the possibility of a long held goal, in part due to his parents’ delusions. The perceived loss of this goal has also impacted his sense of self. This identity crisis has been compounded by a marked increase in abandonment by his parents, whose delusions have kept them in their work space. Their singleminded focus on creating a machine to interact with the dead instead of their own living son has lead to severe self-esteem issues. Unfortunately, these self-esteem issues have led to projection upon his sister, who the client calls arrogant (see my personal folder).
“I have recommended, both to the client’s parents and to the client, that the entire family should spend time together outside of the house (and away from the parents’ place of work). Unfortunately, the client has been seeking validation from his parents by engaging in risky behaviors in their very not safe home laboratory, possibly indicating the client’s own self destructive tendencies and a very adolescent exploration of mortality while denying his-”
She had that feeling and cut herself off just before he spoke.
“What are you doing?” Danny asked.
Jazz stopped the recorder and sat up to turn towards the stairs. He usually avoided eye contact, but he wasn’t, in just that moment, and neither was she, so she experienced that weird psychosomatic response where she briefly felt like she was staring into the vast nothingness of space before she looked away.
“Oh, Danny, I’m glad you decided to come back and talk to me more.”
“Is that a recorder? Were you talking about me?!”
“Did you want to talk about yourself more? It’s really important to talk about your symptoms.”
“My symptoms?” Clear denial in his voice.
“What’s going on in your life,” Jazz said.
“That’s none of your business,” Danny deflected, crossing his arms in a classic example of body language indicating guarded feelings.
“I’m your big sister, of course it’s my business,” Jazz said. “More importantly, according to the latest research on adolescent trauma, your self isolating tendencies are the opposite of what you need.”
“What trauma? Actually, don’t answer that. I’m not isolating! I have friends, unlike you. You know the kids you tutor don’t count, right?”
Jazz took a deep breath in and out. When clients lashed out and projected it was important not to feed into it. “Playing video games online is isolating even if it’s tangentially with friends.”
“Psychoanalyzing people against their will is isolating, because no one wants to talk to you! Now stop being a freak and delete that.”
Jazz held the recorder up to her mouth and said. “Client’s avoidant behavior has increased and will likely stunt his emotional development leading to stunted adult social skills.”
“Oh my god! Give me that thing.”
Danny lunged at her, but Jazz quickly sprung off of the couch and held Danny off as he tried to reach for the recorder that she held over her head.
“Client’s lack of a significant growth spurt has also likely damaged his self-esteem.”
“I’ll damage your self-esteem!”
“The longer you bottle things up the harder it is to work through it,” Jazz said, struggling a bit. Danny was practically trying to climb her to get to the recorder.
“You need a shrink!”
“That term is terribly outdated.”
“Your existence is outdated. Just. Give. Me. The. Stupid. Recorder.”
Jazz toppled herself over onto the couch, with Danny sandwiched in between.
“Oomph.”
“Sorry, little brother,” Jazz said hurried to get up and away. “I just remembered I’ve got some errands to run. In my car. Since I’ve got my license now.”
She dashed for the front door.
“Damn it, Jazz,” Danny wheezed.
“See you later,” Jazz said.
Danny blew a raspberry at her. “See you never, if I can help it.”
“Client’s latent oral fixation indicates-”
A pillow from the couch hit her head just before she got out the door.
“I do not have an ‘oral fixation!’” she heard Danny squawk from the other side of the door.
Well, of course he didn’t, that was Freudian nonsense, but maybe he would think about the childish deflection methods he implemented to avoid actually talking about his feelings.
Admittedly, she had perhaps not handled that as well as she could have. Oh well. She’d bribe him with pizza later to get him down stairs.
“What’s going on up here?” Mom asked, sticking her head into the living room.
“Oh, nothing, hey Mom, I thought you were still asleep. You were working pretty late last night.”
“Oh, actually we worked through the night, sweetie,” Mom said, and then sighed.
“Is everything alright?” Danny asked.
“Oh, well, everything should be working, but it just didn’t turn on.”
“Wait, you tried to turn it on? I didn’t think you were there, yet.”
“Well, your father and I do some of our best work during all-nighters,” Mom said.
“I wanted to be there when you tried it,” Danny said.
“Well, it didn’t even work, Danny,” Mom said.
“My whole life, pointless!” Dad exclaimed from the kitchen.
