A/N: Written for Phanniemay 2018, based on tumblr's ghostgabber's AU where Phantom never ages but Fenton does. Eventual character death. Standard disclaimers apply.

It was a moment of time frozen forever, but Danny didn't realize that at first.

The changes were gradual; though his parents joked about it, he really didn't shoot up overnight, and it took time for him to fill out his scrawny frame. He couldn't hear the changes in his voice, and it's not like he tried to grow out his hair or grow a beard. (The less he looked like Vlad, the better.) His face eventually lost the boyishness of youth, and he was unmistakeably a young man.

But Phantom never changed.

It was embarrassing at first, especially with Sam and Tucker and Jazz teasing him about it relentlessly. Geez, Danny, you could give the little match girl a run for her money. He'd thought his ghost form would change with him. You're shorter than me and you know it; you're my little brother. He'd seen the other ghosts change their forms over the years; why did his stay the same? Oh, man, you look so puny!

Look young though he did, his powers grew. He honed his skills, and any ghost who knew his reputation didn't cross him. Some of them seemed to pop up and attack for old time's sake—Skulker and the Box Ghost being the most frequent—but he became friends with most of them. Johnny 13 would let him help fix his motorcycle (Danny still wasn't sure whether it had ever actually broken if it was just a peace offering, but he wasn't complaining), and Ember actually invited him to one of the concerts she held in the Ghost Zone.

Danny's grades had never been good enough for him to get into the space program, and despite his parents expressing their support for him to pursue whatever he wanted, he chose to stay in Amity Park after high school instead of applying to college. He'd wanted to assure himself that the town wouldn't be overrun in his absence. Sam and Tucker had been reluctant to leave him on his own, but Tucker had been offered a great scholarship to MIT, and Sam wouldn't have been happy staying under her parents' roof any longer. Even Valerie left, though judging by her visits home, she monitored the news from her hometown closely.

So instead of seeking higher education, Danny officially took up the family business. With Jazz off at university, he could no longer depend on her to monitor their parents' inventions. And by working more closely with them, he got a better idea of their views. They still had no love for Phantom, but they were eventually willing to (begrudgingly) admit that Phantom did a good job protecting the town.

It was a start.

It made him think he'd be able to tell them, eventually.

When it became clear that Phantom wasn't physically changing to match Fenton, Danny used that to his advantage. They didn't resemble each other as much as they once had, and the fact that they didn't was seemingly further proof that there was no connection between them whatsoever. Not that anyone had really been looking. Not that he'd known of, at least. But if anyone had, now it could be laughed off as a strange coincidence, not used as potential evidence of what should be an impossibility.

If the Guys in White were still sniffing around, they hadn't shown their faces in years. Danny rather hoped that their department's funding had been cut and the program was now defunct, but he wasn't going to get sloppy because of that assumption. He couldn't afford to. It was better if next to no one knew his secret. It was still safer. For him. For his friends. For Dani.

The first time he realized the changes—or lack thereof—weren't simply physical was during one of Dani's visits, actually. He'd been twenty at the time and over at Sam's to escape some of the Christmas-y-ness of his own house and to visit with her and Tucker while they were home for the holidays. Dani had dropped by with Youngblood to remind him where everyone was gathering for the Christmas Truce.

Sam and Tucker had thought she'd come alone.

No one had corrected them, and that had been the beginning.

"Maybe you just need to get out of this town," Dani said as they flew over Amity Park. "Travel the world. Actually see something. Maybe that'll jumpstart whatever's not developing."

Danny huffed. As Phantom, he still looked like he was fourteen. Dani, on the other hand, looked twice his age and barely resembled the scrappy twelve year old she'd once been, no matter what form she took.

It wasn't fair.

She was a clone.

He shouldn't have to be stuck looking like snot-nosed kid when he was in his thirties.

"I'm serious," she said. "Tell your parents you want to see about expanding their company. Use Vlad as an excuse if you have to. I can hang around here for a while if that'll make you feel better, but I doubt any of the ghosts are going to break your truce."

