Dannymay!

It's been two years since I started posting fanfiction. Can you believe it?

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Danny sucked the ghost into the thermos and landed, breathing heavily and clutching a shallow gash on his side. Fighting someone with sickles for fingernails was not fun, and it was even less fun when he first had to expel that someone from his principal's body. Luckily, however, he had left Mrs. Ishiyama back at the school and she wasn't here in this alley to see him become human again, bright transformation rings sweeping over him, changing his white hair and green eyes to black and blue respectively.

He groaned and rubbed the back of his eyes. The encounter with not-Ishiyama had begun while he was on his way to after school detention, Mr. Lancer was going to be... unhappy with him.

Shadows swept past the mouth of the alley as Sam and Tucker ran by and then backtracked. Danny waved at them, tiredly, with the hand that was holding the thermos.

"How did you know she was overshadowed?" asked Tucker, breathlessly while Sam bent to examine Danny's wound.

"How did I know? More like, how didn't you know? Her eyes were completely red. The whole thing!" He removed his hand from his wound to wave it in front of his face. Sam needed better access, anyway.

"What are you talking about?" asked Sam, pulling a first aid kit from her backpack. "Her eyes were normal."

"Yeah," said Tucker, taking the box from Sam so she could rummage through it without putting it on the alley ground. "She looked the same as she always does."

"What, really?" asked Danny, nonplussed. "Wait, hold up. You've seen other people overshadowed before, right?"

"Yeah? Of course we have," said Sam.

"You've overshadowed me enough," said Tucker.

"And you've never, I don't know, noticed that a person's eye color changes when they're overshadowed? That they glow?"

"No," said Tucker, slowly. "Because it doesn't. It stays the same. Otherwise it would be really easy to tell when someone was overshadowed. You'd just have to look at their eyes."

"I guess it's a power that you didn't notice was a power," said Sam. "Do Vlad's eyes look red to you all the time?"

"No," said Danny. "He looks normal. Wait, you guys can see when my eyes glow, right? When I get angry, or when I use my powers in human form?"

"Yeah," said Tucker. "We see that."

"I think this is good for now," said Sam, patting the bandages. "Fly to my place and we can finish it up, there. Unless you have something I haven't noticed?"

"No," said Danny. "You're good. And we really have to test the eye thing."

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The wound didn't need much cleaning, and his ghostly healing factor had already started to work on it by the time he met back up with Sam and Tucker, so the bandaging was light, unnoticeable under his clothing. Which was good, because obvious bandaging tended to get his parents' attention in a bad way.

"Mom?" he called. "Dad? I'm home!"

"Hey, Danny!" called his Dad, his voice echoing up from the open door down to the lab. "Come down and see what we're working on!"

Well, that was enough to trigger a full-body cringe. Danny did not like going down into the lab while his parents were actively working on something. All too often the thing in question would attack him.

Still, he didn't like to disappoint them if he could help it, so he set his backpack down by the door and slouched tensely down the stairs. "What is it?" he asked, as he neared the foot of the stairs.

"A possession detector!" said Jack, waving a screwdriver. "We haven't come up with a name yet!"

"We only started to work on it today," said Maddie.

In theory, a device that could detect overshadowing and keep people from being taken advantage of that way would be great... unless it could also detect half-ghosts in their human form. Then it would be not so great. It would also render his newly-discovered ability and advantage rather moot, so he wasn't sure how he felt about it overall.

"That's cool," said Danny, neutrally. He flexed his hands. "How does it work?"

"We'll show you!" said Jack, pulling the half finished thing off the table as Maddie tsked in disapproval. He dropped the thing over Danny's head like a helmet, and he stumbled under the unexpected weight, a squeak of distress escaping from his lips. Something bright shone into his eyes and he flinched back before being steadied by his father. "You see?"

"Um," said Danny. "No."

He heard Maddie sigh. "After examining some volunteers who claimed to have been possessed recently, we noticed that they had a much higher level of ectoplasm in their eyes than normal, even for people living in a high-ectoplasm environment. Working backward from that, we realized that the ghosts possessing them must have been physically manifesting their eyes to some degree while doing so, probably to retain their visual acuity. Ghosts generally have better eyesight than humans."

"Uh huh," said Danny. He had noticed that, actually. Being half ghost and all.

He was also really hoping the machine was non-functional. Maybe it had been long enough for him to take it off without being remarked on?

"The thing is, we think we should be able to detect that layering," said Maddie. "We're trying out different wavelengths of light. The problem is, we don't want to accidentally accuse people like us, who just have relatively high levels of ectocontamination, of being possessed willy-nilly."

"Or Vladdy!" said Jack. "He's had high levels of ectoplasm in his system since college! It's why he kept having that ectoacne!"

Danny felt his eye twitch.

"You can see how that kind of thing could evolve into a witch hunt," said Maddie. She lifted the machine off of Danny's head. "See? You're getting readings like the ones we took from the people who had just been possessed, but we know you haven't been." She showed a receipt-like piece of paper to Danny, and he nodded, even though he couldn't read it. "Ours are like that, too," she finished.

"Well, it would be cool if you could get it to work," said Danny, relieved not to have to deal with his parents deciding he was possessed but also disturbed that his parents' eyes apparently contained a similar amount of ectoplasm to his. "I should probably go upstairs and work on my homework."

"Okay, Danno!" said Jack, ruffling Danny's hair. "Go knock it out!"

Danny smiled, already retreating. "I don't think you can do that with homework, Dad. It isn't like our hot dogs. It's not animate."

"Speaking of food," said Maddie, we're ordering out, tonight. "Is there anything you'd like in particular?"

"Chinese?" asked Danny, hopefully, his foot on the stair. "From the place that makes it really spicy?"

"Alright, but we're only getting one that hot. The rest of us can't handle it."

"Okay!" said Danny, jogging the rest of the way up the stairs. "I love you! Bye!"

He did go upstairs, but first went to the bathroom, not his bedroom. He stared into the mirror, and let a tiny bit of ectoplasm seep into them, a thread of glowing green circling his iris. Were his eyes really all that different than everyone else's?

He shook his head. He had homework to get to. Maybe if he did everything for English Mr. Lancer wouldn't give him another detention.