Poke.
"Danny."
Pause.
Slightly more impatient poke.
"Danny."
"If you're some kind of ghost, I'm not in the mood," Danny murmured.
Excruciatingly painful poke.
"Ow!" Danny jerked awake fully, blearily scanning his surroundings. The room was dark; Sam's curtains were still drawn shut, while Sam herself contentedly leaned back, examining her nails.
"That hurt," he said, rubbing his arm.
"Please." Sam hurried over to her closet while he watched in a barely awake stupor. "Come on, we're gonna be late. I forgot to set my alarm."
"Yeah, I know." Danny sat up, stretching. "You fell asleep at the chainsaw scene."
Danny slipped off the bed, fiddling through his backpack, which lay haphazardly among their wreckage of notes and books. He glanced up at ask Sam something but promptly forgot when he saw her moving to change her shirt. He respectfully closed his eyes, even covering them with one hand as he continued blindly trying to find his books. When he was sure that she was done, he opened them again, just in time to see her letting out a massive, wholly unattractive yawn.
"Do you happen to know where my History book is?" he asked. "Or, um, all of my books?"
"At your house, remember? You forgot your stuff. That's why we had to use mine."
"Ah, crud. Lancer's gonna kill me if I forget my book report again."
"Well, we'd better hurry and get it, then."
Early in the morning before school, Danny and Sam hastened back to Fenton Works to retrieve his school work, taking their favorite scenic route by air. When he landed at the front steps, he told her to wait there and ran up the stairs to get his books from his room—only to find his mother holding them for him at the top of the steps as she exited his bedroom.
"Uh?" was all Danny could utter.
"Oh, good, you're back! I was just about to call you so you could get this." She arrived at the bottom of the stairs and tossed the stack of books to Danny, who buckled slightly under the weight when he caught it. "From the looks of it, you didn't study much after all…"
"If his name is Danny Fenton, he probably didn't," said the voice of Tucker at the doorway, waving at Danny's mother.
"Right on cue," Sam muttered before glancing back at Danny's mother. "We shared my books."
Maddie sighed. "You leaving now?"
"Yup," said Danny. "Just had to make a pit stop."
"All right, well, have a good day at school. Oh, I think your father wanted to see you before you go, though."
"Your father does indeed!" said the boisterous voice of Jack from behind, lifting his mask to reveal his face still covered in soot.
"Have you been working on the portal all night?" Danny asked. He cringed when the post-invention stench on his dad's jumpsuit came nearer. "Without showering?"
"Not all night… Well, not on the portal at least. Behold!" Jack held out a small white container, practically shoving it in his son's face.
"Um, what am I beholding here?"
"Looks like floss," added Sam.
"Fenton Floss!" said Jack. "Extra durable, minty fresh, and—" He cupped his hands around the object, cloaking it in a momentary darkness. "Glow in the dark."
"He wanted to try out something new," said Maddie, sighing. "Wouldn't sleep until he finished."
"Glow in the dark, Maddie."
Danny hesitantly took the floss, ignoring Sam's smirk, which practically burned into the back of his head. "And… why are you giving this to me?"
"You never know when you might need it," said Jack.
"Thanks. I'll keep this in mind next time I feel the need to pick my teeth."
"We've also been working on those new gadgets for your friends," his father continued, seemingly oblivious of Danny continually trying to gravitate back to the door. "That bazooka didn't take that ghost's ectoplasm well, but we'll keep trying."
"Who needs a bazooka, anyway?" Sam lifted her hand, showing off her oft-used watch from years before. "This is much easier to carry."
"I never said you could keep that, you know."
"This was before you guys knew about Danny," Tucker cut in. "Any prior ghost hunting equipment is therefore immune to parental permission."
"That's not true," said Jack.
"It is. It's the fundamentals of ghost-child parenting. I should know. I'm the mayor."
Sam rolled her eyes and tugged on Danny's sleeve. "Anyway, we kind of have to go."
Jack waved them off. "All right, all right, go to school before you're late."
"Good luck on your test, Danny!" Maddie called, pulling her tight hood over her face and speeding down the stairs after her husband, who had immediately started raging about the bazooka again.
