CW: Mentions of death, suicide, and panic attacks. Brief description of injuries.

Much as he hated the nickname, there was no denying that Bad Luck Tuck felt like it fit him a little too well lately.

Not only did he get stuck going to the hospital after last week's ghost attack, but he also got nineteen stitches in his leg (Nineteen!), the doctors denied his request to give him any painkillers stronger than a Tylenol for it, and his parents refused to let him stay home from school again since they didn't want him falling behind. Never mind that he was in the top ten percent of his class or that he was better with tech than every computer science teacher and IT professional at Casper High.

Tucker watched as his classmates filtered into the room, his crutches leaning against the wall and his injured leg propped up on the chair in front of him. Normally it would be his English period with Mr. Lancer, but his injuries were bad enough that he would be out for at least another week, so today they had a substitute he didn't recognize. The assignment was scribbled on the board, and she was sitting behind the desk with her feet up as she scrolled through her phone, only occasionally glancing up at the incoming students. Lancer would be furious if he saw her, which meant she would probably be a pretty chill substitute.

Tucker smiled at Sam as she sat down beside him. "What did Val want after lunch?" Val pulled her aside on their way out, but since Tucker and Sam didn't share a class after lunch, he didn't get the chance to learn what she wanted. It wasn't as if Val and Sam were friends.

"She wanted to know if I'm doing okay after the ghost attack because of, my, um, y'know." Sam waved a hand loosely around as she scowled, not willing to admit she had a panic attack when there were too many of their classmates within hearing range. "I wish she hadn't seen that."

"Did you tell your parents about it?" Sam rolled her eyes at him as she pulled out her textbook. "Right. I guess I should've known. How about your grandma?"

"Nope. I don't want her to worry, so I told her the ghost attacks aren't a big deal at school thanks to all the Fenton tech they've installed," said Sam, and then she frowned. "Speak of the devil."

Looking at the door, Tucker saw Danny fidget uncomfortably as he took the seat behind Sam with only a quick nod at the two of them as the bell rang and signaled the start of the period. Despite knowing about Tucker's injury, Danny hadn't reached out all weekend, and while Tucker wasn't exactly surprised, he wasn't really thrilled with his best friend, either. Danny skipped most of their other classes today and missed lunch, too, which meant this was the first time Tucker saw Danny since detention last week. He bit his lip, wondering if he ought to say something to Danny about it, when the sub sat up and swung her feet off the desk.

"Hi, all. I'm Ms. Jones. I gotta take attendance real quick, okay?" she said as she pulled out the roster. "And then you guys can just work on the assignment I wrote on the board."

"Can we do it in pairs?" asked Paulina.

"He didn't say you couldn't, so sure," said Ms. Jones with a shrug. "If you finish it early, feel free to work on your homework from some other class or talk quietly amongst yourselves, okay?"

Tucker pulled out his own textbook and flipped to the page on the board. They were supposed to read a poem by Tennyson called Mariana and then write a short essay analyzing the use of imagery and its themes. Sam looked positively delighted, but Tucker felt anything but joy. He hated poetry, or at least, any poetry that wouldn't help him impress a girl.

"Hey, Sam? Think you can help me with this?" he whispered to her while his classmates read it over, the silence only broken by the sub calling out names from the attendance list, and she nodded. Shooting a glance back at Danny, Tucker saw him looking similarly frustrated by the assignment as he slowly read through the poem while wincing and pinching his forehead, but if Danny wanted help, well, then he could ask for it himself.

Pulling his textbook out, he quickly read through it a few times. "Jeez, this is kind of dark, huh?" he asked Sam as she flipped to a clean page in her notebook.

"Yup, nothing like assigning a poem to a bunch of teenagers about isolation, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I'm sure that won't have any negative impacts," she said sarcastically, and he noticed Danny listening in as he pretended to read it again and take notes.

Sam and Tucker worked through the assignment, with Sam explaining the progression and how all of the auditory descriptions emphasized the narrator's loneliness and grief. Tucker only listened long enough to write up a half-decent short essay on it, but Sam was still writing once he was done, happy to go on and on about the rare subject she actually enjoyed.

