It didn't matter how much Danny searched for Tucker, he couldn't find him, he wasn't at his house when Danny invisibly flew through it, although he did give pause to blink at Angela Foley who seemed very upset about something. At a loss, he returned to FentonWorks. The sun was rapidly setting and dinner would be soon. He didn't think he had much of an appetite. How could he stomach food when things like this were going on? It was a fluke of the universe that somehow his parents didn't seem to have realized Desiree's onslaught was going on at all, and he wondered how they'd react to finding out they'd missed it.

"You must have been conked out, Danny," his mom said as she put a plate of food before him, "I didn't hear a peep from your room all this time."

Because he hadn't been in his room.

"Are you sure you're feeling alright?"

He had come back from the hospital not very long ago. She was only being a good mother. He didn't have the will to give her cause to worry, "I'm cool, Mom."

Roast beef.

"Don't you think things are escalating?" Jasmine asked their father, and for a tense heartbeat Danny thought she knew, but he realized she couldn't.

"Well, Jazzy," Jack pursed his lips, "Like we've always told you, this town is a hotspot anyway. It was only a matter of time before entities started crawling out of the woodwork." He and his wife were rarely the type to say things just to get their kids to stop questioning. For once Danny wished they were, if it meant making his sister just shut up, "Now that we have an attractor of sorts in our lab, I mean."

"Jack," Maddie looked at him, "Saying the Portal is a 'beacon' seems to stray into the realm of pseudoscience."

"Well, Mads," Jack made a gesture with one palm, as if to say, Can't you consider it? "How else do we explain how they're suddenly showing up now?"

She had nothing to say to that.

Jazz surprisingly said nothing else, looking to be deep in thought.

Danny ate his meal, each bite flavorless on his tongue.

The next morning Danny was alone on the school bus. Tucker wasn't there.

Sam sent Danny a text message. She was sick and was staying home.

He walked his usual path to first period class, Mr. Lancer's English, when he bumped into someone entirely unexpected.

"Tucker?"

Everything in the dark-skinned boy's body language bespoke arrogance and a fluidity he normally did his best to imitate, but never really had until now, "In the flesh."

"What happened yesterday? Are you okay?" Danny inquired hastily.

"Oh, that? It was no big deal," Tucker drawled.

"Dude..." Danny hesitantly put a hand on his friend's shoulder, relieved to find Tucker allowed the contact to happen, "I need to figure out what's going on inside of you. Bear with me." He went intangible and tried to overshadow Tucker.

He immediately regretted it. It reminded him badly of when Sidney had taken control of his body, except now Danny was the intruder (a fact which left a horrible taste in his mouth). Without warning he was being thrown forcibly out of Tucker and backwards into a school staff maintenance room.

The other boy phased partially through the door, "Don't ever do that again," Tucker spat, "Got it?"

Danny stared at him haplessly.

"Good!" His head phased back out. Danny was tangled in a pile of mops. He shakily got to his senses.

He put his head in his hands. After five minutes of silent despair an innate drive, the one he'd become intimately close with the past month, kicked in—well, more liked kicked him and told him he ought to find a way to get rid of Desiree, if nothing else, since she was clearly the source of all this craziness.

"I am Desiree," she had introduced, "What is your wish?"

His wish.

Skulker was a hunter, Technus had been an electronics ghost, so Desiree's power was...granting wishes?

A feeble strength thrummed in him. The concept of wish-granting made him think of a wishing well. There was a fountain in the town park. He would be skipping school, but...this was worth it.

He transformed and made his way to said fountain, but then realized he didn't have a coin to throw in it. Damn it. Was there another way to do it? He didn't register the presence of a reddish-haired man approaching the fountain as well until he heard the telltale flop of a dime into the water.

"I wish I had a million bucks," said the man. He glanced at Danny, for the first time seeing the black-and-white suit and seeming taken aback by the opaque green goggles.

The air went cold, green mist sprouted from the waters and weaved around the stranger, who froze.

"So it is desired, so shall it be."

Desiree.

Danny lurched forward and grabbed the man. He shoved Danny away, then went still once more as the mist took a form.

"Young intruder," hissed Desiree, "You dare to interfere with my spellbinding?"

Funny she was the one calling him an intruder, when she was the one in his goddamn town!

"I do! I want you to get rid of everything you've changed, now!" He barked.

The man had had enough. He turned and ran. Danny was secretly glad Desiree didn't even look at him go.

"I cannot," her voice was suddenly softer, "By noon tomorrow, the fates of all I have affected will be sealed."

Including Tucker.

"No!" Danny was adamant, "I can't let that happen!"

"Hahaha! You think you can change anything, whelpling?" She moved to fly, but Danny was fast. He wrapped his fingers around her tail roughly. She looked at him slowly. "You lay a hand on me? No man may lay a hand on me unless I wish it!" She was furious.

"Yeah?" Danny frowned viciously, "How 'bout a fist?" He aimed a hook at her but it went right through, to his eternal annoyance.

She swerved upwards and morphed her arm into a rope, which shot out and tied itself around Danny's waist in what seemed like a fraction of a second. He was thrown this way and that at Desiree's whim, nose painfully snapping on a park bench. She released him then, he took the opportunity to fire an especially intense ectoblast which he formed with both hands at her, she smacked against a tree and fell to the dirt. She grinned with an unholy glee and super-sized her hand which reached out and gripped Danny relentlessly. He struggled against it.

"Now you can't do anything unless I wish it!" She gloated.

The thermos.

The one strapped to his waist. She had his legs locked, but he could still reach the thermos!

He uncorked it and all but screamed, "I wish you would get sucked inside this thermos!"

She gawked at him. For a moment, he feared she would laugh and call him futile, but her expression remained. "No..." She moaned, "I...I must obey..."

