Disclaimer: No own, no money made. Rad.

Chapter 2

Future

Graduation Day at Casper High dawned faster than Danny expected it to. Tucker, on the other hand, said that the last month of high school had dragged, even after the fact. Sam was with Tucker on that one - she could not wait for high school to be over, and every second was grueling as they neared the end.

It's not that Danny wanted to stay in high school, or that he'd relished the "wonderful experience of being a Casper High student," as Principal Ishiyama liked to worm into every assembly. He'd actually worked pretty hard - including a few years of summer school - to make sure he wouldn't fail a grade and have to stay there for a measly second longer than he had to. It's just that graduation had always been a sort of informal deadline. Childhood seemed like it would stretch unforgivably on forever when Danny was fourteen. He thought he had time to repair things with his parents, time to explain things. Four years had gone by faster than he had thought they would.

The ghosts in his house were totally unsympathetic. "I can't believe you want to bring the Fentons here," said Jeb.

"At least you get to grow up," said Charlie. "Don't complain about it happening too fast to me."

"If you bring the Fentons here, I'm hiding my garden patch again," said Tim. And that was a threat, because the backyard looked terrible when Tim hid his work from view.

"Technically, the Fentons are already here," said Danny. "I'm a Fenton. This is a Fenton household."

"Funny. I always thought it was a Jeb household," said Jeb, crossing his arms over his overalls.

"Absolutely not," said Rebecca. "It's a Rebecca household."

There was an ongoing argument over which of them had first begun haunting the house, Danny had learned. Privately, he suspected that they'd both moved in at around the same time, still too new to put off many signals of themselves. With Jeb's preference for the upstairs and Rebecca's preference for the downstairs, they might have gone as much as a decade without noticing they had a roommate. Danny would never say that out loud, though. Voicing an opinion, any opinion, was probably enough to take him from halfa to ghost.

"It's a haunted household," said Jazz, who'd flown in from her university for Danny's graduation weekend. She'd been staying at the house for less than twenty four hours and she'd already managed to meet everyone. Including Claire, who even Sam and Tucker hadn't coaxed out of hiding. "And it's a haunted household that includes a Fenton. Believe me, I understand being wary about our parents. But we won't let them hurt you. We'll be telling them about Danny first, so they'll have already had to accept him before they even learn this address."

The ghosts all seemed to trust Jazz implicitly; they took her at her word.

This only made the pit in Danny's stomach worse. It was one more reason he couldn't back out of finally telling his parents about Phantom, and while Danny wasn't planning on backing out, had every intention of going through it, not having an out felt terrible. And he didn't have an out, not when the wellbeing of others relied on him coming clean.

He held onto that thought in the Fenton Works kitchen, Jazz sitting by his side, hand curled protectively around his under the table. "So," said Jazz, opening the conversation. "You know about the house, and you know you'll be visiting it after Danny graduates."

"Were you in on this, too, Jasmine?" said Mom.

"No, actually," said Jazz, sending a glare Danny's way. "I didn't find out about the house until it was already a done deal. There's also something else I didn't find out about until later."

"What?" said Dad.

"Danny did say he'd tell us everything after graduation," said Mom. "I expected you to hold us to that. You don't graduate until Saturday, Danny."

There was a glob of ectoplasm stuck to the ceiling, Danny realized, looking anywhere but his parents. "Yeah. I figured I'd better give you a few days to wrap your mind around everything before I let you in the door."

Again with the hurt expressions. If Jazz wasn't squeezing Danny's hand under the table, he'd be bolting for his room right now.

"Before you let us in the door," said Mom slowly, like she was turning the words over in her mind. "Danny, when you said you wouldn't let us bring our weapons, was it not actually about the weapons?"

Dad visibly recoiled at that sentence. "Oh no," he said. "Danny, do you consider us a threat?"

Fuck. "No!" said Danny reflexively. "Of course not!"

"He does. And he has every right to." Jazz did not even spare him an apologetic glance. She pulled her hand - the one that wasn't still gripping Danny's wrist - out of her pocket, held up a small box. "Frankly, I agree with him. I know that ultimately you love us and will accept this, but I don't trust you to react safely in the moment."

"What is that, Jazz?" said Mom, apparently willing to ignore everything Jazz actually said.

From the corner of his eye, Danny saw Jazz give a small cold smile. "Something I developed with some of my college friends. It shorts out all ecto-weaponry within a small radius for as long as it's turned on." Jazz very deliberately flipped a switch on her little box, gave a devious little smile, said, "I call it the Fenton Disrupter."

"Jasmine!" Mom and Dad were always hilariously in sync when they were horrified.

"Don't worry," she said. "It's a short radius. It's not affecting the shields around the house or in the lab. Frankly if you don't feel safe enough within your own shields to go without a weapon, I don't even know how to help you."

Mom took a gun from her belt, pointed it at the floor, and fired. Nothing happened. A bit of Danny's fear slipped away.

"You can show them now," said Jazz, not looking away from the gun in their mother's hand. "They can't hurt you."

Danny reached for the iciness of his core and yanked.

Thankfully, Jazz was there to coach their parents through their meltdown. Memories of Jazz's repetitive info-dumps about psychology coached Danny through their parents' meltdown.

There was denial: "What have you done with our son, you spook?"

There was anger: "How could you never tell us? We would have supported you! How could you let us hunt you, Danny?"

There was bargaining: "Surely not since you were fourteen? Not since the portal turned on? Oh God, it wasn't our portal that did it, was it? Tell us it wasn't the portal!"

Then came the sadness, Danny standing there stiffly as his parents wrapped their arms around him and cried into both of his shoulders. "We're so sorry, Danny. We never would have hurt you if we'd known."