Danny shut the door behind him.
"I see I'm not the only one doomed to a family of morning people," Sam muttered, rubbing her eyes in tiredness as they started walking down the street.
"This is news to you?"
"Not really. It's just weird to see it in action. It's like they don't know what sleep is."
"They tell me they wake up to the 'prospects of science,' but I think maybe they just have too much caffeine."
"Honestly. How do you survive?"
"Usually I just try to pretend they don't exist for a few hours," said Danny. "Jazz would've kept them busy talking, but now that she's at Yale, they're more focused on talking to me. Sometimes I wish they didn't know about my powers again."
"Well, now they're focused on other things." Sam wrapped her arms around the boys' shoulders, sighing. "And now we can focus on other things, too."
"Like the test?"
"Sure," said Sam lightly. "Or maybe the fact that you forgot your book report again."
Great.
Test time came way too soon. Danny stared at the mostly blank paper, clutching at his hair as he tried to form words, but no words would come to mind. The substitute teacher administering the test was sitting in the chair at the front, reading a book, his feet propped on the desk.
Scribbling. Erasing. Scribbling some more. He was fairly sure that one of his classmates was crying or else praying, but he didn't dare try to look. He could only sympathize. Then he could only panic.
How was he going to be an astronaut if he couldn't even complete a physics midterm?
The idea of time wasted not studying made him want to kick himself now, but he merely stayed there, trying to avert his thoughts from desperation and back to what was in front of hm.
He knew this formula. He studied it last night, not long before he fell asleep. What was the formula?
He briefly glanced at Sam, who seemed to be going through the exam much more easily than others. She always was pretty adept at any kind of science; he supposed she had to be if she kept wanting to be a part of all the nuances of ghost hunting while also endorsing her own aggressive array of activism.
Sam seemed to sense him watching, for she briefly met his gaze. She pointedly looked at his test before looking back at her own, as if to say he shouldn't let his eyes wander.
"Is something wrong, Mister…?"
Danny snapped back to normal stature, looking forward to see that the substitute teacher was staring directly at him. "Uh, Fenton. And, no."
Suddenly, his whole body screamed with that familiar chill. It worked its way up through his body until he let out a visible breath of air.
Really? Now?
"I mean… yes," he said grudgingly. "There is."
The substitute opened his mouth, likely about to ask Danny to clarify, but he was immediately cut off when there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the rooftop, followed by an echoing roar that shook the trees outside.
"You again," Danny hissed, glancing out the window to see the massive shadow of the ghost he had fought at the college.
The classroom started murmuring, some sitting up to look out the window while others more in the know looked at Danny expectantly. Danny sat up nervously.
"Go for it, bro!" Kwan yelled from the back of the room.
"What's going on?" The substitute wiped his brow. "I mean, calm—Calm down, everyone. I'm sure it's nothing."
Danny looked back at the substitute with wide eyes. "I, uh—Sorry about this."
He jumped onto his desk and transformed in a flash of light before bounding across the students' desks and propelling himself through the window. Sam reached for her watch and got to her feet to go help, though not without picking up her papers from the floor in slight annoyance.
Danny ignored the shocked gaze of the teacher, phasing through the glass of the window and looking around. Ordinarily he would have ducked under the table or simply gone intangible, but the threat was apparent now; no one was paying attention to their test.
Danny was relieved to be able to take a break from the test—but he was also irritated, especially when the shadow became larger outside. Why did it follow him home, and why now?
The giant ghost had just pounced off the roof when Danny appeared behind it, snatching it by the foot and lobbing it across the yard. The wolf yowled in surprise, crashing into the ground.
"Did you miss me?" Danny hovered in front of it. "Look, I know we've had fun times in the past, but this is getting out of hand."
The ghost growled, flying into the air and charging at Danny. He dodged a few of the ghost's deadly barks, even putting up a shield when it became too much, something he had finally learned to do with ease over the years. Even so, it knocked him backwards in the air until he caught himself.
"But don't worry," he continued, finding that banter helped him with ghost-fighting nerves more than anger did. "It's not you, it's me."
He blasted the ghost with a series of ecto-energies, zipping around the ghost's counterattacks. Then, while the ghost recovered from one of his attacks, Danny paused.
