Jazz stared at the red numbers in silence. Her eyes were wide open as she listened out for any sounds. They’d all gone to bed hours ago, but she needed to make sure. She couldn’t risk getting caught.
3:27 a.m.
She was itching with the desire to move. It had to be long enough. Pulling back the blankets, Jazz slowly stepped out, still in her day clothes. She tiptoed to her door in socks and eased it open, making sure to lift it slightly as she did to avoid the creaking noise it normally made.
Walking down the hallway and stairs, Jazz made sure to avoid all the creaky boards and keep her footsteps as light as possible. She wouldn’t wake her parents with this amount of noise, but she had no way of knowing if Danny was home or out fighting ghosts. The extra care she was taking to not be heard was to avoid his enhanced hearing picking up on what she was doing.
She couldn’t let Danny find out. She might have been doing this for him, but he wouldn’t be happy if he knew what she was planning.
Ever since she’d been in the know of his secret, Jazz had been asking him about when he was going to tell their parents. He couldn’t hide it from them forever, no matter how hesitant he was. What Jazz didn’t understand was ‘why’. If he was afraid they wouldn’t accept him as a ghost, she could understand that. They weren’t fond of ghosts in any way, but Danny was insistent that they would still love him, still treat him the same way. That they would be able to get past their hatred of ghosts if they knew the truth. But he still wouldn’t tell them.
The only conclusion Jazz could come to, was that despite all his optimism, he wasn’t sure how they’d react. And honestly, she wasn’t either.
She’d tried pushing, telling him that it was better to know and have it all in the open than let things go on like this. The longer it was hidden, the more it would hurt when it came out. And what if they found out through other means, came to the wrong conclusion, or did something they’d always regret once they knew Phantom as their own son?
Danny hadn’t appreciated her questions. He’d snapped at her to leave it alone and he flew out of the room.
They hadn’t talked about it since then, and Jazz thought that would be the end of the topic for a while longer.
But a few days later, during a fight at the school, their parents had managed to get close to Phantom, and their mother had shot him in the back.
Jazz’s heart had nearly stopped when she saw her brother fall from the sky. He got up quickly, and prepared to fight back, but he froze when he saw who had shot him.
Jazz would never forget the heartbroken look on his face.
He left the fight before they could hurt him further and she hadn’t seen him again until after school, when their parents lectured him about using a ghost attack to skip the rest of school. Danny didn’t make eye contact with any of them, making their parents quickly catch on that something was wrong. Their dad asked him if anything was wrong and gave him, what was supposed to be, a comforting pat on the back. Danny had winced and ran to his room without a word.
Jazz called his friends and confirmed that they’d already bandaged his back before deciding to leave him alone, knowing he wouldn’t be in any mood to talk to her.
It was during dinner that night, when Danny was still hiding in his room and their parents were talking about how’d they’d managed to hit Phantom earlier that Jazz made her decision.
She would respect Danny’s wishes to not tell them until he was ready, but she would not let them keep hurting her brother.
The door to the lab locked behind her with a click, and she breathed a little easier knowing the room was soundproof. Down the stairs she went straight to the weapons vault, turning on the light and looking out at the sea of weapons with a determined expression.
Grabbing the first gun off the rack she took a deep breath and aimed it at the second one. With such a close shot, it burst apart immediately.
Jazz stepped back, gasping. The recoil, sudden noise, and the destruction before her snapped her mind into focus and what she was doing fully hit her.
She was destroying her parents’ weapons.
With the reality of it in front of her, doubt started to creep in.
Was this really a smart decision? Sure, she’d be protecting Danny but not all ghosts were him. Some did want to hurt people, and they could. These weapons didn’t just cause harm, they were a means of protection. But if her parents didn’t know the difference, should they really be allowed to keep them?
Besides, these things weren’t cheap, and they took a lot of time to make. This was her parents’ work, the stuff they’d spent years of their lives on.
Jazz closed her eyes and steadied her breathing. No, she’d already gone through these thoughts when she made her decision. She wouldn’t destroy everything. The weapons were her only target. The shields, detectors, deflectors, thermoses, anything useful that could protect people and not cause great harm to ghosts, would all be staying. She wouldn’t even destroy all the weapons, she’d keep a few in her room in case of emergencies.
As for everything else, her parents needed to learn a lesson. They couldn’t keep hurting every ghost because they were ghosts, and they couldn’t keep hurting Danny.