“It’s just, I’ve helped out,” Danny said. “A lot. I thought you’d want me to be there when you turned it on.”
“Danny, it’s been a very long night,” Mom said.
Danny hid a frown. “So what are we trying next?” he asked. “Maybe take a break?”
“No sense in loosing momentum; it’s crunch time,” Mom said. “We might have to do a teardown, and then who can say where that will take us.”
That was going to take forever. It was always crunch time.
“Not even a spark!” Dad wailed.
“I need to go console your father. We should probably get out of the house.”
“Oh, well, since you just got out of the lab, we could go to brunch or something,” Danny said. “It’s been a while since we’ve been to IHOP.”
“Oh, Danny, I don’t think your father and I are up for much company right now. You enjoy your Saturday.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Right, okay, be good,” Mom patted him on the head briefly. “Jack! Come on, you scavenged from the coffee maker so let’s go find some coffee.”
“Coffee’s for accomplished engineers!”
Mom gave Danny a look and went to wrangle him out the door.
Alone in the house, Danny huffed. It was supposed to be almost over. ‘Crunch time’ had been their excuse for everything over the summer and now here he was two weeks into high school and he couldn’t even wrangle a weekend trip out to Palos Park for some star gazing.
Everything had just sort of sucked for the past however many months, ever since Dash had humiliated him in front of every one on the last day of junior high school, ever since his application for space camp had gotten ‘lost in the mail,’ ever since he’d found out that his body put out just a little bit of EMF because of his ectocontamination and NASA would probably never let him near a space ship… Danny was just sort of waiting for things to feel less sucky.
So, he’d tried to get his parents, literally all summer, to make a trip out to Palos. He’d had it in his head that if they could just go out there it would feel like it had the first time they’d gone there as a family… Well, maybe without Jazz. She wouldn’t want to miss a weekend of studying. It didn’t have to be a long trip, now that summer vacation was over. It could just be a weekend.
He thought about calling Sam and Tucker. Sometimes their enthusiasm for everything had really helped over the summer. Except, after Dash had successfully gotten Danny all the way into a locker on Friday, the both of them were angry on his behalf and the last time they’d talked over Doomed, they’d both been acting like they were worried about him, which was stupid. Danny was more than capable of handling Dash without them worrying.
A part of him just wanted to go upstairs and stare at the stars on his ceiling, but Danny was sick and tired of crunch time. Walking into the kitchen, Danny put the code into the panel next to blast doors to open them. He wasn’t technically supposed to be down there without Mom and Dad, but that was a rule Jazz had made them put in place, so it wasn’t like it really counted.
The lab was a mess, of course, and Danny was annoyed that he had to do some cleaning (when it wasn’t even his turn) before he could go about figuring out what his parents had done all night.
He cut his finger cleaning up a broken beaker and stuck his finger in his mouth, ignoring the green residue he picked up from the glass. What was a little more ectocontamination?
Probably a one way ticket to very definitely never getting into NASA, much less the space program. He should at least try to minimize further exposure.
Danny went and put on a bandage and then his HAZMAT suit, which was uncomfortable and hot. He looked over at the ectofiltrators. Oversaturated. He probably should have been wearing his respirator the whole time. Danny groaned as he threw on the hood and got the full face respirator out to strap onto his face. Nothing like wearing a sauna suit in September.
When Mom and Dad had realized he was a little EMFey and realized how much ectoplasm was in his blood and cells, Mom had made this offhand comment, like, oh, maybe that’s why you’ve always been a bit odd. Which, gee thanks Mom, not like he didn’t hear it enough at school. The kids at school had mostly written him off as creepy when he was in Kindergarten, and the only thing that had changed since then was them deciding that this didn’t make him scary so much as it made him a joke.
Things cleaned up, Danny reviewed all the changes he could figure his parents had made to the blueprints since the last time he’d been down there. Nothing seemed wrong, but there was just so much there, it took forever. He kept telling himself he should take a break and go eat lunch, but… Like his parents, he didn’t like to waste momentum. He wasn’t really hungry anyway.
Review finished, Danny got a voltmeter and started testing connections and outputs on all of the external critical control elements, but everything was within the parameters listed. He took a bit of time to verify that those parameters hadn’t been written with any wrong decimal places.
