Disclaimer: Danny Phantom, the world set within it, and the characters in it are not owned by me - that privilege belongs not only to Butch Hartman and Nickelodeon, but also just as importantly to the vast team of co-writers, co-directors, animators and all other staff who laboured over its creation and development. Without their efforts this fanfiction would not exist, and neither would a good portion of what struck me in the first place in one of the most childhood-defining cartoons in my life.

I remembered when the fire died.

I remembered when I first heard about the mission - and what more of the asteroid that I had managed to espy, passing by Earth with an unnaturally jade green hue, even with my shitty 150 dollar telescope. There were rumblings by some scientists, but strangely enough my father was the first one to discover that they were of ectoplasmic qualities. I wasn't sure if it was a wild guess or from the valued time off he had going back to research more about the paranormal, but either way he had been right.

But the moment I learned about the mission to examine it up close, and the moment the invention of the Fenton Space Travel Vehicle (or something) had met its completion, I don't think I could put into words how fervently I begged and pleaded for my parents to take me along. Never in this town was there going to ever be another opportunity to have a way to get into space without spending a fortune - and here it was, right in my lap.

I never actually got any confirmation as to whether their supposed lack of knowledge of my passion for astronomy was out of sheer ignorance or feigned to keep me out of their business - either way, the string of rejections had prevailed all the way, up till the day itself of the mission.

I had no idea if finally relenting to my fate was the turnaround for them - my father had merely stared at me curiously when I had calmly wished them well for their journey, like I had turned into a giant cockroach.

"You're not coming?"

I squinted ever so slightly. "Aren't you the ones who told me not to come in the first place?"

They exchanged looks briefly before looking at me. "Well, do you want or not want to come along?"

The implication of their words was not lost on me, but it nevertheless still caught me completely off-guard. "D-... so do you m-"

"You'll have to borrow a back-up suit from your dad," my mother instructed me clearly, striding towards the launchpad control panel, fiddling around with the configurations. "We didn't have time to make you one."

Before I knew it, I was donning a suit that would have fit two of me if I could've, and strapping in for launch.

Admittedly it was quite the feat to be able to launch a spaceship like this, without even so much as needing external supervision. Truly the government subsidies for this kind of work must have been insane. Being in the real thing was not even close to comparable to the rocket launching simulations that we had in the NASA junior camps - every physical sensation of the rumbling and the gravitational force yanking on me was amped up exponentially. And of course to say that the view of the outside was simply breathtaking was doing it a huge injustice. Pictures and videos could only capture a fraction of the radiant beauty and the sheer awe that came entailed upon contemplating its vastness when witnessing it up close.

For a brief moment, with my eyes fixated at the black universe ahead of me and the world getting smaller behind, I could not help but let the sensation that this was what my life was built up to be for engulf me.

I wished that I could continue with every minute detail of the expanse before me, but the focus had to be on the mission. From my estimates, I had been able to tell that the asteroid trajectory was simply not going to connect with Earth's rotation around the Sun - something that my parents would still not believe me when I recounted this to them. No matter, it was still worth an investigation for its jade-like properties alone - which illuminated the space around it in a strangely ominous and hypnotic aura, which only seemed to suck us in further and further as we continued to close the gap with the floating boulder.

Of course, I had been almost exceedingly nervous when my mother beckoned me to accompany her to exit the spaceship. To strip that final barrier of protection that separated me from the rest of the world and to expose me now to space and actually be like a real astronaut was a notion that could only make me giddy to contemplate over. But the moment she strode over to the doors, up to the point where she opened the hatch to the outside, I had little choice but to follow her, the loose parts of my astronaut suit sagging under me as I ran.

At that point I could hear my heartbeat thump away within my ribcage like as if my chest were threatening to burst open, as I floated towards the asteroid. On the one hand, of course I could feel the sense of gratuitous exhilaration surge through my veins, a lifelong bucket list checkmark being ticked. But on the other hand, to experience it in such spontaneous circumstances, and with the only things keeping me alive being the oxygen tank on my back and the tether strapped across my waist: it was just as awe-striking as it was terrifying to my very core.

A feeling of terror that would only heighten when I first let my fingers connect with the asteroid.