Her mind was already made up, she couldn’t let fear or doubt stop her now.
Taking another breath, she destroyed the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Adrenaline kicked in and Jazz could feel relief bloom in her chest as she fell into a rhythm. After a while the shooting wasn’t enough, and she left to get a sledgehammer from the workstation.
Jazz swung with all her might, breaking everything in her sight. She might have worried at how much she was enjoying the destruction if she didn’t feel lighter with every hit. It was powerful and freeing. Soon it wasn’t just about protecting Danny or any other innocent ghost, she was taking out all her frustrations and anger at everything her parents had done. They let ghost hunting rule their lives, they left the lab unlocked leading to Danny coming down and getting hurt by the portal, they didn’t listen to anyone, certainly not their own children, about anything. They caused public damage on a day to day basis, shot at or attacked anyone they thought was a ghost or overshadowed without thinking twice or looking for proof, leading to several people ending up in a hospital, they never considered how much their actions hurt others. This was for every time they hurt someone, whether they meant to or not. For every time they embarrassed her, broke a promise, or did something that could have been avoided had they just listened.
There were tears pouring down her face as she smashed into yet another weapon. Sharp pieces of metal and plastic went flying, cutting her arms and face. Splatters of ectoplasm burned her skin. Her arms were tiring as she repeatedly bashed the same weapon over and over.
But she was laughing too.
It felt liberating to destroy it all. Using brute force to smash it to pieces. It was therapeutic in a way.
By the time she reached the end and there were only a handful of weapons left, Jazz was smiling freely. She’d deal with the backlash later; it probably wouldn’t take long for her parents to figure out who did this with the destruction being clearly human and only so many people who had access to the vault. Maybe she would care when that happened, but in that moment, Jazz had never felt lighter.
Danny bolted, flashing a panicked look towards Sam and Tucker, and ran dramatically out of the back door of the ice cream parlor. That… was an extreme reaction, Jazz decided. Hesitating for only a moment, Jazz barrelled after him, almost colliding with one of the servers. "Danny, wait!"
She pushed through the 'employee's only' door and came to a crossroads; there were three doors, the breakroom, the storage room, and the door to the alley. "He went this way," she muttered, deducing that he'd probably left the building. "I think that I can head him off..."
When she opened the back door, she stopped abruptly; Danny was still crouching in the middle of the alley. Jazz didn't want to spook him, so she opened the door a sliver and peeked through the frame. A spark of white light appeared around his midsection, seeing to pulsate… out from Danny?
The light changed, forming a ring around Danny. Jazz watched curiously as the ring enveloped him, moving around Danny and changing his clothing into a black material. How was…? Were her eyes even working right? What was happening to Danny, what-?
She had to stifle a gasp as the ring of light ascended over his head, sapping the color from his hair and leaving his eyes a blazing green. His eyes were actually glowing. It took her another moment to realize that she had seen Danny like this before, well not Danny. She had seen a ghost that looked like this! A real ghost! How the hell was Danny a ghost!
The staid expression never slipped off his face and he bent his knees and kicked off of the ground, jumping into the air and staying there - flying. With determination, Danny jet straight down the alley, his legs twisting into an amorphous spectral tail behind him. There's still no way that could really be-
"Danny?" she clutched her head, trying to wrap her mind around what she had just seen.
Sam and Tucker arrived seconds later, having approached from the other side of the alley. Jazz turned to them in bewilderment. Had that really just happened? Had her eyes deceived her? Was Danny actually the ghost same that she had seen earlier? Even though Danny was alive and her brother-
But was Danny alive?
That question halted her internal ramblings, sending a chill down her spine. How awful was that; she wasn't even sure if her brother was alive anymore! How had she neglected this, not seen this before? She had to investigate this, determine what exactly Danny was and wasn't. Jazz had never been more confounded. This was already eating her from the inside, this uncertainty, this revelation.
Sam and Tucker clearly knew about… whatever that Danny was? It was so obvious now, how they often covered for him. And just then, they had done it again; covered for Danny so he could fight that… ghost panther thing. Danny was fighting the ghosts, just like Mom and Dad had always encouraged, always boasted about. It's almost ironic, she realized deliriously. Danny was supposedly some kind of ghost-person and he was following in their parents' profession by hunting them!