The portal did two things. When someone died and became a ghost (or a proto-ghost, rather) a micro portal opened up and took (most of) them to the Ghost Zone. Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill anyone, of course, so the first thing the portal did, was to artificially open that hole. Next, the portal was supposed to rip that hole wide open and keep it open.
Dad had said that there hadn't even been a spark. So the first place to look was the portal generator, itself, before the stabilizer. Danny eyeballed the chasm in the wall. Jazz had always called it a death trap, and Danny sort of felt a thrill walking into the thing when Mom and Dad weren’t even there. Voltmeter in hand, Danny started testing components, imagining the whole time that he was going to figure it out. Helping to build an inter-dimensional portal had to look good on a resume for NASA, right?
He was halfway through testing the leads on the J7 switch panel, when he looked at it in confusion. Why was there any switch panel in there? There weren’t supposed to be any controls inside the portal. He thought back to the blueprints and then ran out just to be sure. Yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be a J7 switch panel. It was supposed to be a K12 fuse box.
Danny felt giddy for the first time in a long time. He’d done it. He’d figured it out. Mom and Dad would be so happy. The project would be done. They’d want to go take a little break. He could talk to them about- everything. They would go for a little vacation (Danny would pick, since he fixed it).
He went to the supply room and started looking for the fuse box. All he had to do was shut everything down, wire in the fuse box, and then he could turn it on. Mom and Dad would come home and the portal would be working. Danny would just stand there as they exclaimed at how he’d fixed it. They’d…
Mom and Dad wouldn’t leave the basement for another week. At least. If the thing actually started working.
A week? Try a month. Try a year.
‘There’s so many discoveries to be made, Danno, we’ll go out soon, after we’ve published a few papers.’
Danny deflated, feeling dumb, and hot, and covered in sweat. Just a bunch of wishful thinking, like he was a little kid.
At least they’d be proud of him. At least they’d be happy with him.
Danny found the fuse box. He just wanted it to be done. He trudged to the portal opening, ready to be done with it. Kneeling down next to the switch panel, Danny got to work swapping in the fuse box.
Jazz was rather surprised to see the awful RV her parents had modified gone when she got back home. Despite what Danny thought, she did have friends, and she’d spent some time with Spike who had needed a listening ear and some advice while he dealt with parents during a vulnerable time in his late adolescence. They’d gotten lunch together and watched a movie. Danny had probably calmed down and might have processed some of his emotions now that she was home. Though, with it being dusk, and Mom and Dad gone, then it definitely would be on her to handle dinner. All would be forgiven with Pizza.
“Danny,” she called when she got inside. “Hawaiian or chicken bacon?”
There was no answer, even though she knew he could hear her from his room. Oh well, he liked both of them, so he couldn’t complain. Well, no, Danny could complain about anything.
She should at least check to see if her parents were going to be home and would want dinner. She pulled out her phone.
“Jazz, honey,” Mom said. “I should have called earlier.”
“Yes, you should have,” Jazz agreed. “Are you going to be home soon? I’m ordering pizza.”
“Oh, honey, we’re heading up to the city right now; there’s some reference material we want to look at in the archives at the University of Chicago.”
“You’re going out of town? Right now?”
“You can drop your brother off at Hamlet tomorrow before you go to school?”
“Mom, we both go to Casper; Danny’s in the ninth grade now.”
“Right, of course,” Mom said. “He looked so cute in his picture day outfit.”
He’d come home from school with that outfit trashed.
“Anyway,” Mom said. “We’ll be back tomorrow before you kids come back from school.”
“Mom, this is a pivotal point in your son’s development. This sudden abandonment really-”
“Thanks Jazzy Pants, you and Danny enjoy your pizza.”
Jazz did not scream at the phone that had just disconnected. She went over to the fridge and looked at the Luigi’s Pizza magnet for the number.
She looked up when the kitchen lights dimmed suddenly, and a moment later she heard the most awful soul shattering scream. Jazz whipped around towards the blast doors downstairs. That was Danny. That was Danny screaming down in the lab. Jazz ran towards the doors, her heart in her throat. Danny’s gasping pained yell echoing in her ears. She was halfway through the code for the doors when everything stopped. The lights shut off, the panel went blank, and the screaming now only was an echo in her mind.
“Danny?!” Jazz yelled through the doors. “Danny, can you hear me?!”
Everything was off. There was nothing but total silence in the kitchen.