She had a point. It had taken years of negotiations—begun, of course, during the Christmas Truce, when he could hold a decent conversation without trading shots—but he'd worked out a system, more or less. If the ghosts didn't harm anyone when they came, he'd allow them to visit without interfering.

The Box Ghost still made a mess of things, but he was no more terrifying than usual. Johnny 13 and Kitty became regular visitors, along with Wulf and Dora and occasionally Youngblood and Klemper. Poindexter had even dropped by on occasion. Ember was limited to one concert in the Real World per tour, but Technus was free to scavenge for recycled or abandoned electronics as long as he did all his compilations in the Ghost Zone. (Danny was pretty sure he was still planning world domination, but a strategic comment regarding his skills had him competing with Skulker in a rivalry that kept both ghosts fairly busy.)

"I don't think the fact that I haven't travelled the world is the reason for this."

Dani shrugged. "Suit yourself. But don't rule it out till you try it, cuz. Travelling's about the experience, not the destination. You're not going to find out what a place is really like from a TV screen."

Danny pulled up short, and Dani flew back to join him. "You think I'm wasting my life by staying here, don't you? Dani, I'm protecting people."

She crossed her arms. "You were protecting people," she corrected, "and then you fixed it so that they don't need you anymore. By staying here and claiming you're protecting this town? You're just trying to protect yourself."

"Dani—"

"You have a family. And you can't tell me you think they wouldn't accept you after everything. So obviously that's not why you're not telling them. But maybe you think you're trying to protect them now, instead in of yourself. Protecting them from the truth. You're forgetting how much lies hurt, and you're shortchanging them for thinking they can't handle this."

"That's crazy!"

"Yeah, but it's true. You're not telling them because you don't want to admit you've been lying to them."

"I'm not—"

"You didn't even try to pursue your dreams once you thought it was safe to do so. And, yeah, fine, so maybe it would've been hard to've become an astronaut, but there are other jobs out there relating to space that you definitely could've done. You're smart, Danny. Intuitive, which is worth much more than book smarts. But even when your parents were willing to let you go, you stayed. If I'm dead wrong, then why are you still here?"

"I like what I do, Dani." Normally, he'd give her points for the pun, but not now. "And Amity Park still needs Phantom, whatever you think. Pretty much every time I let my guard down, someone comes through and tries to destroy the world."

"That hasn't happened since your truce."

"And you think I'm going to tempt fate with my luck?"

Dani shot him an exasperated look. "C'mon, cuz, you can concede my point. I mean…. I get if you don't want to tell them about me. You're my family. I don't need anyone else." Lies, judging by her face, and that made them more painful for it. "But you still need them. They're your family. And this isn't a good reason to push them away or just put up with them trying to kill you whenever you're in ghost mode. They wouldn't if they knew the truth. And I get it's been easier to keep your secret from them because Phantom hasn't changed, but…. Think about what you're taking away from them by keeping this up."

She wasn't really wrong. He did think his parents would accept him if he finally told them, and he really didn't want to admit that he'd been living a lie for years. If he told them about Dani, they'd probably accept her, too. But he just….

This was easier, in a way. Predictable. And he didn't have to deal with Vlad hovering over him, demanding to know why he'd done what he had when the truth endangered his secret, too.

He hadn't talked to Vlad in years except when he couldn't help it, but he might have to. Dani was right about something else, too: whatever this was, it couldn't be normal. Not when she was his clone and she wasn't affected by…whatever this was. To Danny's eye, Plasmius had never changed, but it's not like Vlad had ever pulled out pictures from his days as a young halfa. So what if something was wrong? And if there was something wrong, who was affected? Him or Dani?

"Look, cuz, fun as this has been, I need to head out of state again. Valerie wants me to back her up while she checks something out. I'll call you later. Just…please, think about what I said."

She took off without waiting for a response.

