When Danny woke up in the night this time, it was to the hinges of his door squeaking open. He tensed up in bed and then immediately tried to relax. He couldn't talk to her. She wouldn't try to wake him up, right? Well, she tried to kill you a week ago, so I don't see why not. His traitorous thoughts responded. A shiver went down his spine and he was sure that it must be obvious he was awake.

"Danny?" It wasn't the voice he was expecting. Danny sat up in bed and pushed down his blankets. Standing in his doorway was Jazz Fenton, with her orange-red hair frizzy and unkempt and her clothes wrinkled like she had slept in them. Though the bags under her eyes suggested that she hadn't actually gotten any sleep at all.

"Jazz?" He rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn't seeing things. He wasn't. "What are you doing here? It's the middle of the week. Don't you have classes?"

"Ya… I just… oh, Danny." Her eyes were watering and she stepped all the way into the room, closing the door gently behind her. She took slow steps to his bed where she sat down gently and just as slowly put a hand on his shoulder. "How are you?"

Danny jerked away and brought his sheets back up around his shoulders. He felt that familiar icy burn that had nothing to do with his powers start up in his gut.

"So you heard," he grumbled. "Who sent you? Sam?" Despite Sam's determination not to bring it up, Danny was under no illusions that Sam approved of or even supported his decision.

"No one, Danny. I just want to make sure you're alright. I did speak with Tucker, but just to confirm what happened. I'm not here to try and convince you to do anything that might put you in danger."

Danny peeked back up at her.

"You promise?" He realized only after he said it how much he sounded like a little kid. He immediately straightened up in his bed, squaring his shoulders.

"Of course." She patted down his hair with a soft smile and he found himself leaning into it. He must be more tired than he thought. Still, it brought up a flash of a long-ago memory of Jazz bandaging his knee when he had fallen off his bike as a kid. She had only been twelve to his ten, but when he came running into the house sniffling she had seemed like a perfectly acceptable adult to run to (and maybe that said a bit about the availability and responsibility of his parents). He chuckled under his breath. The same was true of his time as Phantom, really. Most of the time he went to Sam's or Tucker's house, but on those days he couldn't bring himself to disturb them he'd end up in his own room trying to patch up an injury he couldn't reach.

Sometimes he'd make just enough noise to get Jazz to venture out of her room in worry. When that happened she tended to silently take whatever first-aid equipment he had in hand and gently finish the job, sometimes taking a moment to brush aside his hair and leave a kiss on his forehead before disappearing back into her own room (not to say there wouldn't be lectures, but they'd be left until morning). The two of them had come a long way from scraped knees and bicycle accidents. Not too far, though.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the occasional car pass by outside and watching the street light cast the slightly shifting shadow of a tree on the wall before Jazz whispered, "do you want to talk about it?"

Danny thought back to the lab just a few feet below him and pouring out his heart to eyes shaped a lot like Jazz's. A shiver ran down his spine. Yet Jazz's hand in his hair had lulled him into near security. He could say a little. Not everything, but a little.

"I… I didn't know what to do anymore," he offered. Jazz made an affirmative humming sound and didn't stop smiling gently at him, so he continued. "I was so empty and I just wanted to feel something outside of my own head, so I… And then she found me and I was so done with all the secrets and the lies. It's just… she never asked anymore, you know? When I'm late or come home injured I'm begging for her to ask in my head and she doesn't, like I'm not worth the effort. It's partly my fault, I know, for purposefully trying so hard to keep it from them for so long, but I can't help but wonder if they ever really cared at all. So in that lab… I told the truth." He was looking down at his hands but he felt how Jazz startled backward at the admission. He laughed bitterly. "Don't worry, I didn't tell her that truth. I told her everything else without revealing my identity. I told her who I really was without telling her why she should already know."

Danny held his hands together in the sheets on his lap. He looked up at Jazz from the corner of his eye.