As he considered whether or not he ought to work on his math homework, he glanced at Danny once more, wondering if this was finally the death knell of their lifelong friendship. Danny and Sam and Tucker had gotten into more than a few fights, especially in the last six months, but Tucker continually told himself that even if Danny was distant, even if he was absent-minded and depressed, he still cared about Tucker and Sam. Yet here they were with him injured badly enough to go to the hospital just days ago, and Danny unable to take a minute to send even a quick text to ask how he was doing.

Sam would understand regardless - she was already feeling pretty done with Danny, believing that there was little they could do about their dying friendship if Danny refused to fight for it, too. But Tucker . . . he wished he could stop caring about Danny the way Danny seemed to stop caring about him. It wasn't fair, but for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to completely give up. Not yet. "Do you need any help?" Tucker sighed eventually as he looked over at him. He noticed Sam raise an eyebrow, clearly surprised since Tucker spent most of today's lunch complaining about Danny, but Tucker couldn't help it. Their friendship had to mean something to Danny still.

Didn't it?

Danny looked up, his expression unreadable for a moment before he shook his head. "I, um . . . I kind of already eavesdropped on what Sam explained to you, so I think I got it," he mumbled as he finished writing his sentence and flipped his paper over. "Sorry."

"It's cool," said Tucker as Sam rolled her eyes and turned back to her own essay.

"How's the leg?" Danny asked as he stuffed his hands inside his pockets.

'Oh, so you care now?' thought Tucker, but he pushed it down. At least he finally asked, even if it came a bit late.

"I had to go to the hospital and get stitches. It was the worst, dude," he chuckled. "But they think I'll be able to manage without the crutches by the end of this week and that it should be mostly healed within a month or so."

Danny let out a long breath, his shoulders relaxing as he pressed his thumb into his palm. "Good. I was worried it might be a lot worse. I–um, my mom said there was a lot of blood. She thought you cut a major artery or something."

"Nope, I got lucky there. But, um, y'know . . . " He trailed off, biting his lip, but he could feel Danny's eyes locked onto him.

"Know what?" pushed Danny when Tucket didn't continue. Fine, if he wanted to force this, then Tucker wouldn't stop himself.

"Why didn't you check in with me all weekend?" he snapped, nearly breaking his pencil in two as he glared at Danny. He was angry. Maybe it was time Danny finally knew that, too. Maybe shielding Danny from the consequences of his actions and pretending like everything Danny did was fine was only making things worse, not better.

Danny opened his mouth and closed it, thinking for a moment as he rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably while Sam turned around in her seat and watched. He opened his mouth again when suddenly an intense shiver ran through him and he covered his mouth to cough.

Tucker wanted to scream, but he forced it down as Danny turned away and his hand shot up, no doubt grateful for the excuse to drop their conversation. He held it uselessly in the air, the sub too busy to notice while she scrolled through an app on her phone.

"So you're just going to run away instead of answering Tucker's question?" hissed Sam, but Danny refused to look at her, too, his eyes on the substitute.

After about a minute of being ignored and failing to see the irony in it, Danny gritted his teeth and got up, shoulders tense as he walked to her desk. "Hey, um, can I be excused? I need to use the bathroom."

"You still have to ask permission for that?" said the sub as she glanced up from her phone, and she waved a hand at him. "Uh, yeah, sure kid. Do whatever. Just be quick I guess."

Tucker watched him go, his heart beating faster while Sam turned back to her desk and quickly wrapped up her essay as her left foot began to bounce. Whether it was residual anger about Danny refusing to talk to him or fear about what was going to come next, Tucker didn't know. Nobody knew how Danny predicted the ghost attacks, but whenever he asked to urgently leave to use the bathroom or go to the nurse, a ghost was nearly guaranteed to show up somewhere. Most figured he had some kind of fancy tech from his parents that let him know first, but Tucker thought it might be a bizarre side effect of his accident freshman year since he noticed that Danny always shivered and coughed just before he asked to be excused. It seemed weird, but it was not even close to the strangest thing about living in Amity Park these days.

