Of Bananas, Lemons, and the Living Dead

or alternatively: Some Answers, Finally

When they met up on the steps of Casper High the next morning (Sam didn't have the car on Mondays), Sam was practically bouncing in her black Vans. "So I have a theory," she announced breathlessly.

"Jeez, how late were you up?" Tucker cringed just to look at her under-eye bags. She wasn't wearing makeup, and even her skin looked tired.

"Not that late. I was excited, nothing this exciting has ever happened to me! Now do you want to hear my theory or not?"

Tucker raised an eyebrow and readjusted his beret. "Okay?"

She crested the last step and stopped next to him, readjusting her backpack straps. They were obstructing foot traffic, but Sam didn't generally care about that sort of thing. Students streamed around them, their body language and complai–conversations expressing various flavors of exhaustion. "I did some more research," Sam explained. "Into the victims themselves, not the actual case. Apparently, Nikolai Technus was an infamous black hat hacker. Stole millions, wiped out some people's entire savings to pay for his sister's hospital bills, but they could only make a few charges stick, so he did, like, five years. And Schulker went to trial but was acquitted for the murder and cannibalization of two hikers in the Canadian Rockies."

"You think the murders are some sort of vigilante thing?" Tucker frowned. "But that doesn't make sense; Mrs. Ainara and my cousin were targeted. And one of them was a little kid!"

Sam looked suddenly uncomfortable, seemingly noticing for the first time the high schoolers shuffling past them. She grabbed his arm and started steering him through the doors, into the hallway. "But Tucker…I hate to bring it up, but didn't your cousin have that thing? With the girl at the party…"

Tucker halted in front of Lancer's door, dragging her to a stop by virtue of her grip on his arm. "That was not true," he whispered fiercely. "She said he was the wrong guy, and she confirmed it when they arrested the right person! Tristan would not do anything like that."

"I know, I know!" Sam quickly assured him, looking a little surprised. "I'm saying, though, the killer might not, or might be operating on some crazy, distorted idea of justice. You have to admit, it's weird that three out of the seven of them were suspects in criminal investigations. And I feel like Ember was a little sketchy, right?"

Tucker shook off her arm and walked through the door a little abruptly, but he was mollified. "I don't know, I don't think I ever met her."

Sam took a seat at a desk near the back, Tucker settling in the one to her left, next to the window. She leaned over to talk to him in a lowered voice as he opened his backpack. "My parents made some comments when the school sent out the newsletter about what happened to her. Apparently she had a reputation. Not sure what, though."

"Huh." Tucker leaned back in his seat, twiddling with the mechanical pencil he'd dug out of his pencil case. "I mean, I guess it's a decent theory, but—"

He cut off abruptly, staring at the front of the room. Sam followed his gaze. Danny had just walked in.

He noticed them immediately too, making quick, accidental eye contact over the heads of the Kids With Weird Allergies Coalition (they'd really bonded over that microwave campaign) and then hurrying to sit at one of the open desks on the far side of the room. Tucker's mouth felt dry and his heartbeat jumped, but his Nightmare Sense remained disturbingly silent.

Sam tried to say something else to Tucker, but she was cut off by the bell ringing (they both jumped) and then Lancer striding out of his office and into the main classroom.

"Good morning, students!" he enthused, setting down his coffee to stand jauntily at attention behind his desk. "And happy Monday!" The only answer was a Greek chorus of groans, the usual accompaniment to Lancer's announcements. Lancer was literally the only person in the room happy that it was Monday.

"Jane Eyre, people, it's not that bad. You didn't even have homework due today. That's not something you'll experience often in this class."

While Lancer pulled up his hideously designed but informative Google Slides about "The Most Dangerous Game," Sam leaned over and intoned to Tucker, "Do we try to catch him in the hallway after class? Or lunch?"

Tucker considered. "Are we gonna be able to find him at lunch?"

"I don't know, probably?"

"Miss Manson!" Sam jerked in her seat, looking up at their slightly red-flushed teacher. "Please pay more attention, this will be important," Lancer sighed in his nasally voice.

"Sorry, Mr. Lancer." Sam exchanged one more loaded glance with Tucker and then focused her attention on the board. Tucker's eyes slid over to the other side of the room. Danny was staring at them again, but he swiftly looked away when Tucker caught him.

~(*0*)~

They were, in fact, able to find Danny at lunch—he was standing outside Tucker's Physics classroom, trying and failing to look like he wasn't waiting for him. Which meant Danny had almost definitely heard their whispered conversation from across the classroom. Which was really, really scary.

"Hey, Tucker," he said, trying to grin easily and instead resembling a nervous hyena. "Is Sam around? I think we have some things to clear up."