“Danny! This isn’t funny. Answer me right now!”
He could be dying down there.
She started pressing at the panel desperately, but there was no power. Why couldn’t she open it when there wasn’t any power? She took out her phone and turned the light on. The panel was supposed to have a backup battery in it. She ripped off the cover and… there was an empty spot for a nine volt battery.
“Danny! I’m going to be right back. I need to get this door open. Um, if you can hear me, can you get to the breaker panel? There’s no power.”
There wasn’t a sound from the basement.
Jazz rushed to the closet and found AA and AAA batteries, but no nine volts. The thought of hauling the ladder out of the garage just so she could get a smoke detector down was just infuriating. She grabbed the Fenton-Anti-Creep-Stick™ from next to the door, ran and jumped, swinging the baseball bat over her head, knocking the smoke detector down. A minute later the door unlocked and she hauled it open, her phone light illuminating her way down.
What if he was dead?
She felt that feeling she got when Danny was in the same room as her, except it was turned up to eleven. So, he couldn’t be dead.
Except that feeling was just a dumb psychosomatic response, that she had never been able to train herself out of, so it didn’t mean anything.
“Danny?”
She swept her phone around the room. There was less clutter than she was used to and she couldn’t see Danny anywhere. Then there was a flickering in the corner of her eye and she turned towards the death trap her parents had built and there, lying on the ground, Danny popped into existence. A weird trick of the light from her phone.
“Danny!” He was on his side, clutching at his arm, silent tears streaming down his face. A burned respirator lying next to him. He looked up at her slowly.
“J-Jazz, I d-, am I dead?”
“Of course you’re not,” Jazz said, approaching him cautiously. Looking at the arm he was clutching. The arm of his HAZMAT suit was charred. Oh god, that had to be a massive burn. He was staying calm; he had to be in shock. “Danny, are you hurt anywhere else?”
Danny shook his head. “It’s… Nothing hurts.” He swallowed. “It should hurt, right?”
“Let’s just- We need some light. Don’t move, okay?”
Danny nodded. Jazz walked over to the breaker panel in the corner, the whole time looking over her shoulder to see that Danny was still there. That weird trick of the light happened again, and Danny seemed to flicker.
She turned towards the panel. Luckily the portal had its own breaker, which she left off, but… the other breakers weren’t just flipped, everything in the panel was melted.
“Well,” she said. “Better the breakers than the house burning down.”
She turned back towards Danny, and it was probably the material of his HAZMAT; it reflected light weird.
“Danny, no!”
“It feels fine,” Danny protested, gingerly pulling off the charred material of the glove, the charred material crackling.
“You’re going to peel off your skin.”
“It’s fine,” Danny said. He held up his hand, which was pale, but unmarred.
“Oh, thank god,” Jazz said.
“Got to hand it to Mom and Dad, they make a good suit.”
He started laughing, sounding slightly hysterical.
Clearly he needed a hug, and he probably wouldn’t push her away. Her skin crawled a bit more than it normally did when she hugged him, but it was fine. Not for the first time, she cursed her parents for raising them to believe in ghosts and the supernatural. It had somehow infected her brain and when people had started commenting on Danny being odd, it had never left, no matter how rationally she looked at it. Sometimes, she worried that it had been her who had started the mass hysteria at school, that how she’d treated Danny when they’d been little had been the reason for all his misery with his peers.
Danny caught his breath for a while. “I think I’m okay,” he said eventually, pushing her away.
“What were you thinking?”
“I figured out why it didn’t work.”
“What?”
“Someone installed a switch panel instead of a fuse box. I- um- I forgot to turn off the power before I swapped them out.”
“Danny, it didn’t work because ghosts aren’t real.”
“Uh, yeah,” Danny said. “Anyway, I figured out what was mechanically wrong with it.”
“Danny you could have died! For Mom and Dad’s stupid obsession with these delusions.”
“Hey, hey, I’m fine,” Danny said. “Somehow. You know, for a moment, I sort of thought-”
He laughed a bit again.
“Danny, you got electrocuted so bad your suit got charred. You shouldn’t have been down here. Mom and Dad shouldn’t have let you down here. Do you know how scared I was?”
“Hey, I thought you wanted to be an only child.”
“I was twelve, can you just let that go?”
“Never. What was wrong with the breakers?”