"Which ghost do you think it is this time?" Sam wondered as she finished up the last bit of her essay.

"Hopefully one that doesn't have an obsession with harassing people on crutches," joked Tucker, rolling with the change in subject. He spent enough time venting about Danny to Sam already. "C'mon, ghost alarm, go off already."

Even knowing about Danny's uncanny knack for predicting ghost attacks, the teachers in the school would not let them evacuate until the ghost triggered the Fenton's alarm system since some of the ghosts that appeared weren't hostile and then there were more than a few times when nothing happened, too. Danny's weird thing was just unreliable enough to make their teachers hesitate, but maybe that would change after last week. He hoped so. Tucker silently ticked away the precious seconds, staring at the clock over the teacher's desk, but the minutes passed and the ghost alarm remained stubbornly silent. Maybe it was a real bathroom break or maybe the ghost decided not to stick around this time.

Or maybe it was a lame excuse to avoid answering him.

Eventually, he and Sam let themselves relax and talk about Doomed for a bit and the new expansion pack, and both of them carefully avoided bringing up Danny. Sam managed to get early access codes, so she wanted to try it out this weekend with him. She promised she hadn't played in the new areas yet, but Tucker doubted it, knowing that she would love to have an advantage over him and pretend like she was just naturally way better. As if it mattered - if anything, he respected her for her awesome skills even more if they were hard-won over many hours of gameplay instead of the result of some semi-miraculous inborn talent for Doomed.

The bell rang and Tucker grabbed his stuff. Glancing at Danny's desk, he realized that although the ghost alarm never went off, Danny never came back, either. That wasn't unusual, but it was the last period and he doubted the sub would stick around long enough for Danny to grab his things before locking up the classroom for the day. "Hey, Sam, can you grab Danny's bag and stuff? I would, but, y'know. Crutches."

Sam glared at the pile of things left behind with more disdain than her mother had when she learned Sam was hanging out with middle-class kids at school. "You seriously want to help him after he couldn't even be bothered to make sure you were okay until he literally bumped into you in class? After he then decided to pretend there was a ghost attack or whatever to avoid even talking about it?"

"Fine, forget it," said Tucker, hobbling over and shoving Danny's notebooks into his book bag, and although she had a point Tucker found himself steadfastly ignoring it. Picking up Danny's essay and putting it with his, he held the two papers out to Sam. He did not want to argue with the only real friend he seemed to have left at this point. "Can you at least hand in all of our poetry assignments?"

"Yeah, and . . . ugh, I'll help with his other stuff too, okay?" she said as she took the essays. Running up to the desk, she quickly dropped the papers off and then came back to help. Tucker sent a quick text to Danny to let him know they had his stuff, and then he and Sam headed outside to sit on one of the benches while they waited for Tucker's Dad to come pick them up. Normally they would walk to his house, but his leg remained too injured for even the short trip.

"Why do we keep doing this?" sighed Sam as she glanced at Danny's pile of stuff, the breeze blowing back a couple of strands of dyed purple hair.

"Because he's our friend?"

"Is he?" Sam crossed her legs on the bench and leaned forward, head in hands. "Look, Tuck, I don't . . . I just don't know what to do anymore. We keep trying and trying and trying, telling ourselves that it's for the best because we can't just abandon him, not when something is obviously wrong and he's clearly depressed or whatever, but it's been almost two years, and if anything, he's getting worse. He also doesn't seem to want to do anything about it and nothing we try to do seems to matter."

"I know, but–"

"-but what, Tuck? When do we stop? When do we give this up? Danny clearly has." A small cough behind them made them both flinch, and turning Tucker saw Danny standing there, hands in his pockets. He wanted to see him look angry, upset, or something since Tucker knew he probably overheard some of their conversation, but instead Danny just had the same resigned expression he always wore now.