"Well, actually, it is you."
The ghost wolf glared him in the eyes with its red ones before it charged at him in the air, focusing on him a raging bull. Danny leaped out of the way so that it blew past him; neither had the chance to recover when an unexpected blast of light hit the ghost on its black side.
Danny looked down, seeing the red-suited Valerie speeding up to join the fight on her board. She stopped beside him, waving her ray gun briefly in the air. "Ole!"
Rather than harboring dread as he might have felt years before, Danny could only feel relief that there was someone to help. He and Valerie had completely flipped their relationship on its head over the past few years—at least, their relationship with Danny Phantom. It started basically the day after everyone's efforts to save the world were successful; Valerie, in her ghost-fighting suit, saw Danny at one point and told him he had forgotten something…
"What?" he asked. Oh man. Did he somehow lose his pants again? "What'd I forget?"
"You forgot to tell me who you actually were… Danny." She tossed the muddy remains of a once-discarded Danny Phantom doll at him, and he caught it in surprise. "I mean, I've kind of had a hunch lately that it might be you, ever since I found out that half ghosts exist."
Danny blinked in confusion. "Why did you think it might be me?"
"I don't know. A lot of coincidences between you and Phantom. It kind of added up." Valerie frowned. "Why didn't you ever tell me?"
"I mean… I didn't tell anyone. A lot of people wanted to rip me apart," said Danny coolly. "Including you. I mean, I might've deserved it sometimes, but…" He hesitated, rubbing the nape of his neck. "Valerie, I'm... sorry about your father's job. And... you know, ruining your life."
"You didn't ruin my life. Well, for a while I felt like you did, but then I realized, with this job"-she gestured to her board-"how crazy ghost hunting can be. How things can happen too fast." She looked at him thoughtfully. "How people can change."
Danny didn't respond, only staring at her.
"I probably would've let you off the hook earlier if I'd known you were just trying to help," she continued, tilting her head to look at his much different human form, which only stared back at her. "But things happen. Then again, I guess things don't have to change too much. I'm always up for a game if you are."
"How about we forget the game and work together instead?" Danny suggested.
Valerie smiled, clicking her feet together so that she swiftly returned to the normal, significantly less threatening version of Valerie that he had come to know.
"Deal."
Presently, Danny came back to reality, looking over as his ally Valerie zoomed over to his side. "Thanks. I thought you had a test," he said, knowing her to be in Mr. Lancer's class then.
"I thought you did, too, Ghost Boy, but hey… Things happen." Valerie abruptly pointed the gun just behind him, her eyes wide. "We've got company."
Danny whirled around, seeing two more ghosts headed their way. They looked to be wearing black armor the same color as the shadowy ghost nearby. Their faces, if they even had any, were covered by their helmets, which were the same color green as their bodies. They were tall, fast—and judging by their speed, they wanted something. Badly.
But it wasn't the other ghost they were looking for.
Valerie blasted at them again, speeding toward them. Danny was just about to follow when he fell prey to the paw again; he was swiped violently in the air, and he found himself rocketing back to the school, which was rapidly becoming closer and closer—
He phased through it and darted through a room full of other test-takers, leaving him wondering if teachers purposely planned their tests on the same day just as revenge for students talking in class.
Danny didn't think further on this when the wolf ghost followed him through the wall, letting out the ferocious bark once more. It knocked all papers off of the desks and further knocked Danny and some students back. Danny realized that the wolf was chasing him now and shot out of the room and down the hallway, hoping to tire it long enough to catch it.
The wolf bounded through the school after him, appearing out of thin air once being intangible no longer seemed like an option. Danny whirled around with an ecto-blast at the ready, only to find himself knocked back again. The ghost snatched him with its sharp claws, throwing him back against the lockers. The impact was so strong that one of the lockers opened beside Danny's head, but Danny was now more focused on the snarling wolf that hovered before him, ectoplasmic saliva seeping from its bared teeth.
Then, to Danny's surprise, the ghost spoke.
"Give… me… the girl…"
"You can talk?" Danny blinked, processing this. "What's with ghost wolves and Esperanto?"