"What's with you?" My mother snapped at me impatiently, words that I could barely register as my body remained paralysed in a state of recovery. Never had I experienced something so debilitatingly painful than when I had laid a hand on it. I remembered trying again and again in sheer confusion, and yet the slightest bit of contact I had with it made a searing agony burn like fire across every muscle of my body.

"I-… I don't know," I muttered clumsily, prompting her to groan in exasperation and shake her head.

"Whatever," she brushed off, her eyes returning back to fixing the apparatus on the asteroid. "Just don't drag me down with your incompetence."

At that point I had thought that there was no way that I could feel any lower - to be in the midst of it all, to be literally right where you could live out your dream of actually conducting astrological work, but to be unable to do so right at the last hurdle. To just simply stay there while someone did all the actual good stuff, with that someone giving you a cold side-eye every now and again.

For what it was worth, the reason why I specifically could not touch it and other humans could was quickly discovered by my parents - but miraculously, somehow, none of the pieces could be put together to reveal my identity. What was the saying again? Stupid people can only see other people's mistakes as stupidity without noticing their own?

At least at that point for me there was at least some silver lining - at least a huge milestone had been reached to just be in space in the first place. Slowly though, I could feel myself becoming uncomfortable. At first it was easy to attribute that to just the disappointment sinking in, or the suit being too loose, or perhaps just the foreign nature of it all starting to seep into my skin. But then it happened all at once, and suddenly - I could barely breathe.

In hindsight, I knew that the knock on my back that my mother's foot had made wasn't insignificant after all - but at that point I knew I was going to die without some intervention. And of course, I hadn't been able to pay much attention to what was going on around me up till the point I fainted, but God knows that everything from then on out was the blueprint for me to die. The delayed response from my mother, followed by a delayed reaction from her deciding if her scientific work or if her own 14-year-old offspring was more important to her. The back and forth between my parents in trying to communicate that their child was about to die. The scramble for Jack to pull my tether back to the spaceship, and his inability to find the hatch to close the door for oxygen to flood back into the exit pad.

If there was one thing that I knew for sure, it was that I would have died that day if not for the enhanced strength that being Danny Phantom granted me. If there was another thing I knew, it was that if my parents knew that they had almost committed manslaughter on a ghost, they would have wished without a second thought that they actually had.

I didn't really know what was the worst thing about the whole ordeal. The near death? The extinguishing of any passion that I had about astronomy? The incessant chiding of my parents for sabotaging their mission when at the back of my mind resided the nagging suspicion that nothing had been my fault?

Perhaps it was a mix of all these things - the knowledge that I had nothing left to carry myself forward for, and not even my closest of kin would be there for me. When the seeds of emptiness finally sprouted within me, they would only continue to blossom and grow within me for as long as I lived.

And at least to me, it was a confirmation of my worst fear - my parents were ghost killers before they were my guardians. And that it wasn't difficult to deduce which side of them would supersede the other if my secret ever got out.

"Are you kidding me, Danny?" She queried, her disbelief transparent as she locked the door. "You wanna explain what happened?"

"I don't think I know what you're talking about, Jazz." I defended myself with as best a quizzical tone I could manage.

"Oh, don't give me that, Danny, you should know yourself how awful you are at lying to me."

"If that's true, then you're even more awful at being a polygraph. You want to enlighten me on what you're so angry about?"

She rolled her eyes. "So you're telling me that on the day Dash bullied you, where you took off afterwards to the changing room to retreat, Dash decided to, randomly, out of nowhere, in front of kids filming with their phones and of several coaches, strip naked and streak until he was caught?"

I slinked myself back into my chair, shooting her a deadpan look. "You don't have to CliffNotes it for me, you know. Everyone who's everyone has already seen the video."

"And you mean to say you had nothing to do with that?"

"You mean the part where he was bullying me and I went to hide because I didn't want to get my stomach kicked in again? That part I had to do with."

"Daniel Fenton, can you cut the bullshit?" Jazz raised her voice, stepping closer to me, her eyebrows in a neat V shape and her eyes studying me furiously, her hands tensed up in claws in front of her. "Sam and Tucker can give you a benefit of a doubt, sure, but do you think Dash is that stupid? Do you think he doesn't know his limits of what he can and cannot do? How do you think such a douchebag is the champion quarterback of the football team?"