Tucker eyed those teeth, backing away a foot or two. "Uh, yes. Definitely," he responded, projecting confidence about as well as Danny was projecting nonchalance.

"But not here," Danny added, glancing around. A passing pedestrian jostled Tucker toward him, and Tucker hurriedly pushed back before they could touch. Danny didn't seem to notice, pointing down the hall. "There's this maintenance closet outside our French classroom. Text Sam to meet us there?"

"Hold up." Tucker fought his way into a less busy side hallway and turned to fully face Danny, both of them standing against the wall. "We are not going anywhere alone with you, dude. We are staying where there are witnesses."

"For real?!" Danny whispered back. "Do you really think I'm going to murder you in a closet with security cameras outside, in the middle of the school day?"

"I don't know, man, this is all kind of new territory for me!"

Danny ran a frustrated hand through his hair. "Look, I can't talk about this around people, okay? The government's been trying to dissect me for like a year now!"

Tucker…supposed that was reasonable. In some senses of the word. In this weird new world they'd only just discovered they'd been living in all along. He sighed. "Okay, fine. We'll go to the closet." He pulled his phone out of his pocket and quickly texted Sam about the change in plans. "People are definitely going to think we're making out," he added under his breath.

Danny laughed nervously. "As long as they still think I'm alive, I've learned not to care."

They made it to the closet and waited until Sam had gotten there, voiced her own objections, and heard Danny's understandable reasons for wanting secrecy. She still made sure multiple people passed by and saw them before they turned to the closet door, Sam and Danny hovering uncertainly in front of it and Tucker leaning with forced nonchalance against the glass fire extinguisher case a few feet down the hall. "I don't have a bobby pin on me today, so how are we getting in?" she griped, more as a final reason not to go in the closet than as acknowledgement of an actual obstacle.

Danny looked around. "Uh, cover me."

Sam looked at Tucker, who shrugged, and then they stepped in close on either side of Danny to hide whatever he was about to do from prying eyes. And then Tucker did a double take as Danny's hand met wood and then just kept going through the door. His stomach flip-flopped, and he tasted iron and ozone way back in his molars. Sam just kept staring, openmouthed, as the doorknob turned on its own, or more accurately was turned from the other side, and then Danny pulled it open with his other hand and removed the one previously in the door. "Voila." He stepped aside with a slight bow to let them in.

"What the hell did I just watch." Sam looked a little traumatized and made no move to enter.

Danny huffed in exasperation. "Seriously, that was so basic, now could you please get in the closet before people see? Please?"

Tucker blinked once and then decided to just accept it. He really had seen way weirder. He went into the closet, fumbling for the light more urgently than he might have a week ago. After a moment, Sam followed.

With Danny inside and the door closed, they all began to realize that it really was a tiny closet. The small light in the ceiling was one of those old-school plastic-covered ones, and the cover was filled with the silhouettes of dead flies, which cast faint orangey shadows over their heads. Tucker examined the cracking green walls for any livelier bugs as Danny cracked his knuckles (not the best nervous habit when you were trying to appear nonthreatening) and exhaled. "Uh, so I'm going to start by apologizing, again, for scaring you guys the other night. I'm told my ghost form is a little…much, if you're not used to it. I was just trying to get you to not mess with the supernatural again, because it's really dangerous, but I guess I maybe could have handled it better? Anyway, if you would not turn me in to the government to get, like, tortured and stuff, I would really appreciate that."

Tucker and Sam stared at him blankly. Finally, Tucker processed all the information revealed in that spiel. "Uh. Sure. That seems fair."

"Yeah," Sam said slowly, after a second. "We can do that. You don't try to eat us, and we won't turn you in. Sounds like a plan. But we have some questions."

Danny started to rub the back of his neck with one hand, banged his elbow on the shelf, jumped, and brought it back down quickly. "Yeah. Yeah, okay, uh…what do you want to know?"

Tucker was trying to think of a polite way to phrase the question on his mind when Sam, ever the more straightforward of the two, just went for it. "What are you?"

Danny shifted, moving back into the corner between the wall and the shelf of cleaning supplies to make a little more space, as he took a deep breath and began. "So. I have some abilities that one might describe as ghostly, and I'm affected by a lot of the same things fully dead people are. But I can switch back and I'm obviously still alive, too. Based on what I've gathered from, ah, some of the more…traditionally deceased, I'm simultaneously alive and my own ghost, like a sort of halfway point. And then another side effect is that as far as we understand, I'm a portal."

Sam frowned. "A portal between what and what, exactly?"

"Between the dimension or realm or whatever of the restless dead, and this one."