"You have my stuff?" he said after a moment, and Tucker nodded meekly while Sam scowled at him. Reaching over, Tucker grabbed Danny's bookbag and notebook and handed it to him. "Thanks."

"Are you going to answer Tucker's question from earlier? Or will there conveniently be another ghost around so you can avoid it again?" asked Sam, her nails clicking a steady rhythm against the back of the bench, and Danny's hand clenched the strap of his backpack a little tighter.

"It wasn't–there's no ghost and–Look, I just had to go to the bathroom," he lied, kicking a loose stone with his toe and refusing to look at either of them.

"For an hour, dude?" said Tucker. How stupid did Danny think they were?

"I wasn't feeling–"

"-we've followed you before, you know that?" interrupted Sam, and for the first time Danny looked uneasy, his face paler than usual. "On your bathroom trips ages ago when this whole thing first started. And you're never in the bathroom. Ever. We've never managed to keep up with you well enough to see where you do go–it's like you disappear or something–but it's not the bathroom."

"Super cool violation of my privacy there, Sam. Seems like you're more like your Mom than you thought," he snapped and then he looked away, his eyes shut tightly as if he couldn't bear to see her reaction while he hissed something under his breath.

"Ohhh, that's low, Danny," she said. "Even for you. And you're avoiding the subject. Again. You still haven't even answered the original question Tucker asked you an hour ago."

"Why didn't you call?" Tucker repeated, watching his friend closely. "You talked to your parents about me. Your mom thought I was hurt even worse than I was and I was out of school for a couple of days, too. Sam says she didn't talk to you then and even if she had, I mean . . . You know how much I hate fucking hospitals. And you couldn't even text to make sure I was fine?"

"It was my Dad's birthday yesterday. I was distracted, I guess," he said as he rubbed the back of his neck and still refused to look at him.

"Dude, seriously? It's been days. Almost a whole week, even."

Danny fell silent, his shoulders relaxing slightly as he glanced at Tucker, but then his gaze dropped as he pulled his hands out of his pockets. He stared at the scar on his palm from his accident freshman year while he rubbed it with his thumb, considering before he finally walked over and sat down next to Tucker, who shivered as Danny's arm brushed against him.

His voice was quiet when he spoke, almost to the point where Tucker couldn't hear him, and he was still staring and rubbing the scar on his palm with his thumb. Tucker recognized it as a sort of nervous gesture. He constantly wondered how Danny managed to get such a perfect, round scar from his accident but otherwise didn't appear to have a single lasting mark on him from that day. Danny always refused to say. "I was scared."

"So was I, but I still managed to check-in."

"Not helpful, Sam," hissed Tucker, but Danny seemed unphased by her snark.

"No, she's right. I should've reached out. I'm sorry, Tucker. I was just too in my own head about it, I guess. Thinking about hospitals makes me think about my own accident, and it's kind of hard for me to deal with it," said Danny. "I haven't been in a good place for the last few days because of it, but that's a stupid reason to not at least make sure you were okay."

"You wanna talk about it?" offered Sam as she leaned forward to talk, her voice surprisingly gentle considering how angry Tucker knew she was, too. "We didn't get to see you after your accident until you were out of the hospital for over a week already, and we never really heard exactly what happened aside from some kind of malfunction with your parents' lab equipment."

The afternoon suddenly seemed darker, the chill in the air more pronounced, and for a moment Tucker swore he saw what looked like a gaping mouth filled with emerald fire behind Danny. The hair on his arms stood on end, and there was a buzz in the air, almost as if he were standing beneath high voltage wires, and he could feel his heart beating rapidly in his chest. "The ghost portal my parents made, it didn't work. I thought I could fix it, for some reason, so I went inside. I tripped," he said as his eyes shimmered with an impossible, green glow that made Tucker gape, but Danny seemed oblivious as he continued, his eyes locked on the scar on his palm.. "My hand hit a button on the wall that turned it on, and I–I was electrocuted. It hurt like–I just–I thought–"

If Danny said anything after that, Tucker didn't hear it as a feeling of intense pain washed over him, and in a blink both he and Sam had fallen off the bench onto the ground, collapsing from the agonizing pain running through their veins as their bodies seemed to freeze and they could no longer move or speak. Closing his eyes, Tucker had to bite back the sudden, intense urge to vomit, and he wanted to curse and scream when suddenly the earth seemed to right itself again. The chill in the air was gone, the weird electrical twinge vanished, and the only pain remaining was the now familiar ache in his leg from his injury last week.