Vlad raised his eyebrows. "You're only asking me this now, little badger?"

Danny bristled. He still hated that nickname. And even though he was taller than Vlad in his human form, the other halfa hadn't changed his ways. "Just tell me."

Vlad shuffled the papers on his desk, playing for time and just trying to make Danny squirm. It didn't improve his mood. But while Dani hadn't brought it up again, Danny had been thinking about what she'd said that day—and, more to the point, what had been bothering him since he'd first realized that her ghost form was changing while his stubbornly stayed the same. That was why he was here, now, crashing at Vlad's unannounced and demanding answers.

He hadn't wanted to give Vlad warning, since the old fruit loop might use the time to prepare convenient answers that seemed to be the truth but were really just what Danny wanted to hear.

"Danielle is a clone, my dear boy, but she is not a perfect one. For obvious reasons."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Just spit it out." Vlad never got straight to the point when he could go on and on. While he had more or less given up on the whole idea of getting Danny to turn on Jack and be the son Vlad had never had or of creating a reasonable facsimile, he still enjoyed the attention. And antagonizing Danny at every turn.

"How's your biology?"

"Aside from what I need to know? Terrible."

Vlad sighed. "Then suffice to say, little badger, that by her very nature, Danielle's body will age faster than yours."

Danny just stared at him.

"One of her imperfections is her instability. You may have stabilized her once, Daniel, but she is not exactly conservative in her actions, and such wear and tear is hardly the best thing for her fragile body. I must admit I cut quite a few corners accelerating her age to twelve years when I first started; it's surprising that she does not appear older than her current age now."

Danny opened his mouth, closed it, licked his lips, and tried again. "So, what, one of these days, she'll destabilize again? Why didn't you tell me this years ago? How can we stop it?"

"It's not a process that can be stopped. There are simply too many mutations within her genome, and cytolysis seems to have been introduced with the accelerated aging—"

"And you haven't figured out how to fix it?" Danny growled, knowing his eyes were burning green but hating that Vlad had kept this knowledge to himself, that he was content with letting Dani die so easily. "We have to save her!"

"There isn't anything we can do."

"But there has—"

"Daniel. Her aging isn't normal. Surely you've realized that, considering that your own ghost form hasn't changed."

"That just makes me the abnormal one," Danny bit out. "Other ghosts have changed and grown. It's not just the shapeshifters."

"The other ghosts are ghosts. Have you really not figured this out? It's been years, Daniel. I had thought you at least a little cleverer than this."

Danny was about to retort when Vlad's words clicked. He'd made a distinction between ghosts and halfas and already made it fairly clear that Dani's apparently normal growth was the furthest thing from it. Which meant…. "You're not aging, either? In ghost mode, I mean?"

Vlad leaned back in his chair and changed into Plasmius. "Do I still look so old to your young eyes?"

Plasmius didn't resemble Masters as much as Phantom resembled Danny's human half, but— "No. You look…. Geez, you almost look younger than me."

"I am. I was in my mid-twenties when your insufferable father caused the proto-portal to explode in my face. But this form has its advantages, little badger. It becomes more and more difficult to give up."

"Uh huh."

Vlad gave him a level look, a slight curve of his lip the only indication that he disapproved of Danny's flat tone. "You'll understand someday. Youth isn't something to be scorned."

"You can't talk. Plasmius doesn't look like a teenager. People don't look at you in ghost mode and not respect you. I swear, the kids these days—"

Vlad cut him off with an amused chuckle. "And you call me old. But let an old man teach you a lesson you should have already learned: accept what you cannot change."

"What, not be the change you want to see?"

"You were always good at changing things, Daniel, but you never quite got the hang of accepting them."

"I handled the half ghost thing well enough," Danny muttered. He wasn't sure what Vlad was trying to do by giving him this so-called advice, but he was more concerned about everything else the other man had said. If he wasn't lying about Dani…. "Did you really not figure out a way to stabilize your clones? I mean, you could've adapted your own mid-morph sample if you were messing with DNA anyway."