"Was." I corrected her, doing my best not to let the corners of my mouth tug upwards. "And what do I know? I'm not him, I can't read his mind to know what goes through his tiny skull at a given notice."

She shook her head, crossing her arms. "I think it's easy to infer from that look he had when you left his body."

"Jazz, where the hell is this coming from?" I accused, suddenly infuriated. "Let me get this straight. You already know this person has bullied me the entirety of high school, you already know he thinks he's the king of the school. And then one day he acts like he's one and gets punished for it, and you think it's my fault?"

"Danny, did you or did you not possess him that day?"

I grit my teeth together, snarling. "No."

"Even the worst polygraph on earth would know that is the least convincing 'no' humanity has ever taken witness to."

"That doesn't change the fact that the answer is still no."

"Does it?"

I remained silent, and kept my gaze ahead. Some questions were not meant to be answered. Jazz sighed, and stepped closer to my desk, her expression softened now, as if attempting to pacify an angry bear.

"Danny, I-"

"I've heard enough," I cut her off curtly. "I hear you loud and clear, okay? I get it, you're never going to take my side on this."

"Danny, what are you talking about? I've been on your side for as long as I can remember! What makes you think that that's suddenly not true?"

"You don't think, even in the not-real case that I actually did it, that he deserved it? You don't think that after 4 years of treating me like his personal punching bag, he needed something like this? And yet I am the one who is worth lecturing here? In that case, would it have mattered how he got his just desserts, anyhow?"

"Of course it matters," she answered without hesitation, like a stretched-out elastic band smacking back at me. "You know what this is like? It's like if a robber gets caught, and he's charged not for robbery, but for murder. Don't you think that's extreme?"

"You have this completely backwards," I swatted my hand at her. "This is like, if a murderer gets caught and he's somehow charged for robbery, and on top of it, he gets community service as the punishment. So what if he gets suspended and gets demoted - not even kicked off - from the team? Don't you think that's too lenient for not only physically and verbally abusing me? And not just me, but almost every kid in Casper High?"

I espied her pinch the bridge of her nose in the corner of my eye. "Danny, look, I know how you feel. I dated that asshole once, after all. But, this isn't you. You're not the type of person who puts the punishment of innocent people in your own hands. That's not what heroes do."

"And you think Dash is innocent?"

"Innocent that he didn't strip naked in front of everyone on his own accord!"

"Of course he did," I maintained, and Jazz groaned in response.

"And if he didn't?"

"But he did."

"Daniel!"

I scoffed. "Okay. What if he didn't, then, even though he did?"

"Then he didn't have to be punished for doing something he didn't do. Do you not even agree with me on this base fact?"

I shook my head, taking one moment to glance at her face of disbelief and vexation and tilting my head forward again. "In some places not called 'your world', we call it 'karma'."

"For Christ's sake, Danny, what in the flaming hell happened to you?" she queried, her voice breaking now. "Where did your sense of justice and fairness even go? Are you still the same Danny from 4 years ago?"

"I don't know," I confessed. "I don't honestly know, Jazz. But if you think that this isn't at least a little bit just, then I don't know what to tell you."

She walked over to me now, placing a faux-sympathetic hand on my shoulder. "This is about Miranda, isn't it? You know as much as we all do that it's not your fault, right?"

"There's no way you haven't heard by now," I said, raising my voice a smidge. "People are rioting in the street because of me. Miranda at this point is a blip in the sea of issues right now."

She frowned, and crossed her arms once more. "You do know how much I have to stick up for you right? How much Mom and Dad argue with me over you, debating endlessly about your heroism and trying to defend your honour, while you sit there silent like Switzerland?"

"You think I'm not aware of that?" I half-shouted. "Of the fact that at any point of time they will just shoot me out of the sky and be glad they did it? Why do you think I'm so fucking tired, Jazz?! Why do you think I have to stay quiet and make sure that they don't put 2 and 2 together? Who is the one people are rioting about here?"

"Danny, come on," Jazz reprimanded. "It doesn't have to be like this, you know? This city needs you as a hero."