That was all it took?

He watched in amazement as she, shocked, was indeed pulled into the Fenton Thermos.

"You will pay for this...! Pay!"

He regained himself and put the lid back on without further trouble.

He had to find his friend.

Searching the school, Danny finally found Tucker doing something on a monitor in one of the computer labs...was he hacking into his own grades? Wow. Nothing Danny could do about that, he had more important things to worry about.

"Tuck', you're in real danger—"

Tucker flared, there was really no other way to describe it; his ears became pointed, as well as his teeth, his skin brightened into a neon green, irises taking on a crimson sheen. Power pulsated from him in such a way the coldness in Danny's chest reacted defensively, making Danny cringe back.

"Take it easy," Danny tried to placate, "We're friends, remember?"

"Only on your terms," Tucker growled, "But now I make the rules around here, and my first rule is: no more Phantom!" A strong gust of ghostly viridian breath shot out from his mouth (Danny dwelled on how gross that was for a second) and knocked Danny clear through several hallways before crashing against a door. He was sure at least some students must have seen him fly past.

He realized he'd landed in a science classroom. He stood up—Tucker marched intangibly through the closed door, surprising him.

They locked eyes, a glare and a wide-eyed stare. Tucker raised his clenched fists and fired up ectoblasts. Danny tensed. He didn't want to hurt his friend. He found he had no choice but to dodge the blasts, running behind desks and ducking his head multiple times. It was beyond freaky to see Tucker like this. Another blast nearly caught his ear. Danny's self-preservation fired up, he grabbed a skeletal display and flung it with decent momentum at Tucker, realizing what he'd done a second too late. This wasn't some aggravating ghost he was trying to get out of his town, this was his best friend! Even as he thought this, Tucker disappeared briefly and the skeleton went right through him, hitting the wall behind.

"Is that the best you can do?!" The boy snarled.

Danny swallowed a knot in his throat. It was the best he could do.

For once, his humanity overruled his otherworldly burning to battle. He fled through a wall. He needed to recoup. He stopped in a room filled with pipes and huffed. His ghost sense misted and he froze. Some alien instinct told him Tucker was following him. He was right, because not even a moment later the wish-inflicted teen was crashing into Danny's hiding place.

Danny panicked. He flew away as fast he could, eventually bursting outside near the campus football field.

He looked over his shoulder, paranoid—with good reason. Tucker was still tailing him. He was visibly, literally, enraged: at least two feet taller, buffer-looking, almost unrecognizable as Tucker Foley. His eyes had lost their irises and pupils, replaced with pure redness.

Danny was freaking out by this point. Everything he'd done so far since his accident in the Portal would be for naught. He was going to be offed by his own buddy. He went invisible and blinked startled as Tucker slowed to a confused stop.

"Where are you? Where?"

Danny's breathing evened. Maybe this could work.

He reappeared a few feet behind Tucker, "What'sa matter?"

Tucker turned around, frothing at the mouth.

"Can't catch what you can't see?" With that, Danny went invisible once again.

He had an inkling that ghosts could 'sense' other ghosts even if they couldn't see them. With that suspicion in mind, he raced through the sky to FentonWorks, where there must be surely something in his parents' lab which would pacify Tucker long enough for Danny to talk some sense into him. He careened into his home so quickly he just about crashed into the laboratory. A mistake.

What he didn't know was that his parents had been working on a device earlier that day which vaguely resembled a dream-catcher. They hadn't meant for this of course, it was simply how it ended up appearing. Danny couldn't slow down fast enough. He went straight into it, a strange splitting sensation imbuing him with a terrible sort of horror he couldn't explain. He was being taken apart...!

It was over. He couldn't remember blacking out but he must have because he woke up with his cheek flat against the titled sterile floor, eyes taking in the sight of...himself, lying beside him. He was in human form, but his ghost form was separated from him. It was utterly wrong. How was this possible? He was one person, not two! His ghost self lifted itself to its feet, seemingly just as shell-shocked. Danny couldn't read its eyes through the goggles—was this what Sam and Tucker felt like when looking at him in that form?

Wasn't this what he'd wanted on some level? To be normal again? For his mom and dad to invent something to fix him?

His ghost self didn't seem occupied with similar thoughts. It turned to study the dream-catcher-esque device, unknown to Danny, it—or rather, he—was making sense of how to reverse what had happened, because he too knew that being two and not one was fundamentally not-meant-to-be. If going in it one way had made this happen, then going back in from the opposite direction...it could be nonsense, it could be genius.

Danny started as his ghost self lifted him up by the arms effortlessly. Danny was clueless, Phantom was hopeful. Intangibility made them both rise effortlessly once more through the Catcher. All at once Danny understood what had been going through Phantom's head because, really, it had been his head. He shook off the insecurity his pure human side had felt. He took in the entirety of the Catcher, looking it up and down.

Tucker was ghostly, too, now, wasn't he? There had to be a human underneath it all.

The timing was practically destiny. Tucker charged down through the ceiling of the lab, roaring. He was going in such a straight beeline Danny saw an uncanny opportunity. He yanked the heavy Catcher from its place in the center of the lab and held it in Tucker's path. He could see the monstrous boy's expression contort as he went into the net-like wires. Danny's breath hitched as he saw the unmistakable form of his best friend materialize on the other side of the Catcher. But, something else emerged.

Tucker tumbled to the tiled floor much like Danny had minutes previous, except he was awake for all of five seconds, gawking at the creature that had been a part of him, before his eyes rolled back and he flopped onto his side. This alarmed Danny to see, but first, he activated his thermos and captured the incoherently spitting, baffled ecto-entity which had caused him and his friend so much strife.

Danny fell to his knees, exhausted. It was done.