"Okay, dipstick, so next you need to put your hand like this," she said, adjusting his fingers slightly on the neck of the guitar, "and then hold the pick like this between your other fingers." She held up the pick, showing him how to hold it again, and he adjusted his grip until he was grasping it properly. "Try to strum."

Danny dragged the pick over the strings, grinning as the chord echoed through the empty park. It was a favorite spot of the ghosts that came to Amity Park, which meant it was the perfect place for her to meet the kid for their lessons since most sane people avoided it out of fear of being attacked. Occasionally they would see someone - a teenager smoking pot and trying to hide it from his parents or some stupid or brave soul walking their dog down the cement paths as quickly as possible - but they mostly had the place to themselves. "Cool," he whispered, doing it again.

"Aww, don't get too excited, babypop, that's one chord and you need to know at least three to be a pop star," she teased, her fiery blue hair lighting up brilliantly in the twilight. "At the rate we're going you'll be lucky to get there by the time you're in college."

"Haha," he said as he pulled his left hand away and flexed it gently. Not for the first time, Ember noticed the faded burn scar on his palm. He asked her for the guitar lessons after helping her escape yet again from his overzealous parents a few months ago, and she was happy to oblige, an easy repayment for a favor so freely granted. The Fenton kid had a reputation amongst the ghosts for being well-meaning if a bit stupid sometimes, trying to convince even the nastiest of ghosts to back down from their attacks, and Ember couldn't really disagree with that assessment after getting to know him a bit better over the past year or so during her various visits to the living world.

"Old injury?" she asked, pointing to his palm, and he quickly pulled his hand back to try to hide it.

"I . . . yeah. I got in an accident back at the start of my freshman year. It makes everything a little stiff around it and sometimes it's hard to move my left hand," he said. "I thought learning guitar might help since nothing else really has."

"I'm not a physical therapist, kid." She shrugged as she floated up into the air a few feet and laid back, putting her hands behind her head to relax a bit. "But I'll keep teaching you if you think it'll work. So once you feel up to it, try to play that chord again." Even if it could work as physical therapy, she doubted the lessons would accomplish much - this was only their second lesson in two months and given how much they were covering again she could tell he clearly hadn't practiced - but she also knew it wasn't the whole reason he wanted lessons from her given what the other ghosts said about him.

Danny nodded, and after a few minutes of slowly stretching his hand out, he set it back on the neck of the guitar and tried again. Ember watched him as he put his index finger on the wrong string and then strummed out an awful sound she didn't think a guitar was even capable of producing.

"Yikes," she snapped, covering her ears, and Danny laughed, his nose scrunching up in an adorably stupid way that reminded her of her sister. Shit. She pushed the thought out of her mind, fast. She did not think about her family. That path only led to pain, and she was not going to spend her afterlife miserable and mourning what she had no control over.

"Not right, huh?"

"Obviously." She floated closer and corrected his positioning. "Try again."

Ember watched him and their surroundings closely. So far, Danny was the only person any of the ghosts had met in Amity Park that seemed to react to them with downright friendliness and warmth. He never seemed put off by their otherworldly powers, and reacted to her floating and phasing about as much as an ordinary person might react to a car passing by. There were some folks in Amity that were happy to champion tolerance for ghosts and condemned some of the Fenton's experiments as barbaric, but most of that altruism tended to disappear as soon as they experienced a ghost attack.

It wasn't entirely without merit, either. Ember herself mind controlled hundreds before Phantom stopped her, and she'd gotten into a few other brawls since then like the time she agreed to play pirate games with Youngblood for a few hours. Youngblood was a nuisance, but Ember and the others all felt a bit of a certain obligation when it came to child ghosts. "Why don't you care?" she asked suddenly, rolling over onto her stomach and resting her head in her hands as she floated.

"Gonna need you to be more specific," he said as he tried to strum, and the sound that came out of her guitar was painful. The kid had a talent for inducing misery. "Crud, that's no good, huh?"

"Move your left finger down," she said, "and relax your grip a little." Danny did as she said. "Now try again." He grinned as the sound of the same chord from before echoed once again through the park. "Nice, kid."

"Thanks. It's nice to feel like I don't suck at something for a change," he chuckled.

"Eh, I wouldn't go that far," she said. The kid was awful, but she hadn't expected brilliance. "But you're still learning, and you're at least following my instructions." She paused, then. "You didn't answer my question."

"You didn't really explain what you meant," he replied, strumming again as he gave that goofy little grin of his, but it faded quickly. "There are a lot of things people would say I don't care about. School, friends, relationships . . . take your pick."