"I don't know what I wanted to happen," he admitted, "I think on some level I thought she might recognize me. That what I was saying would strike a chord and she would just… know. It would prove that she wasn't ignoring me, that I was still important to her. At the very least I thought it would prove to her that the thing she had on her lab table was sentient. That it was a complex being with emotions and desires as complicated as any human. But it didn't. After everything I told her I was still nothing more than a ghost. After everything, she could still leave me to..." He shivered and Jazz dared to wrap her skinny arms around him. She could only imagine how that sentence was supposed to end. She didn't want any confirmation of it, so she jumped into an advising role.

"I'm not going to try to justify their actions to you. Mom and Dad have always been less than diligent in their care of us and have themselves realized this. They try to make up for it with overprotectiveness, but that just means that they discipline us without being there emotionally. All that being said, I don't think I could say they don't care. If something were to happen to us they'd be devastated-"

"You mean something like dying in one of their inventions?" Danny interjected venomously. "How long after I got out of the hospital did it take them to start experimenting with it? A day? Or, wait, was I even out of the hospital yet?" Jazz hadn't known Danny carried bitterness for their parents regarding the accident. She bit her lip. Maybe she should have. She wondered if he heard the parallel with Vlad. She wondered if that was why he had never let her know how he felt.

"I… It was their lifelong dream, Danny. They didn't think you were seriously injured and they were overwhelmed with excitement. Like I said, emotionally distant. But if you had really completely died in there, if they never saw you again… I'm not sure they would ever open it again." Danny was shaking his head before she even finished.

"If I had really completely died in there, they would have skipped my funeral to search for my ghost. They would have thrown themselves even farther into their work. You would have hardly ever seen them again,"

"...Maybe you have a point. I don't know which they would have done, honestly. But both of those do show a deep level of love for you, don't they? We can both agree things wouldn't be the same for them. They would miss you and whether they would choose to face that emotion or bury it in their work, it would still be there,"

Danny shifted uncomfortably and picked his head up from where it had come to lean on Jazz's shoulder.

"I guess… But that doesn't mean I owe them anything. I don't owe them for caring about me enough to mourn me if I were dead! It's within my rights to ask for more than that from them…" He hesitated and his voice dropped again, "isn't it?"

Jazz's heart skipped a beat in an unexpected burst of something that felt a bit like fear, though she couldn't pinpoint exactly why.

"Of course, Danny. And if stopping ghost hunting is what you really want to do, you're within your rights there, too. But are you sure that it is?" Danny pushed away, both hands against Jazz's shoulders.

"What do you mean? You think I want to be nearly killed by ghosts every night for the sake of people who don't care which happens?"

"I think that it was good stress relief for you. I think that you enjoyed it, to an extent. I'm worried about how you plan to fill your time now and how you'll react when the news next reports on a tragedy you could have, theoretically, prevented,"

Danny turned away and wrapped his own arms around his torso. "People are going to get hurt," he whispered. Jazz could immediately tell that this was something he had thought about immensely. It made her feel a little better about the whole thing. This wasn't a rash decision he had been manipulated into making without thought of the consequences. At least, not completely. She was still suspicious of Vlad's role in this whole mess.

"They are. Maybe killed,"

"Are you sure Sam didn't send you? I thought you weren't here to convince me to go back?" he said with an almost dry humor in his tone.

"I'm not. I promise that I only want you to be happy. I'm just telling you the realistic consequences of your decision and I want to make sure that you can live with them. That they won't just make things worse. If you can be happy knowing what could happen, then-"

"Then what? I'm a monster? I don't want their lives on my shoulders! I don't want them. I didn't ask for them! They're not my responsibility!" Danny stood up in one sudden movement, dragging his sheets behind him so they were half draped on his shoulders and half on the floor as he turned to glare at Jazz. His last statement was an aggravated shout that left his chest heaving under the plain white t-shirt he wore to bed.

Jazz put a hand on his shoulder. "I know. What I was going to say was that I wouldn't judge you for it. You're my brother, Danny. Your health and happiness are the most important things to me. There's no one who cares more. Not Mom and Dad, maybe not even Sam and Tucker, and definitely not Vlad Masters,"

"Vlad? What does- What do you know about it?" Danny's hands fisted at his sides.

"I don't, I just saw Vlad next to you on the podium and-" Danny shrugged her hand off his shoulder.