“You melted them. The power’s out for the whole house.”
“I can fix that,” Danny said.
“You’re not touching anything.”
“I’ll turn off the mains power first.”
“Danny, I almost just lost you. I thought you were dead. Danny, I thought you were dead.”
“Yeah, well, just wait till Mom and Dad get home, then I’ll be dead.”
“I’m going to kill them! Danny, this has gone too far, their extreme neglect almost killed you.”
“Jazz, I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking!”
“It was just a bit of a shock.”
He was pale.
“Can you stand up?”
Danny started to get up, but his knee went out from under him. Jazz tried to catch him. She thought she had caught him, but she must have just missed him.
“Nice catch,” Danny muttered.
Jazz reached down and helped him sit up. She brushed his hair back from his forehead. Besides being pale, his skin was clammy. She picked up his hand and checked his pulse. It was rapid, but thready. She pulled him up. Half leaning against her, she helped him get out of his HAZMAT suit. He looked shaken up, but he was… not burned to a crisp? Was he in shock? She was pretty sure he was in shock.
She hazarded a look into his eyes and the vast expanse of nothingness almost swallowed her. She had to explore it. It was so empty and so full of possibilities and- his pupils were dilated wide open and barely reacted when she shined her phone light in them. Yeah, he was in shock.
She dragged him upstairs, where she dropped him on the couch.
“You’re in shock,” she said. She pulled down one of the back pillows and placed it on the foot of the couch. “Feet up, lay down. I’ll get you a blanket.”
“I’m really fine.”
“You’re really not,” Jazz said. “Danny, can you just try not to get yourself killed right now?”
Danny sighed and laid down on the couch.
“Feet up,” Jazz said, moving towards the closet to grab a blanket and a lantern, if she could find one.
“Oh!” Jazz exclaimed. “Take off your binder.”
“Really, Jazz?”
“You’re in shock! You want to have trouble breathing?”
“There is no trouble breathing. I’m not in shock,” his voice shaking.
“Danny, so help me, I will ruin every constellation in your room…”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’ve got the same exact glow paint, it would be so easy, you’d never sleep again until it was all fixed.”
“You’re the worst,” Danny said.
Danny had been obsessed with the accuracy of his ceiling for years. When he’d been five, it had been enough to just have the stars, by the time he’d been seven it had needed rough constellations. When he’d been ten, he’d gotten the ruler out and learned proportionality and perspective.
Jazz found the lantern and turned it on. Relieved to not be relying on her phone, she went back out into the living room where Danny was struggling with his shirt. She helped him get comfortable, put the lantern on the table, covered him with the blanket, and went to get a Pedialyte.
Thud. “Oof.”
“Danny!”
She ran back out into the living room. Danny was on the floor, looking shaken. He looked up at her, eyes wide. “I- I’m still alive.”
“What happened?” she asked, kneeling besides him.
“I don’t know. I- I was lying down, and then I just- fell.”
She helped him sit up and made him drink some of the Pedialyte.
“Did you have a seizure.”
“Jazz, can you calm down? Of course I didn’t have a seizure.”
“People who are just lying down don’t fall off of couches. You got electrocuted. I’m calling paramedics.” She pulled out her phone.
“Jazz, no,” Danny said. “I’m fine. And besides, they said they weren’t going to come back here after the last time.”
The goo incident.
The ability to call for an ambulance; another thing her parents had ruined.
She helped Danny get back up onto the couch. Made sure his feet were elevated. Made him finish the Pedialyte, and covered him back up with the blanket. Then she sat down in her dad’s recliner and settled in to watch Danny.
“So, where are Mom and Dad?”
“They’re probably in Chicago by now,” Jazz said.
“Oh.”
He looked really upset about that, but shut down when she tried to explore it further.
Jazz was a super worry wart, and a control freak for the rest of the evening. She kept making him drink water. She insisted on keeping an eye on him. She did get him pizza, though.
Mom and Dad were going to kill him. When Jazz finally fell asleep, Danny got up, grabbed the lantern, and went into the kitchen. The lantern illuminated the room and Danny eyed the doorway downstairs.
It was just the basement.
At the very least, Danny should have the power back up and running before Mom and Dad got home. He held on tight to the handrail and went downstairs. Everything mostly looked the same. The light of the lantern cast the room in an eery light. He didn’t look at the portal. He just went to the supply closet and grabbed as many breakers as he could carry and went to the breaker panel.