The wolf roared, sending waves of anxiety to the one pinned down by its power, and further anxiety when its claws dug into his skin, rendering him in unimaginable pain so that his yell of anguish echoed through the hall.
Then, when he cleared his head just enough to briefly ignore the pain, Danny shakily phased through the locker behind him and out of the ghost's clutches.
The ghost didn't have time to react when Danny quickly shot back out and slammed the open locker door into its head, so hard that the door cleanly came off its hinges.
This only made it angrier, especially when he started to fly away. The ghost didn't care about intangibility or pretenses anymore, charging after him and knocking into everything in its way, letting out the occasional powerful roar to send him off his feet. Danny grimaced as he turned the corner, trying to block the sound and its more devastating effects away.
"The Amulet's Flaw, people, what's going on here?" Mr. Lancer's droning voice echoed through the hall as he appeared outside his classroom, watching the scene from the doorway with a coffee mug that read WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER. He then dropped the mug with a crash to the tiled floor when he saw what was chasing Danny.
The wolf was about to run into him in its fervor, so Danny wordlessly snatched Mr. Lancer by the front of his shirt and rather unceremoniously threw him aside, just as the wolf plowed through the hall in his place.
Mr. Lancer blinked, watching as Danny disappeared through a door at the end of the hall. After a pause of consideration, he then ran over and knocked on it, yelling, "I want that book report by tomorrow, Fenton!"
Danny hardly registered what he said as he burst through the empty lunchroom and escaped back outside to prevent any further damage. The ghost followed him out with another haunting bellow of, "Give me the girl!"
Danny whirled around in the air to face it once they were in the clear. "If you're talking about the girl at the school, she's not here, and she never will be! Congratulations, ghost breath, you followed the wrong people! So get—OUT!"
His blast of energy was thwarted too easily.
He glanced down, seeing that a few students were watching out the window, while most of the others hid. Sam and Tucker had joined him outside, though they didn't seem to notice he was there as they helped Valerie fend off the two smaller ghosts.
Valerie must have heard him, though, for she pointed directly at him. "Ghost breath at two o'clock, Danny!"
Danny instantly surrounded himself with a shield so that the wolf's attack was a mere blunt to the side. He then gritted his teeth, trying to figure out how to disable the wolf without the thermos readily available. The wolf only attacked again, unrelenting, letting out the ghostly bark that shook the earth. Danny grimaced at not just the sound, but the smell, as he tried to avoid it.
Then he paused in the air, catching his breath as Valerie's words repeated in his head.
Ghost breath.
"That's it."
Danny tried not to think extensively about how ridiculous this was going to be. He reached into his pocket, taking out the floss that Dad had given him.
Valerie, Sam, and Tucker had all managed to take care of the ghostly guards and were now headed toward Danny. Valerie zoomed up beside him, somewhat crouched on her board, until she noticed what was in his hand.
"What… is that?" she asked, standing up again.
"Fenton Floss."
"You've got to be kidding me."
"Just go with it. You guys try to distract him, all right? Sam, you got the thermos?"
"Tucker does."
"Right here, dude!"
"Then follow my lead!" said Danny, pulling as much of the string out of the small container as he could. "It keeps using the ghost wail power. If we stop that, we stop the ghost."
Valerie sighed before shooting off to pelt the ghost with balls of energy. Sam was just behind her on the ground, running toward it with a determined expression as she tried to shoot it in the face with her energy-shooting watch.
"I really wish I had that bazooka now," Tucker huffed before following her.
Danny pulled out the entire contents of the container, wrapping it around his hands as he neared the ghost, which was trying to fight all three teenagers at once, letting out barks in all different directions.
"Seriously, someone needs to train you not to bark at strangers," said Danny as he arrived, using his free hand to shock it with a blast of ecto-energy.
When the ghost was ever so slightly distracted, Danny turned intangible and moved the floss off of his hand, holding it like a lasso as he zoomed around the wolf's mouth. It reacted by trying to bite at him, only to yelp when he tied one end of the floss to one of his shining teeth.
The ghost reacted by blindly swiping its giant paw in the air, which promptly knocked Valerie off her board, sending her crashing to the ground.