In the ensuing silence, a thought occurred to Tucker. He wasn't gonna say it. He wasn't gonna say it…He had to say it. "Bro…you're like Raven from Teen Titans."

Danny choked on a burst of incredulous laughter. "Wow. Actually, yeah. But instead of cool magic tattoos I get random bouts of intense nausea."

"So when you would skip out of classes and stuff, or disappear during lunch, you were in here…throwing up ghosts," Sam stated flatly.

Danny cringed. "Or hunting things that were already here, or hunting down the ones that get away. But yeah, pretty much. It's really gross." He sounded personally offended by these circumstances.

"And no one else at school knows?" Tucker asked.

"Nope. It's really a miracle I've hidden it this long; I've been almost caught like eight times since I got here." He started counting on his fingers, looking up at the treacherous lightbulb and its victims. "There was Mikey, there was that blonde girl and the Asian guy from my Chem class, there was the actual janitor…it's just a mess, let's be honest."

It took a while for them to get out of the closet. At some point they all got tired of standing, and then Tucker knocked an empty and very loud container of bleach off the shelf and almost got them caught by a teacher, so they ended up sitting on the floor, Sam's knees bumping up against Danny's as she leaned back onto Tucker's side and he braced his feet against the door. And Danny told the story of how he'd died.

His parents were parabiologists (or, as they preferred, ectologists) as a very time-consuming hobby, although they paid the bills as a chemical engineer and a regular engineer. And at their last house in Chicago, not long before the start of Danny's sophomore year, they scavenged parts on moonlit nights and built something in the basement. It was a shadowy hunk of machinery as tall as cathedral doors, with twinkling lights that disappeared when you looked at them straight on and strange reflections that twisted of their own accord across impossible planes. It made strange humming sounds late at night, at a frequency so low that the whole house quivered in its foundation. But for all its ominous vibes, it didn't actually do anything, no matter what the Fentons poked or prodded.

That is, until Danny was cleaning the basement lab and happened to trip on an exposed wire (a wire he couldn't find later, no matter how hard he searched) and fall into the machine in the basement. He remembered the smell of burning hair and bright green light, and the feeling of his esophagus crawling into his stomach, and then he remembered waking up on the floor of the lab at three in the morning and stumbling upstairs to his room, mind foggy and muscles still seizing, to pass out again in bed.

It was the next day, when he woke up with a floating-y feeling and scared himself to death (heh) looking in the mirror, that things started to get really weird. And it only escalated from there.

Ghosts began finding him, even those who already resided in the land of the living or had entered the dimension through other, less testy portals. Some were friendly, just looking for a door to the other side as the logical next step toward whatever, if anything, lay beyond. Most were decidedly not friendly; a lot weren't even coherent. These, he could forcibly send back. (And no, he hastily clarified as he saw Tucker's wide eyes and correctly read the question on the tip of his tongue, he did not have to eat the ghosts to do that; how many times did he need to reassure them that he did not eat people?! Tucker thought again of the ghost in the triangle's big, wide mouth and said nothing.) At first, his parents were ecstatic about their neighborhood's sudden, inexplicable uptick in paranormal activity. Then the house began accruing damage, and no one could tell where it was coming from. Including their insurance company. Creeping things started coming to Danny's school, and back then he wasn't nearly as experienced at fighting them off. They sent kids of all ages and their teachers flooding into the hallways, chased by nothing but a nameless reflexive panic, an involuntary knee-jerk of fear. They cornered people in bathrooms and back alleys and under the bleachers. Half the school was in counseling; the counselors were in counseling. It was hell on the electrical wiring.

And then Todd Zelenski was found dead at the drinking fountain, drowned in two inches of water.

Everyone knew Danny Fenton had been near or at the sites of most of the attacks. Everyone knew Danny Fenton had been acting weird.

Danny Fenton and associates decided it would be wise to get the hell out of Chicago.

The consulting company Mrs. Fenton worked for (she determined if pharmaceuticals were safe for human testing) had a lab in Amity Park. They'd been trying to get good researchers out to the suburbs for years, and the pay was better even if the resources were worse, so she didn't take much convincing. Jack Fenton was an independent inventor at that point, so he could wander wither the wind blew. Jasmine Fenton was in college. So they moved to Amity, and all summer, it seemed like it was going to work out. Chicago was murder city, while Amity was lucky to see the occasional downtown stabbing; the restless came less and, when they did, were less angry than confused. For a while Danny could breathe, and hope against hope that things would be easier from now on.

He'd definitely jinxed himself. Hope was a scam.