The main breaker was still on, but all of the sub-breakers had tripped and melted. That was a few hundred dollars in breakers, but he was hardly the only person in the house who’d ever ruined a breaker with mad science, so they had plenty of replacements on hand. Danny put on electrical gloves, turned off the main power, and started pulling all of the melted breakers out. It was a bit tedious, but it wasn’t any more difficult than anything he’d ever worked on for the portal.
He was still a bit shaky. He was fine, though, right? All that weird stuff had been in his head. The portal definitely hadn’t turned on. Danny had just electrocuted himself, like an idiot. If everything had turned on, magnetically confined ectoplasm would have flooded the chamber. The graviton vortex would have squished the ectoplasm, and Danny himself, into the start of the portal. Danny could picture it in his minds eye. For a moment, he had thought it was happening. For a moment, when the electricity had arced through his body, he could have sworn he’d felt his blood boil in his veins. He could have sworn that he’d felt his body compress and contort.
Except he was fine. He’d had a weird hallucination of himself floating. He’d had a near death experience. Danny had been electrocuted, and he’d probably shorted something out, which was why the rest of the portal hadn’t turned on. If the rest of it had turned on, Danny would have died for sure, and he definitely wasn’t dead.
He’d just fallen through the couch, but that had just been his imagination. Jazz might have kind of been right about him being a bit shaken up. He’d had vertigo, maybe, and just fallen off the couch. He definitely hadn’t gone through the couch, like a ghost. Danny was fine.
Everything wired into a new breaker (except for the portal circuits), Danny turned on the main power and then started switching on breakers. He really didn’t want to go near the thing, but he really should check to see if he’d fried anything in the portal.
“Danny?!”
He should have switched off the lights before he went downstairs.
“Hey,” Danny said sheepishly.
Jazz rushed downstairs.
“Seriously, Danny?”
“I’m feeling much better.”
“You said you were fine when you were in shock, what does better mean?”
“It means I was able to rewire everything, just fine,” Danny said. “So that probably means that I’m fine.”
“You could have electrocuted yourself again.”
“The food in the fridge was going to go bad.”
“The food in the fridge was already contaminated,” Jazz said. “Danny, please just come upstairs and stop doing dangerous stuff.”
There definitely wasn’t anything else he wanted to do downstairs.
Danny convinced Jazz to let him sleep in his own bed, and not to watch him all night. This was for the best, since it would have been embarrassing to have a little freakout at two o’clock in the morning over what was probably a fever dream of waking up floating over his bed and seeing a ghost in the mirror. Then he’d had that thing where he dreamed that he was falling, and jolted himself awake in bed. He’d woken up in a bit of a state.
It took him a while to fall asleep again. Still, a weird freaky dream was a whole lot better than being dead.
The next morning, his alarm never went off, because he’d never put his phone on to charge. Luckily, Jazz had actually called him out from school. She’d also called herself out from school. It must be nice to be the biggest brownnose in school. Unluckily, she called him out from school so she could take him to urgent care.
“Jazz, I’m fine,” he said for the millionth time. “I swear, if you check my pulse one more time…”
“You got electrocuted, you went into shock, and you might have had a seizure,” Jazz said.
“I did not have a seizure.”
He also hadn’t phased through the couch.
Or floated.
Or looked like a ghost.
Or died.
He was definitely alive. Jazz had checked his pulse enough times to prove it.
“I just feel like we’re wasting people’s time here. I’m sure the guy who’s been throwing up over there probably needs a doctor more than I do.”
“Who’s been throwing up?” Jazz asked.
“That guy,” Danny said, pointing across the room, except… “Huh, I guess he got called. The point is we’ve been here an hour, so that means they’re busy, and I’m fine.”
And if he wasn’t fine, he didn’t want to know about it.
“How do you feel?”
“For the last time, I’m fine.” He doubted it would be the last time.
“Emotionally.”
“Seriously, Jazz?”
“You had a big scare, there. I was reading up on responses to acute trauma. I really should have had you process it last night.”
“Jazz, I can’t believe I’m sitting here, literally dying, and you’re still psychoanalyzing me.”
“Danny-”
“Danny Fenton?” a nurse called out.
“Finally,” Danny said.