Vlad frowned, though Danny didn't know if that was because he was incorrect or just grossly oversimplifying things. "Is that really your biggest concern right now?"

"Yes!"

"Then you haven't learned anything at all. Run along, little badger. Try to prove me wrong. But don't be surprised when you fail."

"So you still haven't told her, huh?"

Danny phased his hand through the wall of his old bedroom to the empty space where he kept a vial of Dani's ectoplasm. He'd had to beg it off Vlad, not wanting to tell Dani what he was doing until he found a way to fix this, so he was careful with it; he wouldn't have the opportunity to get more. Fortunately, his parents weren't home right now, which meant he had free reign of the lab—and it meant he could have Jazz on speakerphone. "There's gotta be a way around it. C'mon, haven't you come across anything?" As of last week, Tucker hadn't had anything, either, and according to Sam's text yesterday, her best attempt at a lead had fizzled.

"You're the one working with Mom and Dad, not me. I haven't been covered in ectoplasmic goo in years." Danny opened his mouth, but Jazz continued before he had a chance to say anything. "I know, I know. I'm keeping an ear to the ground, but I don't think I'm going to be much help. You should ask Mom."

"That would require more explaining than I'm prepared to do," Danny pointed out as he headed downstairs. Jazz was just trying to make the point again that he should tell them his secret, especially now that he'd finally—finally—gotten them to agree to work with Phantom more overtly than ever before. He knew they didn't trust him much, but they were getting older, and they weren't as quick or—at least in his mom's case—as accurate a shot as they'd once been. He'd told them, as both Danny and as Phantom, to turn on Phantom if he ever went bad, but that was as much for their comfort as for his.

He didn't want to be let loose on the world if, for some reason, he was being controlled or anything like that. Valerie knew that, too. She didn't need to live in Amity Park or Elmerton to keep up on the news, and Phantom going rogue? She'd pay attention to that.

But he hadn't told her his secret, either, even after she'd accepted Dani. Because that wasn't the same. On that point, it did come down to cowardice. Like Dani had said, he didn't want to admit to the years of lies. And, brief though the period had been, he had dated Valerie. She might take that as a betrayal of trust. Willing to work with her enemies though she might be, she could definitely hold a grudge.

Of course, mad at him as she might initially be, she would get over it. Eventually. And then he'd have someone else to help him solve this problem with Dani before it was too late. He was beyond pretending that he didn't need help.

"And you tried talking to Vlad again?"

"He's no help and you know it," Danny said as he flicked on the lights in the lab. "He gave up on her a long time ago. As far as he's concerned, he's humouring me. Waiting for me to realize I can't do anything. As if I'm going to abandon her."

A sigh. "Danny, I know how much this means to you, but you need to talk to someone who knows more than we do. Sam and Tucker have their own lives now. They can't drop everything to help you as easily anymore."

"And neither can you," Danny finished. "I know. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm just—" From Jazz's end, someone leaned on a car horn. Danny winced. That was the downside of calling Jazz in the middle of the day; if she was somewhere she could talk to him, then she was in transit, fighting her way through what seemed to be constant traffic. She walked as much as she could, claiming it kept her fit, but Danny suspected the truth was one too many close calls with drivers little better than their father. "Someone got cut off?" he guessed.

"Patience is hard to come by in the big city," was all Jazz said. "Sometimes it feels like you're risking life and limb even venturing out onto the sidewalk."

"But your patients thank you for it," Danny said, grinning as he imagined Jazz's eye roll. "And I'm grateful that you still put up with these phone calls from me. You're a life saver, Jazz. Really." He glanced at his watch. "You've got, what, ten minutes till you want to be there for your next appointment?"

"Yeah. It would be tight if I didn't give myself a few extra minutes. But you didn't call to talk about me. Was it really just to see if I've miraculously discovered something to help Dani?"