The one "good" thing, according to Danny, about this current ectoplasmic upwelling was that the ghosts (he'd met two: Amber and now Schulker) were very recently dead. Old ghosts were much worse; they seemed to degrade, stewing in their restlessness, bearing less and less psychological and physical resemblance to their living templates as time went on.

At this point, Sam interrupted the flow of the story, frowning. Outside the closet, a group of students passed, most likely coming in from lunch. Their loud laughter was muffled and distorted by the closet door. "So what exactly are ghosts? Like, are they actual souls, or, like, echoes or something?"

Danny made a vague handwave-y gesture. "Unfortunately, when I died I was not given a manual. Right now, we're thinking a sort of remnant. More than an echo, but, like…ugh, it's hard to explain." Sam readjusted her crossed ankles, pulling the bottom one onto the top, as he continued. "I used to think of it as similar to the way a star's light can reach Earth millennia after it died, so we're seeing a version of what it was even though temporally, that star doesn't exist in the moment that we're experiencing; it could have died before our great-grandparents were born. And since light gets refracted and lost on the journey through space, what we're seeing is a slightly corrupted version. But that's not a great analogy, because some ghosts actually do seem able to, like, learn, or at least adapt to changing circumstances. Starlight that reaches Earth will never be anything more than what it was when it was first generated light years ago."

He paused for a breath after that spiel and frowned thoughtfully. "Also," he added, "since light travels and your brain processes it and stuff, you never actually see anything or anyone as exactly what it is in the instant you perceive it."

"Huh."

They sat with that for a minute.

Then Sam snapped her fingers. The light flickered, and Tucker hoped it wasn't one of the bugs in the cover moving, maybe roused from rigor mortis by all their talk of undeath. "I got it! They're more like banana candy. You know, Tuck, from that text post you sent me."

"Oh, yeah!" Tucker remembered thinking, rightly, that the goth in Sam would like the concept. "I read that the flavoring they use for a lot of banana-flavored candies was actually based, when it was invented, on the taste of a species of banana that then went extinct," he explained to Danny. "So when you eat those candies, you're actually tasting a long-dead type of banana."

"And!" Sam added, straightening excitedly, "the recipe could've been changed over the years—like, a little more of this, less of that—so that little by little the taste changed! But there aren't any more of the original banana species, so we have no way of knowing anymore if that's really what they tasted like, when they were alive."

Danny grinned. "Well, but humans share more that half their DNA with bananas. So by that logic, I'm totally norm—"

"What are you doing in my closet?!"

There was a general clatter and clash as all three teenagers scrambled to their feet in the small space, knocking at least three unidentified cleaning-related objects off of the shelves and sending the shelving unit itself rocking in a very unnerving way. The door was being held open by an older man in work pants and a tee shirt. He also held a broom and looked extremely exasperated under a stubble goatee. The badge hung on a lanyard around his neck said "J. Klein, Janitor." It dawned on Tucker that he was, in fact, the janitor.

When none of them answered (they just stared at him with a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look), Mr. Klein sighed gustily and hit a button on the walkie-talkie hanging next to his badge. "Just caught two more kids making out in my maintenance closet," he intoned in a dry, husky voice. "I deserve a raise for dealing with this crap every day."

Two more? Tucker looked to his left, over Sam's shoulder. Danny just…wasn't there. What the hell?

Sam stumbled into him suddenly, and then she and Tucker made wide-eyed eye contact. Woah, she mouthed.

Tucker decided to focus on the issue at hand. He put on his best "aw, shucks" grin. "Sorry, Mr. Klein, we were just curious about what was in here, and the door was open! I swear we've only been here for a few minutes. And we weren't making out. Really."

Sam made a "gross" face. "Yeah, Mr. Sunshine here is not my type. He thinks he's funny."

A muffled snort emanated from thin air near Tucker's head.

Klein harrumphed, but there was a slight crease in his stubble on one end. "Whatever you say, kid. As long as the lock isn't damaged I couldn't care less. Now get going."

"Thank you, sir!" Tucker declared enthusiastically. They hurried out of the closet past Mr. Klein and into the hallway, stopping about 20 feet away. Mr. Klein glared at them until they got to some arbitrary safe distance, then grabbed a rag and a new 409 spray bottle off the shelves, closing and very deliberately locking the closet door with one more pointed glance at them before he left.

"Heh. That was hilarious," said Danny's voice from directly behind them. Tucker and Sam both whirled to see him leaning smugly against a wall that a second ago had been entirely empty. Tucker's increasingly unreliable sixth sense chose that moment to spark up taser-to-the-kidney style and then die down again to a low nerve-fluttering hum.

They stood there for a moment. Tucker slowly nodded, assimilating that ability into his new reality. "...So. That went...well?"