Danny wasn’t thinking and he accidentally made eye contact with the nurse who just froze and stared at him a moment. He looked at the ground.
They got taken to the back where Danny got his height and weight done, blood pressure, and then… The pulse oximeter didn’t register anything.
“Oh, let me see that,” the nurse said. He put it on his own finger and it lit up. He gave it back to Danny and… nothing.
“Well, I’ll just take your pulse the old fashioned way,” he said. “And we can leave the O2 a mystery.”
Then he got a myriad of questions, including embarrassing ones, in front of his sister. Of course, the things that Danny wasn’t sure about, Jazz just knew off the top of her head.
Finally, the doctor came to see him, and Danny tried to say what had happened, but the words didn’t want to come out of his mouth, so Jazz explained about him being electrocuted, and it felt all wrong to hear her say it, and then Jazz described all of his symptoms, and the doctor wanted to test all of Danny’s reflexes. He ignored the way she sort of flinched the first time she touched him.
“So, tell me about falling off the couch,” the doctor asked Danny, since Jazz had had to bring that up.
“Oh,” Danny said. “I think it was just some vertigo. I don’t think it was a seizure.”
“Vertigo can be a precursor to a seizure, or the manifestation of a small seizure,” she said. “Though it can also be its own symptom of the after effects of electrocution. So we’re going to want to monitor that. I don’t want you riding a bike or scooter or anything like that for four weeks, and I don’t think you should walk around town on your own. Neurological symptoms of electrocution can pop up some time after the event itself.”
“Wait, that seems a bit extreme,” Danny said.
“We’ll make sure of it, Doctor,” Jazz said.
She was going to be a nightmare.
She put Danny through some dexterity and coordination tests, checked his memory, and asked a bunch of the same embarrassing questions the nurse had already asked.
“Was there a reason your parents couldn’t be here?”
“They’re traveling for work,” Danny was quick to say. “Jazz is old enough to look after me.”
And didn’t that smart to say, but Danny didn’t want the doctor to make a thing about it.
“And this accident happened in your home?”
“Yes,” Jazz said, faster than Danny could respond. “And it shouldn’t have been able to happen.”
“The lab was locked,” Danny said. “I wasn’t supposed to be down there, but I knew the codes.”
“And when do you expect your parents to be home?”
“Sometime today,” Jazz said.
The doctor nodded. “I’d like you to follow up with your pediatrician in a week, but if you experience any vertigo, discoordination, seizures, sensory issues, heart palpitations, or anything really, I want you to go straight to the ER. I’m going to ask the nurse to give you some printouts on seizures and heart arrhythmia that I’d like you both to read, and your parents to read, now, and not after something happens.”
Danny was currently in-between pediatricians, the last one hadn’t seemed at all religious until he had wound up a bit convinced that Danny was the anti-Christ.
“Sure,” Danny said. “But I feel fine, I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”
“You went into shock,” Jazz said.
“Maybe,” Danny said.
“Your sister described the symptoms of shock pretty well,” the doctor said. “And it sounds like she treated it appropriately, though I would have liked to have seen you yesterday evening instead of this morning. But your symptoms now don’t warrant any immediate intervention. So I’ll just admonish you to stay safe, do your reading, and monitor for further symptoms. Okay?”
“Yep,” Danny said, eager now that it seemed the whole thing was close to being over.
On the way back out through the waiting room, Danny saw that man from earlier. The one who’d been throwing up constantly. He was trying to talk to the receptionist, but she didn’t even look up at him.
That sucked.
The man turned suddenly and looked at Danny. Danny looked away quickly.
Had there been something wrong with that man’s eyes? Danny turned back to look but the automatic doors were closing.
“Danny?”
Had that guy been sort of transparent?
“Nothing,” Danny said, turning back towards the parking lot. “I thought I saw- it was nothing.
Jazz drove them home. The GAV was in the carport.
He was so dead. He followed Jazz inside. Jazz went straight to the kitchen and hollered downstairs that they were home. It was time to face the music.
Mom came upstairs, followed by Dad. They both looked at Jazz.
“Why aren’t you in school?” Mom asked. “And would you care to tell me what happened down in the lab?”
Best to let Jazz explain it.