She knew it wasn't; her tone made that perfectly clear.

She could still read him like a book.

"Dani was wrong. About me just needing to travel, I mean. Since Vlad confirmed that he's the same as me…. The joke about me being half dead might not be as much of a joke as I thought. Phantom's never going to change, Jazz. I could be ninety, and if I go ghost, then bam! Wimpy teenager. Again."

Jazz snorted. "Phantom can't exactly be described as wimpy, and I don't think perpetually looking like a teenager is what you're really worried about. You aren't losing yourself whenever you change, little brother. Just because you look like your past self, it doesn't mean you're becoming him. You've grown a lot over the past couple of decades, even if you can't see that growth on the outside. That face in the mirror is still yours, and you're still you. Phantom might be almost unrecognizable alongside Fenton, but that dissociation isn't—"

Jazz's words ended in a shriek, difficult to distinguish over screaming tires and blaring horns. After a loud crackle, the line went dead.

Danny's shouts went unheard.

A warm hand dropped onto his shoulder. "She's gone, sweetie," Maddie said quietly as she moved around to join him at her kitchen table. "We have to accept that." He'd come over for a visit, found them both out, and sat there to drink some tea which had long since gone cold. He hadn't heard them come back. He had also apparently missed the kettle boiling, as she held her own steaming mug as if she were going to attempt the same thing he had. He wondered if she'd be any more successful.

Nothing seemed to be successful lately, including getting some sleep, considering there hadn't been any ghost attacks.

It had been three weeks.

Three weeks of numbness. Three weeks of anger. Three weeks of tears. Three weeks of being an emotional mess, swinging between feel nothing (dead inside) and feeling too much.

Three weeks of that unfinished conversation repeating itself whenever he closed his eyes, always ending the same way.

Maddie pushed the warm mug toward him and pulled his untouched one away. He stared at it dully for a moment before slowly curling his fingers around it in acceptance. The patterns of steam in the air were mesmerizing. "This is incredibly hard for all of us, honey," his mother said. "You should consider talking to someone like Jack and I do. Jazz would have wanted that."

You don't know what she wanted. He couldn't bring himself to voice those words, though; there was no reason for such venom. Had a ghost taken Jazz from them, no one in their family would have hesitated. They would have been able to spring into action and take down the ghost, stopping it from doing this to anyone else even if they weren't in time to save Jazz.

But it hadn't been a ghost.

It had been an ordinary human. Driving. Drowsy, maybe, or drunk or texting. Danny didn't know for sure. All he did know was that the man had run onto the sidewalk and hadn't been able to stop fast enough. He'd hit Jazz and a few other pedestrians. He'd died from his injuries after a few days in the hospital; the others had, as far as Danny knew, recovered.

Jazz hadn't even made it to the hospital.

"This isn't right," Danny whispered. "Jazz has too much left to do."

Maddie found his hand and squeezed it. "I know it hurts, sweetie. Your heart is aching with her absence. But she's gone, and you have to accept that. We can't change it."

Her words made him remember the conversation he'd had with Vlad years ago. "You were always good at changing things, Daniel, but you never quite got the hang of accepting them."

But did he have to accept this? Jazz's death had been abrupt, senseless, and had come well before it should have. She was the definition of someone with unfinished business in this realm. Didn't that mean there was a chance that she was out there somewhere? Lost in the Ghost Zone, trying to recollect her memories of her past self or trying to muster up the energy to move through the Ghost Zone, find their portal, and break through?

Danny let out a slow breath. "She might not be gone gone." He tore his eyes away from the mug and looked at Maddie. "She might be out there. In the Ghost Zone. Mom, I might be able to find her."

Maddie's smile was small. Sympathetic. Saddened. "Jazz wouldn't have wanted to come back as a ghost, sweetie."

"That's not necessarily a choice! And if she's out there—"

"Even if something is out there that resembles her, Danny, it wouldn't be her. You know that."