"For my older sister, you seem to forget that I'm also an 18-year-old still struggling with his own personal issues." I countered. "If these people don't want me as a hero and think I'm just some, some conspirator trying to tear down the fabric of society, then I'll be an 18-year-old who will use that power for reward when I can."

"Danny…"

"It's been 4 years, Jazz," I informed her, swivelling in my chair. "4 years of not using my powers for myself other than small conveniences, because I wanted to put my heroism over everything else. What am I supposed to do when nobody even wants it? Continue on this path until I can't take it?"

"And so what do you think the alternative is? Hang up your hat and let everybody die?"

I pursed my mouth shut, knowing that my answer would only cause a volcanic eruption of indignation from her. Of course, my silence spoke as loud as words could, and she shook her head at me.

"Danny, in case you're not aware, you're an adult now. Sometimes I wish you'd act like one for once."

"And I did," I countered. "For 4 whole years. If you'd like, you can take my place, you know. Be my guest. Get your face pummelled into the dirt by other ghosts, get it taped, and have people still think you're going to kill them. And then I'd wonder if you too, would also still be as heroic, and carry that responsibility endlessly until you perish. And I'd wonder if you would still do it knowing that people would push you into your own grave and piss on it."

"I'd know that it would be the right thing to do, at the very least," she answered. "If I were the sole thing stopping the world from collapsing, I'd know that I'd need to do everything in my power to fulfill my duty. You know, instead of just, giving up and abusing my powers."

"And would you do it?"

"How would I know?"

"So you won't actually do it. That's what I'm hearing."

"I didn't say that!"

"Okay, then say you would then. Say it. Would you do it, if you had my powers?"

For the first time, she paused, wordlessly averting her gaze and biting her lower lip in silence. The fact that she couldn't even break out of her contemplation to lie to me was all I needed.

"I rest my case." I concluded, jolting out of my chair. I walked to the door, turning the knob in one swift motion and swinging it open, almost causing it to bang against the side of the wall. "You know, Jazz, as much as I know I have to keep doing this shit, I ought to remind you of something. I only have 1 life - once I'm gone, that's it. I'm not Jesus."

She took in a deep breath, pursing her lips together and shaking her head slightly, before exhaling. "I know, Danny. I know we're asking a lot, and I'm sorry. I don't really know what else to say."

"But?"

"But I don't think you have a choice."

"Don't you at least wish I had a choice? Hadn't it dawned on you the day you realized I was a ghost that perching heroic responsibility after heroic responsibility on top of a kid's back was going to make the whole thing collapse?"

"Of course I do, Danny, I'm your sister. The day you emerged from Mom's womb I've always done my best to support you. And I am here to do that now, to tell you to please, for the sake of everything good in this world, at least try to keep on going. Even you should know that what you've been doing, doesn't feel right. All I ask is that you don't just… forget who you are."

If she had been looking at my face, she would have seen the momentary flash of relentment, and she would know that it was all over: but just like everyone else, she hadn't been paying attention, and so into the illusion she went. "Okay," I muttered under my breath, only loud enough for her to hear.

"I hope you're telling the truth on that one. The world depends on that truth, and you know it."

"Okay."

Her eyes drifted towards the corner of my room. There was a moment of hesitation, of her pondering over our conversation, like reviewing moves on a chessboard, trying to understand how to avoid getting checkmated, until finally, she tipped over her king. She shook her head and strode out the door.

"I just hope you're happy, Danny."

I closed the door behind her, with a little more force than necessary.

As much as I hated to admit it, Jazz was right. Of course this world depended on me. And of course, if I were to speak completely from altruism - if I could have all my enemies destroyed and all my dreams come true, even if it was dishonest… was it all worth it?

Even that was an answer I had trouble coming up with.

Did this mean I was doomed forever? Did this mean that I was eternally resigned to my personal boulder, never to even receive even the smallest of pleasures to motivate myself to keep going?

I buried my face in my hands, sitting down to the floor. A small part of me was apologetic to my big sister, for all the disappointment that I was going to serve her.

But unfortunately, or fortunately, a bigger part of me knew that the path I was on was greatly more satisfying than that of the road I'd taken for 4 years.

And from the moment that Jazz made it clear she wasn't going to relinquish her idyllic vision of my heroic acts, I knew that this was, love it or hate it, completely inevitable.