The fact that he was fighting explained some more things, but not much. It explained the destruction that he had caused in Lancer's office a few days ago. It explained why the medical supplies in their bathroom moved every few weeks. It also explained why he had been so sullen lately, discouraged. He was dealing with all this stress that he couldn't tell anyone about - keeping his otherworldliness a secret and fighting the ghosts. Mom and Dad were definitely a problem, with their talk about what they'd like to do with ghosts. In retrospect, she probably hadn't been helping either….
When she went home, she went to her bedroom first. Danny had inexplicably gotten home before her, which she figured was explicable now since she knew that he could fly. Man, it still hadn't sunk in. Her little brother could fly. How was one supposed to react to that?
She laid on her bed for an immeasurable amount of time, recalling what she had seen and learned. The way that the light had changed him… colors inverting. How Danny hadn't even flinched, familiar with the process of transforming…. The terrifying implications, how he might not even be human or alive anymore…. Because despite what she knew about him, there was no doubt he had looked like a ghost, wielding ghost powers like it was natural to him.
It all kept coming back to that. As she tried to piece together a picture in her head, figure things out, it all came back to one panicked realization: Danny isn't human anymore. Because ghosts can't be alive, right? Even though she swore that she had seen him breathing, become fatigued, and eat….
But he couldn't be both alive and dead, so she had to determine the truth.
Jazz pushed herself off of her bed and walked over to her desk drawer. The clock on her nightstand said it was about 7pm now. Mom had called her down for dinner about fifteen minutes ago, but Jazz had stayed in her room, unable to think about eating. It wasn't that she wasn't hungry, it's just that she couldn't afford a distraction; she had to figure this out before she did everything else. Priorities. Even her Spirit Week speech could wait until she understood what Danny was.
She opened the drawer and rummaged through it, looking for what she hoped was still there…. The second prototype of the Fenton Finder. About two years ago she had gotten frustrated that her parents were spending more time working on the Fenton Finder than with her so she stole it. She couldn't bring herself to destroy all the hard work that Mom and Dad had put into the device, locking it away instead. Jazz always told herself that she would return it later but by the time she was ready to return it they had already started the fourth prototype.
She crept down the stairs carefully. She could hear Mom and Dad in the living room, but she knew that Danny hadn't come up to his room yet. He must still be eating dinner. Good, Jazz thought. I can work with that.
She stood beside the doorway to the kitchen, her back pressed against the wall. She could hear Danny listlessly moving his silverware across his plate. Was he not eating because he was depressed, or was he not eating because ghosts couldn't eat? It occurred to her that she had seen him eat, but what if that was just an act?
Well, time to find out.
She'd remembered some of Mom and Dad's notes and recalled that this particular prototype of the Fenton Finder could run detailed diagnostics within a certain proximity of a ghost. Jazz would run diagnostics on Danny and see what they said about him, and then decide on a course of action from there.
She pressed the 'start' button and the device activated for first time in two years. Thankfully, the batteries were still functional, otherwise this would've been a bust. The screen went blank, flashed a pixelated 'FW' logo for a few moments, and then reloaded completely. A single box popped up on the screen: '1 ecto-entity found. Run diagnosis?'
Jazz jammed the 'yes' button with enough force that she was worried that she'd broken the device. Then, a graph appeared on the screen. Jazz scanned the results, trying to make sense of them. She was sure that these terms made sense to her parents, but she was having a difficult time making them out….
-Subject: Human - Ecto-Classification: Unknown - Power Level: 7.2 - Active Ecto-Energy: 3% - Stable: Yes - Signature ID: Unregistered-
That… was an entire mess. So first, Danny was human… but he had a power level, active ecto-energy, and a stable ectoplasmic composition. At least the human clarification relieved her worries that Danny was dead. However, even if he was human, he was definitely also an 'ecto-entity'. The Fenton Finder had only given her more questions. Is it possible to be a living ghost? Because she couldn't see any other way Danny could be a human and have ghost powers!
What really baffled Jazz is that she didn't even know how this had happened - how Danny had gotten powers in the first place. Mom and Dad had always said that it was impossible, and they were ghost experts! Sure, her parents were wrong about many things, but they were usually on-point about ghosts. Or… at least she had thought.
Jazz wracked her brain, trying to recall any incidents that could have given Danny powers. Mishaps happened all the time with their ghost weapons and usually with her more than Danny. The time that Dad had vacuumed her hair, the time her laundry got contaminated, the time that Mom grazed her with an ecto-burner…. The only really big accident that Danny had been involved in lately had been with the Ghost Portal and she knew that it couldn't be that. After all, Sam and Tucker were there and told Jazz that Danny had only been shocked by the plug to the portal. That he had gotten a small jolt of electricity, nothing else, nothing more….
