This is based off of a true story. I only bent the details to fit a bit better ;)

Enjoy!

The next day, Danny was rather sick. At around six o'clock on Sunday morning, he had woken up to shivering and coughing, and couldn't quite get back to sleep. He was reading a book when Maddie came in. After a quick examination, his mother determined that it would be best if he stayed in bed all day. She gave him his medicine, left a phone on the bedside table, in case he needed anything, and went back down to the lab.

Rather disheartened by the thought of being bedridden for a day, on a weekend no less, Danny lay there with his eyes closed in the dark, neither trying to wake up or go to sleep, a period of misery broken periodically with a bout of coughing.

In this mood, Jack found his son. "Hey, Danny?"

"Yeah?" Danny's voice was rather gravelly, on account of a sore throat.

"I'm sorry you're ill, son." Jack tiptoed over to the blinds and opened them, causing Danny to squint. "It must have been that fight yesterday."

"Yeah..." Danny sniffed. "What are you doing in the lab today?"

"Maddie's installing a handle on the inside of the Fenton Weapons Vault." Jack sat on the side of Danny's bed. "She doesn't need my help, so I was thinking that you needed a little cheering up."

"Are you going to tell me about how you stole all the chairs from your school?" Danny piped up hoarsely, already looking a lot more cheerful than he had been mere seconds ago.

"Was that the story I said I'd tell you? Well, here goes, but I told you, I'm not a good storyteller."

"Please?" Danny pleaded.

"Okay!" And so Jack started:

"Back when I was fourteen, I was living in a log cabin in the woods. We lived in a place with a lot of forests, sunny in summer, snow piled up way over our heads in winter; you should'a seen the igloos we built! Your grandfather, grandmother, my brother and I all lived together in that cabin."

"You had a brother?" Danny interjected.

"Yes, Danny. I had a brother three years older than me, called Zack, and we got on pretty well up until he turned sixteen. Then, he went through a teenager phase, avoided most of the family as much as possible and started calling himself – I think he got it from the car shop he used to work at – Chevvy, because he hated how our names rhymed."

"Wait, where's he now?" Danny frowned. "He never comes to visit us."

"That's beside the point." Jack sidestepped the question. "So, this school we went to, Treelore High. It had a rather posh-looking, non-spandex uniform that always used to give me rashes. V-man and I went to that school, except he lived a little closer to it, in the town. The drive for us was around forty minutes, in an old truck.

Anyway, chair selling incident, as most stupid things we did, started with me trying to replicate whatever my brother was doing. Vlad and I caught Chev smoking at the back of the school, with some friends of his."

"Wait, you smoked?" Despite the fact that Danny knew his Dad's generation wasn't as up to speed on the dangers of smoking, it still felt rather shocking.

"All the kids were trying it," Jack explained. "I did try it a couple times, to be cool, but I never got hooked. And that's why smoking is a big no-no in the Fenton family, eh, son?"

"Why would I want to try it?" Danny croaked. "Though at the moment, I sound like a smoker."

"You shouldn't talk so much when you have a sore throat." Jack reached over and ruffled his son's hair. "Where was I? Oh, yes! I'm back on track.

My father didn't give pocket money, and I didn't want to get a job, so I tried pressing Chevvy for some money. He didn't want to give me anything, and was probably even less willing when he heard that I was going to use the money to copy him. I can still remember him saying to me, 'Smoking's bad,' leaning on the back wall of the school with a cigarette between two of his fingers.

Vlad's parents used to give him pocket money, but it was strictly regulated by them; he used to have to bring back receipts and notes to show them what he spent on every little thing. They were a more modern sort of family as well, ahead of their time and already suspicious that smoking wasn't a good thing. So of course, they forbade old V-man from buying any of that."

"Didn't you say something about a lumberjack, dad?"

"I'm getting to that! Oh, yes. Dave was a former friend of mine at school, whose dad was a lumberjack. When I talked to him about my problem, he told me that his dad needed a whole lot of chairs for this new order. He and I came up with this plan that if I went and got the chairs from the assembly hall - which the school hardly ever used – and carted them across town to his house, Dave's dad would probably pay good money instead of having to make them all by himself."

"So, that's what you did?" Danny frowned. "Didn't anybody think it was weird?"

"I guess not." Jack shrugged. "It was very easy to nick the chairs because they never locked the hall. Vladdie and I didn't get stopped once as we carried two chairs – one in each arm – every few times before and after school to Dave's house. I get the feeling now that Dave's dad was sort of shady; once we explained the situation to him, he didn't seem to have any problems buying chairs that weren't his.

But Vlad and I were happy enough, getting short-changed about a twentieth of the chair's worth, which we promptly spent on cigarettes, fudge and the like. This continued on for two or so weeks, and by the end we'd nearly completely cleared the assembly hall."

"What happened?" Danny frowned.

"Well..." Jack grimaced. "There was a school play going on, and it was then discovered that there were barely enough chairs to even fill the front row. On that same day, all the teachers got sent out looking for any suspicious activity, so soon enough Vladdie and I got busted carrying four of the last remaining chairs across town.

Ooh, my father was not pleased with the bill he had to foot; Dave and his dad denied any responsibility, and Vlad's parents insisted that old Vladdy was pressured into doing wrong, so it all fell to the Fentons to pay up."

"Wow." Danny blinked. "That's a, that's a-" Before he could finish his thought, another bout of coughing interrupted him.

"I was a naughty kid." Jack grinned. "You know, that was kind of fun. I should tell you about the lemonade truck tomorrow, but you probably need some rest, to get better for Monday!"

"Not fair." Danny grumbled, but he did recline back into bed. "I hate getting ill on the weekends. Well, at least I got to hear the story!"

"That was fun." Jack backed out of the room. "But sooner or later I'll have to stop before he gets too invested in them."