For one, brief moment he saw Danny standing over them, hands over his mouth in horror as he trembled, and then without another word he ran before they could stop him.

"What the actual fuck was that?" wheezed Sam, gripping her chest as she cursed, and he could see tears stinging her eyes as she struggled back onto her feet. Holding out a shaky arm, Sam helped Tucker back into the bench as his leg burned.

"I don't know. You saw–you felt it, too? The portal and stuff?" He needed to know he wasn't crazy, and Sam nodded as she caught her breath. "That was–that was a ghost thing, right?"

"Obviously," she whispered as she trembled. ""But Danny's not a ghost."

"He could be pretending. Like Spectra did, remember?" The guidance counselor still gave him and most of the student body nightmares.

"Hasn't he been to like a hundred doctors appointments? His parents have talked about it, too, so it's not as if he's lied about it. I don't think anyone could hide being a ghost from actual medical professionals," she said as she rubbed her arms in a desperate effort to shake off the strange chill that still seemed to hang over them even though Danny was now gone.

"That's true." He paused, considering for a moment, when inspiration struck. "But you know, in all these years, I don't know if anyone's ever checked to see if he's possessed, have they? His parents said he has low levels of ecto contamination from the portal accident or whatever, but what if that's not it? What if some ghost has been possessing Danny this whole time?"

"It would explain a lot. Not least of all whatever that was," said Sam. "I've never heard of something like whatever that was happening before, though. I'm not sure he even meant to do it."

"Probably not. I don't think some ghost possessing him would want to tip its hand that way," agreed Tucker. The air hurt to breathe. It was impossibly cold, and every breath felt like he was inhaling ice crystals into his lungs. "Maybe Danny's finally managing to fight his way through it somehow?"

Sam sat quietly for a long time, her fingers shaking as she tucked a couple of loose strands of her hair back behind her ears and then brushed the dirt off her skirt. "You really think he's possessed?"

"What else could it be? I mean we should, like, research it, but he's not dead, he's got a pulse and stuff. It would explain why he's been so weird and distant, too," said Tucker, his mind racing through the various possibilities. Danny couldn't be dead. Couldn't be a ghost. Tucker refused to believe that, not even just because of the dozens of doctors appointments, but because his best friend being dead and Tucker somehow not noticing was unacceptable. "His parents' equipment can pick up on overshadowing, but I think I remember them saying before that it wouldn't usually pick up on someone being possessed. But I don't know anything about fixing this. Do you?

"No, but we know someone who might."

"His parents?"

"Well, they would know how to fix it, but that seems like a bad idea, given how trigger happy they get when it comes to ghosts. I don't–I don't want to take the chance that Danny might get hurt, especially if we're wrong about him being possessed," she said.

"Then who?"

"I was thinking of Jazz."

Oh. That was reasonable. Jazz would have heard her parents talk about ghosts dozens of times before, and she might know something about possession already, too, or how to find the information in her parents' research if she didn't. But if they broached the idea with her, they would need to be as close to absolutely certain as they could about Danny being possessed now. There was still a chance this could be something else, somehow. Impossibly. He didn't want to admit that a not so small part of him hoped he was, since at least that would explain why Danny stopped caring about them. "We should do some research before we ask her. She's way less likely to do something stupid than Danny's parents, but she's also going to be super skeptical if we aren't, like, absolutely sure."

"Then let's go to your house and see what we can figure out," said Sam as his Dad pulled up, and Tucker tried to stay optimistic that somehow, impossibly, they would finally be able to help Danny.