And that had been a complete lie, hadn't it? And she had fallen for it, nonetheless gullible. Wow, the incident had been staring her in the face this entire time and she hadn't realized it. She certainly felt stupid now. Danny getting powers from the Ghost Portal made so much sense that it was almost scary. It also was around the same time that he had started acting differently, more fidgety, clumsy, nervous, morose….
So, Danny was part-ghost with ghost powers and his parents were ghost hunters. His two best-friends knew, but they could only help him so much. Jazz realized now, Danny was struggling. She could offer to help him, lend him her own hand. Reassure him that she cared about him, because despite how she acted sometimes, she truly loved her brother. It was just something that siblings didn't say because nobody wants to be the gushy one.
Danny was just a few feet away and in the three minutes Jazz had been standing there, he hadn't stopped pushing his food around. Jazz decided, I have to talk to him. Let him know I'm there for him.
She turned off the Fenton Finder and placed it in a nearby plastic plant; Mom would find it later and assume Dad had left it there. Jazz breathed quietly and stepped into the kitchen doorway. Danny must've noticed her movement, because he looked up from his plate almost instantly. His eyes met hers, boring into her with bored accusation, "What?" he asked.
Jazz forgot everything that she had been preparing to say. "Nothing," she responded. Once again, she had a lapse of disbelief. This… kid - her brother - was part-ghost? She'd been thinking about it all night, but being in the same vicinity as him just felt underwhelming. Nothing about him suggested that there was more to him beneath the surface. Beneath… the surface.
An urge possessed her. Just a nagging little thought. Sure, Danny was supposedly still human, but what would happen if she touched him suddenly. Would he be tangible like a human, or would her hand go through him like a ghost? Damn curiosity, making her wonder these stupid things. She was so burnt out after thinking about Danny after all these hours that she was foolish enough to follow through the action. She walked across the kitchen, scrutinized Danny again for a moment, and jabbed him in the shoulder. Her hand made contact with his skin and he flinched.
"What!" he yelped, recoiling from her violation.
Well, that hadn't gone well. "Nothing," she repeated. She really was being ridiculous. Just because she knew that Danny had ghost powers now didn't mean that she wouldn't be able to touch him. It was an absurd notion. Jazz glanced around cautiously, ensuring that their parents weren't around to overhear. She placed a hand on her hip and treaded carefully, "So uh, Danny?"
He rubbed his arm, soothing where she had grabbed him. He didn't respond, so she continued. "I know I've been kind of hard on you lately, but you know I think you're great, right?"
Danny's expression wasn't aggressive, but it was clear she was agitating him. "Yeah, right," he said. "That's not what I hear."
"Then you've heard wrong," she assured him. "Look, I know you think I'm pushy and that I'm a know-it-all. I know you think I can be a jerk sometimes."
Danny was smiling, enjoying Jazz belittling herself. She felt a pang of irritation, "You know you can stop me at any time?"
"I know," he grinned.
Jazz sighed, "All I'm saying is, I'm your sister and I care about you. And even though you think I won't understand," she firmly placed a hand on his shoulder, "you can talk to me about anything."
For a moment, something in his eyes looked vulnerable, his facade slipping. He looked down quickly, "Um-"
Before he could say anything, the kitchen shook - a loud BOOM reverberating through the house. Both Jazz and Danny were instantly on their feet, reflexively checking what had blown up. In the living room, Dad's latest invention had misfired again.
As Mom and Dad recited their typical tirade about graphically experimenting on ghosts ("molecule by molecule"), Jazz watched Danny. His breathing went short, and he listened to their parents clearly uncomfortable, terrified underneath. And had an absolutely valid reason to be; hell, knowing what she knew now, Jazz was scared.
She decided then and there, with resounding clarity. Although they were loving, good parents, Mom and Dad were dangerous to Danny. If they captured Danny's ghost self and didn't give him a chance to tell them the truth, the results could be disastrous… fatal… it could destroy this family.
She would stand in the way of Danny and their parents and any other danger that he faced. Even if that danger was himself and his slipping mentality, she would be there for him. She would be his rock. She would do her best to help him stand - soar - against his obstacles, whether it be ghosts, family, and the decline of his mental health.