"The ghosts," she said, and he frowned, his fingers resting on her guitar. "Nothing we do seems to phase you–"

"-haha–"

"-and you were raised by two ghost hunters that see us as being less sentient than your typical dog," she continued. The pun really wasn't intentional - they weren't typically her style, although like all good lyricists she dabbled with that and a dozen other kinds of word play from time to time. "It's hard for me to understand why you don't see us that way, too."

Danny smiled again, but it seemed forced this time. "Teenage rebellion, maybe?" He turned back down to the guitar, pulling his hand away to look briefly again at his scar before putting it back into the proper position on the strings.

"You don't seem like one for rebellion," she said. The kid was as nerdy as Pointdexter, although he hid it better than Sidney. "No offense."

"None taken, given that you're kind of the expert after Kitty and Johnny." Danny strummed the guitar again a few times before he finally looked over at her, his blue eyes twinkling. "Why do you care so much, anyway?"

"It's kind of nice not being seen as some kind of monster," she explained, "and it might be nice if others besides you didn't see us that way, too. I doubt the retired rockstar teacher vibe I'm going for right now will work on everyone, babypop, and if everyone just keeps thinking I'm gonna do something terrible, it's hard not to just give the people what they want."

"I don't really buy that," said Danny, putting the guitar down for a moment as he leaned back against the bench and looked up at the sky. It was still too early to see any stars, and the light pollution in Amity Park was bad enough that even in the park most stars weren't visible, but the kid had the positions of most of the major constellations memorized even as they shifted throughout the year. If she asked him where to see the Big Dipper in a few hours, she knew he'd have the answer even though he probably only managed to see the night sky a few times a year himself.

"Oh?"

"I don't think you'd start destroying things or whatever just because people think that's what ghosts do. You don't really do what people expect of you or what you're told," he said with a shrug. "But I get it. It's hard not to just cave to your worst instincts when nobody expects anything more from you. Like there are days why I wonder why I still keep trying in school even though my teachers and my parents and my sister all expect me to fail, anyway, and I guess it's because some part of me wants to prove them wrong. Let them realize that I'm better than they think I am. Or something. It's stupid, maybe."

"I think I get it," she said. "But you still haven't answered my question."

"Jazz would say I'm deflecting," he grinned, "and she'd be right. Kind of a bad habit for me. But it's just–it's hard to talk about. That's all."

"But if there's anyone you can talk to, it's the cool rockstar turned personal music teacher who knows all the right things to say and has all the words of wisdom and life lessons, right?" Ember smirked at him as she picked up her guitar, quietly playing a gentler tune than her usual fare. She enjoyed teasing the kid, if nothing else. "Let me be your sensei, dipstick."

Danny laughed despite himself. "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Gotta give it my all to see if this identity sticks, that's all. Always gonna be a rocker or a pop star, but you've made me think I can be something more, too. So if you hate this, it's your fault," she said. "So?"

"The accident I mentioned from freshman year? It kind of . . . it kind of almost killed me. There was a moment when I thought it did," he explained quietly as he traced the scar on his palm, and for a second she felt as if she were being swallowed up by something impossible, something giant, but the feeling rapidly vanished. She looked around the park for a minute as Danny continued talking, not wanting to alarm him since it definitely felt like another ghost was nearby, yet the park was silent aside from a handful of birds chirping and leaves rustling in the gentle breeze. "And I started to think about what would happen to me if I became a ghost."

"Not everyone becomes a ghost, babypop."

"I know, but it's possible," he said. "And I thought about what my parents would do to me and how they'd treat me. I don't think I need to tell you how badly it would end. You've been captured by them. You know they don't–that maybe they'll never see just how wrong all their theories are, because once I started interacting with ghosts, I saw that a lot of the things they said they knew they clearly didn't. They were guesses, based on evidence that was questionable at best and faked at worst, and if they were better scientists then maybe they would see that their theories aren't holding up as they collide with reality."

"I think they do, actually," said Ember, and Danny looked up, frowning at her. "They seem desperate, that's all. I know what that kind of desperation is like. Makes you do stupid things and think things that don't always make sense because the alternative–facing that you're wrong or that you can't have what you want–is so much worse, dipstick. So you outright ignore the stuff in front of you or try to force it to fit the perfect square you've constructed even though what you've found is a sphere."

Danny blinked at her, considering it for a moment. "You might be right."

