Thursday, December 17th, 2004

The click of a pen. The purity of an unused notebook. The welcoming atmosphere of the local library. All of these small details and more added up to an earthly heaven for Jasmine Fenton. She shifted her weight in the hard desk chair, finding a comfortable position. For most people, especially teenagers like her younger brother, it was an incredible feat to get cozy in the rock solid task chairs seen in schools and libraries and the like. But Jazz was certainly not most people, and to her, the chair felt like home.

All was right in the senior's world. After all, just three short days ago, she'd gotten acceptance letters from two of the four colleges she applied to, making the total three. She was still waiting to hear from the final college (Harvard University, for those of you that are curious), but she had received firm "yes"es from the first three. She felt as though her mind was made up as to where she would attend, however, without ever truly deciding. The choice was obvious, it seemed. The University of Notre Dame, located a short five hours away from Amity Park, had a prestigious psychology program where she would be able to earn her master's degree and hopefully secure her dream career. The distance was an added bonus; being only five hours away, she would be able to visit her family more often and hopefully be able to still help Danny.

And speaking of Danny…

He would kill her if he knew that she was getting ready to do this, and that's why she decided to call it her own, private analysis. Not necessarily an experiment, just an observation. She knew he hated it, but she saw him not only as her brother, but also as a psychological enigma just waiting to be untangled and figured out.

Still, she hated herself for thinking of him like an object to be observed and not a human being with much more going on in his life than his emotions. She simply couldn't help it, though. It was how she thought of everybody - some specimen just waiting to have their minds and behaviors and everything about them analyzed and discovered. It was a personality trait of hers that she despised. The Fenton Obsession Gene she would always blame it on. Not that it truly existed, of course, but it helped her feel a little bit better about herself.

The thought of getting into the mind of something more than human made her mouth water, and with access to the world's only two half-ghosts, she was practically biting at the bit to delve into her analysis. As interesting as it would be to interview Vlad and map his brain, she thought it too risky. She knew Danny hated the man with a passion unlike any other (could that be a trait from his ghostly side? she wondered vaguely), and her brother would surely accuse her of betraying his trust if he were to discover her endeavors with him. On the other hand, if Danny found out she was picking apart his own mental processes, he'd still accuse her of betraying his trust. With much easier access to her brother, her choice was simple and quick.

She knew this was to be done in the utmost secrecy. She loved her brother and didn't want to make him angry, so she took extreme measures when planning her analysis. When writing on paper, she developed a code that hopefully only she would be able to read. The data that was on her computer was stored safely in a little flash drive, which was always on her person at all times, and with a little, innocent talk with Tucker about some of his hacking methods, she was able to erase any remnants of the data from her laptop itself. She never worked on the project at home, and not just because Danny was there, but she was worried about the security of her papers, considering something was always blowing up in the lab downstairs, and one could never tell how bad it would be with her father's unpredictability. If she did dare to work on it at home, it was under the cover of a silky black night sky, usually in the very early hours of the morning. Otherwise, she would be in the refuge of her school or the local library, usually the latter. Lying to her parents about a school project was simple enough - after all, if they hadn't caught Danny's continuous lies about his double life at this point, would they catch on to just a tiny white lie? And Danny never was interested in what she was doing, so it was easy to not tell a single soul.

In true Jazz Fenton fashion, she'd planned everything thoroughly and carefully, and she would not fail herself.

"Day 1," she wrote on her paper in tiny, neat letters, biting her lip. Although would labeling it Day 1 be truly accurate? After all, Danny had begun his changes the minute he exited the portal the day of the accident. If she wanted this to be a proper observation, she would have to account for every day preceding today.

She shook her head and put her pen to her paper. She would simply make a note to herself and verify that this was an informal observation, done only for her own self-fulfillment. As well, it wasn't as if she could account for every single day between the accident and the day she discovered his secret. As much as it pained her, she figured not being perfectly precise in this one instance was permissible.

And so she began to write. The words came to her very easily, much to her surprise. She figured Danny was such a complex being she wouldn't know where to start. However, following a brief summary of the previous nine and a half months, she carefully described her brother's actions over the course of the day, some of the details provided to her through a little bit of prodding combined with a lot of brown-nosing to his teachers, especially Mr. Lancer. It didn't take too much effort, they were all too excited to rave about the latest tardy or missing assignment. She feared they were at their wits' end with him.

She shook her head. She was getting distracted.

"Most of the subject's teachers are disgruntled by this stereotypical teenage behavior," she wrote, "but the cause of missing assignments and chronic tardiness digs far deeper than just the inherent teenage desire to laze around. His responsibility as a hero to protect this city - and, to a further extent, the world - is crushing on his responsibility as a fifteen-year-old boy to fulfill his educational need. He must learn to balance his two lives, or one side could outweigh the other and destroy his identity. I fear for that day, because if there's anything that I know, it's that two halves are just that - fifty percent and fifty percent. When one outweighs the other, they're no longer halves. Frankly, one thing I'd rather not learn is what happens to a creature who is more human than ghost - or vice versa."

Slowly, she set her pen down and blinked at her notebook, as if coming out of a trance. She reread her last paragraph and scolded herself. An observation was supposed to be purely objective, simply stating the facts and nothing more. And yet her own thoughts crept in onto the crisp white sheet, now stained permanently with black ink. Her own fears, now forever stamped onto this paper.

She scribbled it out.

As she left the library, absentmindedly noting that it was far later than she'd thought it was, her thoughts kept drifting back to what she'd written on the paper. She was still ashamed; a budding psychologist such as her should know better than to admit her own personal feelings and possible solutions in an observation. Still, she couldn't help but wonder if what she'd written was true. Did she really fear that her brother was becoming unstable? After all, her brother was a pretty powerful ghost, growing more powerful with the passage of time. What would happen if he allowed his human side to dominate his ghost side? Or worse, his ghost half dominate his human identity?

She quickly brushed the idea away. She was simply being too paranoid, a habit of hers. Everything would turn out alright, her brother would be able to figure out how to balance everything, right?

Right?

I'm so sorry for the wait in getting this up, my life has been pretty rocky as of late, but as I keep saying, I'm determined to see this story through.

Anywho, I hope this chapter doesn't seem too filler-y, honestly it was simply going to provide a different perspective on Danny at first, but inspiration struck me somewhere in the middle of writing this (you might be able to tell where…), I'll most likely be bringing back themes from this chapter in the future.

And to thank you for your patience, I'll tell you what we'll see in the next chapter - we finally get to hear from Danny himself again, maybe see if he can reveal some things for us… or just complicate things further. :)

Thanks for sticking with me, I will see you in the next chapter!

-CatchingWind