"Val!" Danny looked back at her, feeling a rush of relief when she shakily picked herself up, offering a thumbs-up to signify that she was okay, then shooting him a glare.
"Sorry."
Danny evaded another swipe and pulled at the string so that the wolf jerked forward somewhat, newly disabled from Danny's attempts as well as Sam and Tucker's continual blasts. Danny then flew multiple times around its black snout, so that with each round, its barks became more and more muffled, less and less powerful. Eventually, Danny finished off the makeshift rope and tugged hard in an attempt to clamp the monster's mouth shut.
Something about the floss's properties made the ghost unable to phase through or go intangible. But even without the extra ghost help, the creature was durable, and far more determined than anything else. It shook with fury and thrashed about in an attempt to knock Danny's grasp away, leaving Danny fighting to keep it there.
Danny could feel it breaking. It was floss, after all, no matter how durable it could be. Danny clenched his teeth, sweating as he pulled at it with all his might, trying to tighten it more. The ghost's barks were coming back, vengeful and ripping deep in its throat.
"Tucker!" he yelled.
"Way ahead of you!"
Suddenly the ghost's struggling stopped. There came a bright iridescent light, which was about to envelop Danny until he let go and jerked himself away from the pull. The ghost thought itself free, snapping out of the floss's hold and making to charge at all of them—but the pull was far too strong, sucking it toward the Fenton thermos like gravity.
The last thing Danny heard was an anguished howl before the light disappeared and Tucker clamped the thermos shut.
Danny weakly came back to earth, landing with a light thud on his back rather than his feet, purely out of exhaustion. His arms were throbbing at his sides.
Something white caught his eye, and he turned his head, only to find that he had landed directly where the remnants of the Fenton Floss lay on the grass.
"Huh. Durable."
"Danny!"
He looked up, seeing Sam dashing toward him with wide violet eyes. "Oh, you're hurt."
"Nothing some ghost healing can't fix," said Danny with a humorless laugh, stretching out his arms to examine them. There were tears in his black sleeves, with bloody gashes where the ghost's claws had been. "I'm fine. Just… give me a second." He let in and out a deep breath. "What about you guys? Valerie?"
"Valerie's fine. Just got a sore ass." Valerie grumbled, walking over to them and grimacing. "I'm supposed to have been back after a bathroom break, like ten minutes ago, but now I'm not so sure what to tell Mr. Lancer."
Danny was the only one with his secret exposed out of the two of them. Among her school peers, at least, Valerie's ghost hunting "job" was unknown, and she intended to keep it that way, even going so far as to make up excuses to help Danny every time a significant threat was around.
"Something tells me Mr. Lancer will understand," said Danny.
"And the substitute?" Tucker mused, nodding back at the window of the classroom as he handed the thermos back to Danny.
Danny looked up, seeing that the substitute teacher had his nose pressed to the window, his face pale in absolute horror. Purely to see his reaction, Danny casually returned to human form, and the man looked as if he might faint.
"We can probably arrange for a make-up exam," he said.
Tucker couldn't stop laughing as they walked back toward the school. "He must be new here."
The rest of the school day ended up being far less eventful, even with Danny having to face the wild curiosity of the substitute teacher when he had returned anew. Most likely out of pure fear, he agreed to write a note to the actual teacher explaining the circumstances of a potential re-take of the exam.
In time, the school day ended—one day out of only a few months left in senior year. Danny was practically counting down the days, but at the same time, he wasn't quite sure if he was ready for the months to go by.
He returned home in somewhat of a stupor, trying to hide the gashes that he still needed to fix, finding that self-regeneration against equally powerful ghost wounds didn't help as much as he thought it might. He didn't say much to his parents, then, except for a brief trip down to the lab to return something to his father.
"Hey, Dad?"
Jack looked up from his work, lifting what appeared to be a welding mask away from his face. He let out a breath with puffed cheeks. "Yes, my boy?"
Danny tossed the empty container back so that Jack caught it in curiosity, looking down to find his own face, printed on the container, grinning sultrily back at him. Jack then looked inside it to find that it was empty except for a few haphazard strings left.
Danny smiled, making it a point to show his teeth.
"Thanks for the floss."