"You're wrong," he insisted. "You know as well as I do that some of the ghosts in the Ghost Zone are people and animals who had once lived in our realm. They aren't all just sentient ectoplasmic forms or whatever your latest term for it is. And the ones who aren't, the ones who were once alive— There's more of the people they once were in them than you think. Death doesn't change everything. Jazz would still be Jazz, not just a ghost that looks like her."

Maddie sighed. "I know it's a comforting notion, Danny, but you can't delude yourself with such falsehood."

"It's not—"

"Ghosts aren't alive!" Maddie snapped. Danny blinked, not expecting her anger, and she took a few breaths before saying, "It's dangerous to hope like that, Danny. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment, and you know better."

Danny swallowed. "I know more than you do. I know more than you think."

Jazz had always wanted him to tell them.

"Danny—"

"Do you remember that accident I had in the lab when I was a kid? The one that sparked the portal? When you wanted me to go to the hospital but I insisted I was fine and Dad was so excited about the portal working that you didn't push the point?"

Maddie's lips thinned but she nodded.

"More happened then than I ever told you. I…. I don't know how it works, exactly. Jazz always understood it better than I did. But my DNA…. Something changed. I think it was infused with ectoplasm."

There was a frown on her face now, but at least she wasn't interrupting him. He was surprised she'd let him get this far.

"The thing is…." Danny could still see the steam rising from the mug. He looked down at it and channelled some of his ice powers into his hands. The mug cooled, and the liquid within froze solid as ice painted the outside. He didn't look up, even though Maddie's gasp meant she'd seen it as he'd intended. "Everything changed then, Mom. I was just fourteen. I'd been in an accident that probably should have killed me—it was worse than I ever admitted—and…. I came out of it alive and with ghost powers. Which sounds crazy, like something that should be in a cartoon or comic books or something, but it's not. It happened." He glanced up and met wide violet eyes. "I can turn into a ghost."

Silence.

"I'm Danny Phantom, Mom."

Heartbeats passed.

Maddie let out a slow breath.

Danny waited.

Finally, a quiet, heart-wrenching, "Jazz knew?"

Not what he'd expected, but Danny treated the question as the lifesaver it was. "Not at first," he admitted, "but she figured it out, and then she helped me. Sam and Tucker knew from the start. And Vlad…." He hesitated. "Vlad knows, too. Since that reunion you dragged us to. He, um, hadn't entirely given up ghost hunting like you and Dad thought." That was the safest way to put that. Let Vlad explain it for himself. "But my point is, Mom, I can go into the Ghost Zone and look for Jazz. I've been in there before. A lot. And I've got friends in there who can help me. We can find her."

Maddie took a shuddering breath. "Please don't."

"I—what?"

The tears that had been gathering in Maddie's eyes began slow tracks down her cheeks, disturbed as she'd tried to blink them away. "I…. I don't want to think that she's a ghost."

A lump that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with an old terror filled Danny's throat. He managed to choke out, "B-but…ghosts aren't evil, mindless beings. That's my point. I'm still your son, even though I'm a ghost, too."

Maddie closed her eyes. "I know. And I…." This time, she was the one having trouble finding the right words. "I still love you, Danny, and so will your father. I don't have to understand this to know that. But that's different than what happened to Jazz."

Relief flooded him, and he found himself smiling as he argued his point. "No, it's not." He almost felt like laughing. Jazz was right; he should have done this years ago. He'd have to tell her the good news. "I can go find her, and—"

"Jazz is gone, Danny," Maddie repeated. "You can't find her. There isn't anything here—or in the Ghost Zone—for you to find."

"But—"

"No. Please, just let your sister rest in peace. For all our sakes."

Maddie stood and went down to the lab, presumably to find Jack. Danny just stared after her, dumbstruck. He'd thought…. He'd thought she'd be happy, knowing her daughter might not be lost forever.

He headed into the Ghost Zone the next morning anyway, determined to find Jazz.