"He didn't eat us," Sam pointed out with a shrug, in a surprised-but-approving tone of voice.

Danny gave her a look but let it pass. "Anyway. I think you guys sort of get the gist of how this stuff can ruin your life, right? So in the future you stay out of my stuff, I'll stay out of yours? And no more summoning, please, you don't know how close you were to catching me in the shower—"

"Wait," Sam said. "You don't understand, we have to deal with this case—"

"—But there's no reason we can't take a supporting role!" Tucker interjected hurriedly. "Very small. Minuscule. Like, an extra's role. I'll be a tree."

"Uh, okay?" Danny absentmindedly rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and held out the other for a joking handshake. Tucker grasped it to shake emphatically, as if the universe might consider that an official transfer of cosmic responsibility.

He felt a shock, like Danny had one of those prank buzzers in his palm.

Tucker crumpled.

Distantly he heard a panicked voice say "Holy—I swear that wasn't me!" and a slightly less overtly freaking out one respond "I mean, Tucker's psychic, so this might be a thing that just happens?" and then the first one to say "Wait. Tucker's psychic?!" Oh yeah, he thought faintly with one side of his brain, I guess we totally forgot to tell him about that. The other side of his brain was stuffed with cotton and pine needles that scratched and poked at his occipital lobe.

He looked blearily around from his position on the threadbare carpet. His vision warped and darkened, and he realized he wasn't sitting on the same floor he'd just fallen on.

He was somewhere dark, with stale air and thin smoke and a warm but not penetrating orange glow. He started to roll onto his side and yelped, snatching his hand back to his chest, when it hit something that burned. He craned his neck and focused blurry eyes and saw that he was surrounded by a circle of white candles.

He struggled to focus more, past the nausea, and look past the circle of lights. Barely visible walls, carpet stains—a boot. He looked up with a sinking feeling and saw bulky camouflage and a dirty beard.

Something hissed, drawing his attention to the outside of the circle to his left. He tried to sit all the way up, but his limbs were vague unwieldy instruments and he could not will them into reacquiring the dexterity of millennia of evolution; his synapses just weren't firing. Even my nervous system's nervous, he thought, and laughed inside his head. To his left, he finally saw, was the blue-haired girl. Amber. Remember, he thought she mouthed, but maybe it was just the way her skin was swimming. At his feet, directly in front of him beyond the candles, the grey fox sat perfectly still. They all stared at each other, in silence, while the flames crackled merrily. The air was still. After all, no one was breathing.

If you wanna make the world, a better place…

The hunter smiled.

Then the grey fox made a little mewling sound, shifted, and scratched its left ear with its back foot, dismissing them all.

Tucker surged upward, gasping for air, in the brightly lit school hallway. Strong arms grabbed him and held him upright as he coughed violently, his whole body heaving with the force of it. It wouldn't stop, and Tucker wondered frantically why he couldn't catch his breath until he realized he was talking, his lips curling and lungs straining around words he couldn't even make out. With effort, he swallowed whatever had been coming next. "What…?"

It took a few seconds, but he finally caught his breath and was able to put his hands back and support himself on them, grounding himself in the feeling of worn, crumb-strewn carpet, and a few seconds later Sam let him go, sitting back herself with a worried crease between her eyebrows. "I'm fine," he managed breathlessly. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure, dude?" she answered, sounding just as haggard as he undoubtedly looked. Flyaway hairs stood out all around her face. "You just collapsed. I think you were unconscious for a second there. Danny went to get the nurse, should I…?"

"Nah, I think it was" —breathe— "a psychic thing. Definitely. I saw—what was I saying?"

Sam frowned at him and folded her legs to the side with the aid of one hand. She took another second to visibly check him over before answering. "You said, 'Schulker, he's not human. He's not human. He's not—' and then you cut off."

"...What the hell?" Tucker wheezed out. "I don't remember saying that; I don't even know how I know that."

But he did know it, he realized. He'd known it since he'd first met the thing that was and wasn't a hunter. It was that instinct, that prey animal adrenaline rush, the physical, chemical manifestation of the word "run." Amber was scary, but Schulker was paralyzing.

He couldn't believe he was about to say this. "...Heckity-heckin' crap," he said in tones of wonder. "I think we need to do another summoning."

"Are we making Danny help this time?"

Sam still looked frazzled, but at the concept of less talking and more action, a smile was now playing around the edges of her upper lip, creeping up to her nose and flaring the nostril with the almost-invisible piercing hole her parents didn't know she had. It made Tucker smile to look at her. "Yeah, we're definitely making Danny help this time."

She grinned. "I'll bring the lemon."