"That's why I'm your sensei, see?" she teased, flipping upside down for a moment, and he grinned. "But so what then? You figured out your parents might be wrong, which, I might add, is classic coming of age teenage stuff even if it doesn't usually have a ghostly flavor to it."

"I guess," he said. "But once I realized that what they were basing their information on was wrong, it made me think that the things they were doing might be a lot less ethical than they seemed to think, and living in that house makes me feel like I'm complicit, I guess. So I wanted to do something. I wanted to try to help. So I tried to talk to the Lunch Lady ghost that almost killed Sam when she came through the portal again. It feels stupid, in retrospect, but I didn't know what to say so I asked her to teach me how to make brownies for my parents."

"You asked her for a favor?" She knew this already - more than a few of the ghosts were awful gossips - but it was different hearing it directly from the kid.

Danny nodded. "Yeah. And she seemed weirdly thrilled by it. And as she showed me how to do it, she was so patient and so kind that it was kind of hard to remember that she almost seriously hurt my friend just a couple of months before, but the more I spent time with her the more I realized that it wasn't really the menu that upset her. It was the lack of respect for tradition, for her recipes, her food, and for the wisdom of her and others like her."

"I knew there was a reason I didn't like that old biddy. Tradition's a bad excuse that people like her use to do awful things," she groaned as she righted herself. "And she proved that with spades."

"You're not wrong that what she did was awful, or that people use tradition to excuse doing a lot of bad stuff," said Danny, "but some traditions are kind of nice, I guess? Not holidays or anything–I hope every year we'll finally stop pretending we can celebrate Christmas in my house–but like my family used to go camping every year at this lake about a few hours away, and sometimes I really miss those trips. It was nice to make s'mores with my sister, look at the stars with my Mom, and go fishing with my Dad. And I thought that if I could, I don't know, find some traditions like that and bond over that with the Lunch Lady or channel what she needed in a different way, then maybe . . . maybe my folks would get that she's not as simple as they think she is. That none of the ghosts are. And that all of them–all of you, really–have the capacity to change and do better and just be better."

"So you decided to turn me into a music teacher, huh?" said Ember, but she smiled at him. "It's cool, dipstick, but it's probably not enough."

"Maybe not," he said with a shrug, polite enough not to mention her particular obsession with recognition. With being seen and understood and remembered and cared for. But clearly the kid knew, or this wouldn't be working on her half as well as it was. It irked her a bit, his actions teetering on an almost uncomfortable kind of manipulation, but there was something so genuine and honest and just plain earnest about him that she struggled to think of him or what he was doing as anything really malicious. He never pressured them, either - she knew that if she said no he would think no less of her for it - and maybe knowing it was genuinely a choice made all the difference. "But getting guitar lessons from a famous musician is pretty cool for now, even if in two weeks you're back to mind controlling teenagers or whatever."

"As if mind controlling teenagers is hard," she said. She barely needed to use hypnosis. "Wonder what you'd be obsessed with if you did become a ghost. Ever think about it?"

"Probably outer space? I mean, have you ever seen me not in NASA hoodies?" Danny gestured at his old sweater with a grin. "At least it would be a better obsession than hunting, at any rate."

"You know that's my boyfriend you're talking about, right?"

Danny flinched. "Wait, seriously? Skulker? You two are dating?"

"It's the rebellious streak in me," she said as she handed him back the guitar. "I like dangerous men." Although realistically, Skulker was a bigger softie than he let on. Not that she would tell the dipstick that.

"I think in this case he's more of a bad blob, but, uh, let's not go there, maybe?" said Danny, wincing as he took the guitar back, and she smiled wickedly at him. "But I know you can handle yourself."

"Damn straight, babypop, so let's try that chord again, and if you get it right this time, I'll teach you another," she said as they resumed their lesson. They spent the next hour quietly working on his technique, and by the time they were done he could reliably play a few chords that she knew he would likely forget by the next time they met.

"Do you want to do a lesson next week?" she asked, and then she saw his eyes lock onto someone on the path. Looking up, she saw that ghost hunter girl, Valerie, in a fast food uniform, her hands pulling an ecto gun out of her purse. "On second thought, let's figure that out later since I think that's my cue to leave. Make sure you practice this time, okay?" Grabbing her guitar, she vanished and flew off before Valerie could shoot. Danny would be fine. It wasn't as if he were a ghost, after all, no matter what his nightmares might suggest.

A/N: Thanks for the favorites/follows/reviews! I meant to post this chapter sooner, but, uh, it's been a week. I'll probably try to post the next one on Wednesday before the holiday.