With any luck at all, that meant acceptance was coming.

When Mom and Dad unwound themselves from their group hug, they wiped their noses and nodded resolutely. "No weapons in your new house," said Mom. "I understand now."

"We'll leave them in the GAV," said Dad. "And programming them to ignore your ecto-signature has moved to first place on the to-do list."

"That's good to hear." Danny decided to drop his final bomb on the conversation. "Because my new house comes with ghostly roommates and weapons or no weapons, I don't want you to go in unprepared and end up scaring them."

"What?" said Dad.

"What?" said Mom.

"I've met all of them," said Jazz. "They're very nice. So if you can set aside your biases, I think you'll end up getting along with them! Tim has a vegetable garden going in the backyard that's just absolutely to die for."

Letting his big sister diffuse the situation, Danny leaned back in his chair and focused on his breathing. Things were going to be fine.

Graduation passed, his parents hooting and hollering next to the Foleys in the stands. They seemed reserved, though, when Danny found them after.

"You don't have to bring us over if you don't want to, Dann-o," said Dad, glancing around at the crowd.

"I know you said after graduation," said Mom. "But given the givens, we think it's more important that you don't feel pressured."

Danny glanced around at the crowd. Tucker was hugging his own parents not five feet away, and half-way across the field he managed to spot Sam attempting to shake off the Mansons.

"I want you to come," said Danny, although he was pretty sure he mostly just wanted it over with.

For all that his parents hadn't noticed anything beyond their laboratory in the last five years, they seemed to see right through to his hesitance.

"We don't have to do this now," said Mom.

Danny felt Jazz touch his shoulder. He let himself be steadied by it, set his jaw. "We do, actually."

He brought them that very afternoon, still dressed in his cap and gown. There was a double purpose - Sam and Tucker wanted to insist on coming, but this afternoon, both the Foley and Manson parents were insistent on celebrating with their children.

Danny wasn't entirely sure why this was something he felt he needed to do without them, but it was.

He herded his parents through the door, making sure Jazz was flanking their other side. Danny wanted to trust them, but he felt better when he saw Jazz flick the switch of her Fenton Disrupter anyway. He'd watched them de-arm themselves outside, tossing ecto-guns into the GAV blindly, like they weren't extremely volatile machinery.

Their suits didn't seem like they should be able to hide anything larger than a Pokémon card, but Danny knew from painful experience that they could. It always seemed like they pulled weapons out of nowhere. He gave Jazz's Fenton Disrupter an approving nod.

Mom and Dad, to their credit, didn't even look hurt. Just resigned.

Then they looked startled, because Jeb and Rebecca were standing right inside the door.

"C'mon, guys," said Danny. "You said you weren't going to intentionally sabotage this."

"Standing in our own house is intentionally sabotaging something?" said Rebecca, crossing her arms. "Because we talked about it. Decided that trying to hide out and give Dr. and Dr. Fenton more space than they deserve would actually be setting us up for failure. Better to rip the bandaid off."

"Wouldn't Charlie be better suited for ripping the bandaid off?" There was just something inherently comforting about Charlie, Danny had felt it that very first morning he'd met them.

"We only let them talk to you first because Charlie insisted before we had a chance to stop them. We've got Tim and Claire distracting them right now," said Jeb.

That tracked. Everyone in the household was protective of Charlie, even though Danny was reasonably certain that Charlie had been dead longer than both Tim and Claire. Ghost aging, man. It was weird.

"Well," said Dad, putting on a brave face and gently extricating his shoulder from Jazz's grip. "Any friend of our son's is a friend of ours. We want this to succeed, too."

"We understand your reservations," said Mom. "We're willing to do this your way until we've earned your trust."

Rebecca seemed to approve of this, but Jeb still looked doubtful. Danny remembered that first day, when Jeb's face had softened when Charlie pointed fingers at Danny's parents.

"This is important to me," said Danny. "I don't want to hide this house from them. I don't want to hide you from them. We have to start somewhere."

"That we do," said Jeb.

"So," said Jazz, finally inserting herself into the conversation. "I brought board games and some icebreakers. How about we all go into the drawing room and get to know each other a little better?"

(The resident ghosts, Danny had learned the hard way, did not appreciate the term living room.)

"We'd love to, Jazz," said Mom, all false enthusiasm, voice a little higher than usual.

"We would love to," said Jeb. His voice was hard

Somehow, Danny thought that these weren't bad signs. Sure enough, that afternoon went as smoothly as he could have expected.

His parents had been tense and afraid for about as long as it had taken them to realize that they were in a room with a bunch of people that might actually answer their research questions without having to subject sentient beings to human rights violations.

Jeb resolutely did not answer a single question they asked. Rebecca, on the other hand, answered the questions they managed to work into the games they played.

Charlie, having realized that something was afoot, dashed into the house after about an hour. They answered any question Mom and Dad dared to ask, but only in the most unhinged way possible.

Claire brought out cups of coffee. Tim brought in a basket of assorted spring herbs for Mom and Dad to take home. "To cook with," he said. "Not to conduct experiments on."

That drew a guilty look from them, which Tim didn't miss. His lips drew back into a sharp, thin smile.

Danny knew the peace was fragile, but it was still peace. It whispered a tentative promise into his ear: there was a future ahead of him, and it just might be bright.

Author's Note: Hope everyone enjoyed this last tidbit from Ectoberhaunt! Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear what everyone has to say. Concrit is, of course, always welcome.

ALSO! I have a survey on the expectation of anonymity versus the realities of internet privacy in fanfiction spaces that I've made for my library science graduate level coursework. I would love it if y'all considered helping a fellow out. It's linked over on my Tumblr aggiepostemon and aggie-postemon