“I’m not in school, because I had to take Danny to urgent care, because last night he decided to try and fix your stupid portal and electrocuted himself! Did you seriously just leave the power on? Do you know how lucky we are that Danny was wearing his HAZMAT suit? Did you see it down there? It was burnt to a crisp. Danny, somehow, wasn’t. Oh, and the emergency battery for the door was missing. So it took me forever to get down stairs-”
“Okay, enough, Jazmine, where’s your brother? Is he okay?”
“Danny was in shock and he might have had a seizure, and he’s…” Jazz turned and her eyes swept right over him. “He must have snuck upstairs. Because he thinks you care more about that stupid machine than you do about him.”
No one looked at Danny. He looked down at himself. He couldn’t see himself. Danny stopped breathing, afraid to draw attention to himself.
Everything turned to static, whatever Mom and Dad and Jazz were saying, and then Jazz was following them down to the lab, yelling about something.
Danny willed himself to be visible, and eventually he was. He felt for his pulse. Not like he couldn’t feel his heart hammering in his chest. Ghosts were invisible. The dead were invisible. That man at the hospital only Danny had seen…
Danny ran downstairs, desperate for proof that he was alive. He barreled into Dad, wrapping his arms around him.
“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mess it up. I’ll fix whatever’s wrong.”
“Woah, hey there Danno, let’s have a look at you.”
Dad held him out at arms length.
After Danny had started to creep people out his parents had started wearing their HAZMAT suits full time. They never minded touching him or hugging him.
“Ah, see, he’s fine, Jazzy Pants. Now, what’s this about you finding something wrong in the portal?”
“Oh, there was a switch panel on the inside, it was supposed to be a fuse. You can see on the blueprints, section AD forty-five dash one.”
Mom was already looking over the prints. “Oh, there was a switch panel there?”
Danny nodded.
“Great catch, Danno.”
“Are we seriously focusing on that thing right now?! It almost got Danny killed.”
Danny cringed at that, deeply uncomfortable.
“Hey, now, us Fentons are made of sterner stuff than that. Danny’s fine, and he learned from his mistake.”
Dad slapped Danny on the back, knocking him forward. Danny was very solid, and very visible. He definitely wasn’t a ghost.
“Hey, how about we get those last breakers swapped out and see if that switch panel was the only missing link.”
“I cannot believe you right now,” Jazz said.
“Well,” Mom said. “Danny, you really shouldn’t have come down here alone.”
“Oh, uh, sorry Mom.”
“Aw, us Fenton men like to handle things on our own, sometimes. Danno’s really growing up on us.”
Danny just gave Jazz a look, like, what did she expect?
Well, Danny had been expecting to be in a bunch of trouble, but he hadn’t expected his parents to stop working on the thing.
“Oh, Jack, look, the ecto tanks are almost empty!”
Danny looked over and felt all the blood drain from his face.
“Hah!” Dad exclaimed. “There, proof it worked.”
“How is that proof it worked?” Jazz asked, aghast.
“Well, where did it go?” Dad asked. “The portal must have opened, but we didn’t manage to hold it open. Great work, Danno, but it looks like there’s more than one piece wrong about this puzzle, but us Fentons will figure it out.”
“Oh, it’s going to take so much time to replace all of that ectoplasm,” Mom said.
“I- I’m sorry,” Danny said, not sure why no one was asking how he was still alive, if the portal had really activated and Danny had been inside at the time.
“Oh, honey, if we’d put the fuse in right, we’d have turned it on and the same thing would have probably happened. We’d still have needed to figure out why it didn’t hold the portal open and we’d still have had to condense all that ectoplasm all over again.”
“Are we seriously just glossing over Danny’s near death experience?”
Danny would very much like to gloss over it.
“I’m very glad that Danny’s alive,” Mom said. “And I’m so glad he was wearing his HAZMAT suit like a responsible young man.”
“Hey, Danno, since you’re alive and all, do you want to get started on those breakers?”
“Sure, Dad.”
“Unbelievable!”
Jazz stormed off upstairs. Danny sort of wanted to follow her. He wanted to go lay down on his bed and stare up at the ceiling for a while. The portal had turned on. The chamber had been flooded with highly charged ectoplasm. The graviton vortex had squished it all together to open a portal before it collapsed in on itself. And Danny had been right in the middle of it.
He was alive, though, he was definitely alive. Danny put on gloves and started working on the electrical panel. If things occasionally fell through his hands… no they didn’t. The work kept him from getting too close to the portal, and his parents.