"And you think he talked me into this? You think this is part of some sort of evil plot that I'm walking right into? I'm not an idiot, Jazz! No matter what you seem to think! I don't trust him, obviously. I just… I just… I needed out and he helped me with that. That's it. I was going to stop either way."

"Okay, Danny,"

Danny's head shot up to make eye contact with her again. "You don't believe me,"

"I do. It's just-"

"I can take care of myself! I can make my own decisions!" He near growled as he glared at her. Jazz tried to back up.

"Of course. But I think-"

"I don't care!" As his voice rose into a shout his eyes flashed that unsettling neon green, throwing unnatural shadows and washing out everything they landed on in sallow green light. "I don't care what you think! I don't care what anybody else wants! And I don't care who gets hurt!"

Jazz startled backward, bringing the hand she had been reaching out with back to her chest. She watched as Danny took a moment to get his breathing back under control. She could see the moment he realized what he had said as his eyes abruptly lost their glow, leaving behind a soft and startled blue.

"Oh god," he gasped. He deflated in front of her eyes, sinking to his knees on the floor. Jazz moved to join him, hesitating before deciding not to put her hand on his back. He didn't say anything more and Jazz decided this might be a moment she should push for it.

"Do you mean that, Danny?"

"No!" his head snapped up to look at her before quickly looking down onto the floor. "I mean… No. I don't think so? I mean, of course not. I just…" His hands alternated between clenching onto the blankets still draped over his shoulder so tightly his bones protruded to so loosely that it slipped. He could hardly speak between gasping breaths and soon his attempts at explaining tapered off into nothing but heavy breathing. Jazz quickly scooted forward when she realized what was happening.

"It's okay, Danny, forget it, just breathe." He continued to gasp and Jazz went back on her previous decision, putting her hand on his back after all. "Danny, look at me. Look at me." He did as he was told. "Good. Now breath with me. In… out… in… out… in… out, No, no, slow down, slow down." She rubbed his back gently. "In… out… In…"

They sat on the floor for a few minutes as Danny's breath slowly came back to him.

She wondered if he knew what had happened… if this was the first time.

"I'm okay," he finally whispered. Jazz nodded but didn't stop rubbing his back.

"I don't think you're an idiot, Danny. I think Vlad's a mastermind. But if you say this is what you want and that you know the consequences, I believe that this was your decision." She paused, debating with herself about whether she should add the next part of what she wanted to say. "... I don't know if I believe that you don't care." She finally decided.

Danny shook his head at the floor but didn't say anything, and she wasn't sure she understood what that meant. She didn't think it was good, because he curled further in on himself.

"Danny…"

"Please leave." There was a hitch in his voice.

"I'm not sure-"

"Please please leave. I need to be alone for a moment,"

"Danny-"

"Go away!" He shouted, turning to face her. His eyes were glassy, but his breathing seemed steady, so Jazz nodded and carefully stood up.

"I'm right across the hall if you need me, little brother."

Danny stared at the door as it closed behind her. Once she was gone he turned from his knees so he was sitting in the nook formed by the wall and the bed frame on one side and nightstand on the other.

I don't care who gets hurt!

A shiver washed through his entire body. If Sam had been there she wouldn't have hesitated to point out who he sounded like. He looked down at his hand, almost afraid that it would be that light green-blue that haunted his nightmares. In the dim light, he could almost imagine that it was.

"I'm not a monster," he whispered to himself. He didn't want to hurt anybody. He didn't want anybody to be hurt. He hated the idea of anyone being in danger because of him. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

He didn't want to be hurt either.

He hiccuped, and that was all it took for the tears to start down his face. He tucked his head into his arms and tightened his knees against his chest as he trembled.


AN: Sorry for the slightly longer wait, guys. RL has been a bitch.

So, I know a lot of you have been waiting excitedly for Jazz... I don't think things went quite how ya'll expected, seeing as she kind of made things worse BUT she brought up some points that Danny needed to face if this 'staying away' thing was going to work out. You know what they say about things getting worse before they get better. What do you guys think about how she handled things? Is it IC? Let me know.

In other news, I decided to open a poll on my profile to decide Maddie's 'closure' in this fic, so go vote if you're interested. The story shouldn't be too much longer now...