A/N: 'WWW' means a scene change.

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"He was really bad those first couple days after the accident—and everybody knew it was an accident. Danny wouldn't even make eye contact with us. After about a week he seemed a little better, but whatever went on those first couple days left a mark. That accident, the guilt he must have felt… He never really got over it."
-Jazmine Fenton

Jazz walked down the hallway, feeling a little sick at the feel of the rough carpet beneath her feet. She'd always had the thicker, poofier kind back at home, the kind where you could swing your feet out of bed and wiggle the thick threads between your toes before setting out to take what the day had to give you. She hadn't thought about that side of it in years, of course, but she missed it now.

She padded down the carpets to the kitchen where her grandmother was already making breakfast, flopping gooey french toast around on the stove.

Her grandmother flashed a bright smile of false teeth. "Mornin' hon." Gray curls bounced down to frame her face, the corners of her eyes tilting up and creasing with sympathetic wrinkles.

Jazz sat, leaning her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her fists. "Good morning." She tried to sound perky, failing utterly in her own ears. Jazz's dreams had been after her about the explosion again. She'd have to remember to pick up a book about dreams later at the library.

Grandma flopped the toast into the serving plate at her elbow. "Is Danny up yet?"

"Don't think so." There was another thing she was going to have to do, talk to Danny. He'd been moping around all weekend, still avoiding everyone, and she'd hardly had a chance to sit down with him. She'd almost expected him to come to her, but so far, no dice. The funerals had taken a lot out of him. They'd taken a lot out of everybody.

Coffee burbled and bounced in its glass pot, speaking cheerful gibberish to her from its place on the white-tile counter. Jazz raised a skeptical eyebrow at it, watching the black murk jump around like a caffeinated Mexican hat-dancer. She sighed and got up for a cup of it, adding milk and a couple spoons of sugar from the ceramic jar nearby. The bubbling black settled down into a milky brown, and Jazz leaned her back against the fridge as Grandma dunked another piece of bread into a bowl of beaten eggs, flicking it into the pan where it hissed softly.

"Penny for your thoughts, dear?" asked Grandma from the stove. She glanced up at Jazz, a half-smile playing on her face.

"Well, I don't know." Jazz swirled her coffee, watching the steaming drink climb the sides of her mug. "I'll probably talk to Danny today."

Grandma bobbed her head, resting the spatula against the pan. "That would be good for you both, I think." She sighed, shaking her head. "I tried, but he keeps talking in riddles."

"Yeah, he does that sometimes."

Grandma's skirt swished as she picked up the spatula again. "Well I'm sure you'll do better than I."

Jazz shrugged. "I guess." She certainly wasn't going to try it until later in the afternoon. Her brother was a little jumpy in the mornings, these days.

WWW

Danny woke up staring into the rafters of the old house. They almost seemed to flex, shine gray…

He shot bolt upright in bed, breathing hard, fingers clutching the sheets of the mattress under him. Across from him, an old, carved oak chest of drawers squatted calmly on carved feet, the knobs of its drawers like buttons on a patrician's suit. Danny whipped around, his glance alighting on a variety of eccentric furniture stashed helter-skelter about the attic, a lamp with a shade of green glass, a square wooden chest with a scrap of fabric drooping out the top, and an old, half-finished model plane hanging from the ceiling. He was up in the attic. Danny sighed and let himself drop back on the wrinkled sheets as he studied the plane, its balsa-wood fuselage naked of paint or other decoration, several rounded posts jutting from its sides where the wings might sit if it had any.

How many days since, he wondered. Nine. It was Saturday, at—he checked the hands of the wall-hanging clock—six thirty, give or take a minute. It was that stupid window next to his bed that had woken him. It faced north, so the sun didn't shine directly in, but the glare of the blue sky was more than enough to wake a guy up. It made for a blissfully benign alarm clock on school days, but on weekends it was a little much. And of course he couldn't bring himself to pull the shudders at night. The sky was too fantastic for that, and besides, pulling the shudders on the night sky, the moon and all those stars, was a little like pulling the shudders on them. But he had no problems blocking out the daylight, especially on the weekend.

Danny jerked the vinyl cord, sending the Venetian blinds clattering down, and rolled over to hug his pillow for a little more sleep.

WWW

Out in the country there were few lights to pollute the night, but in the thick of the city there was always some kind of distraction. People bustled down dirty sidewalks, kicking aside the wayward napkin or scrap of newspaper as they brushed by one another, hurrying away for work, errands, or, most pleasantly, entertainment.

The city was full of tall high-risers labeled only with numbers. The shops on the street floor were loudly announced, but always there were dark windows on the many floors above. From the street, the upper floors look abandoned, but inside they were packed with apartments and offices, activity felt by the public but hardly ever publicly witnessed, a situation perfect for the Fenton's temporary purposes.

"Do you really think he's alright?" Maddie lifted a tube of ruby fluid to the light as she spoke. It glimmered back at her, the transparent solution apparently pure. She'd have to give it another spectrograph to be sure. "Jazz has been saying we should look for a counselor."

Jack flipped up the welder's mask, examining his own handiwork on an aluminum component. "Jazz is always saying that, and Danny comes through fine." He replaced the mask and picked up the torch.

Maddie glared at him. "This is different, Jack, and Danny has been acting strange lately. I worry about him. We should be doing something."

"We have." Jack removed the mask with a curt flick and set the torch down again. "We took two days off work and let him off from school. We let him rent movies and lounge around and then we put him back in school to 'give him some normalcy.' We're using this nearby junky lab, even though the university offered us that new fancy one that was farther away, and we agreed to get home every day by five. What more are we supposed to be doing?"

The red fluid, a new compound Maddie had been preparing all day, slipped from her fingers and cracked on the worn linoleum. She wiped the back of her glove across her forehead. "I don't know."

"My point exactly." Jack slammed the mask over his face and went back to work with the heavy acetylene welder.

Maddie chewed her lip, more confused than upset at the moment in spite of the spill. "He isn't talking to us, and he doesn't have any other close friends," she murmured. Jack wouldn't be able to hear her over the welder's racket. "Which leaves Jazz." Maddie had a great deal of confidence in her daughter's psychiatric abilities for others, but this time the patient was family. Sooner or later Jazz was bound to try something; Maddie just hoped that everything turned out OK.

WWW

The books thumped along in the back seat as Jazz maneuvered the car around several of the larger pot holes. Their grandmother didn't exactly live in the wilderness, but it wasn't quite civilization either. They had neighbors, but they lived the city equivalent of a couple houses down. The developers had gotten their hands on the land just recently, and the smooth fields were being mapped out, slowly but surely, with homes and streets, perfect for everybody's soccer ball-kicking six-year-old. Jazz wasn't sorry they hadn't paved this road, but of course they wouldn't have; Grandma's old house had been around since the Stone Age, and so had its dirt road.

She spotted the building up ahead and drummed her fingers on the wheel. It was an old house, but not bitterly so. The paint was aged but not peeling, the front lawn a little untended but by no means ratty. Grandma liked her dandelions, Dad had said. Jazz's eyes gravitated irresistibly to the attic window, a wide square fixture with its blinds down, peering blindly out over the gray-shingled porch roof, street, and the country beyond. Her fingers pattered a little faster on the wheel, clenching it and unclenching it as she bumped down the road. Whether he was ready for it or not, she and Danny were going to have to have a talk.

Jazz parked the car and lugged out her six hardbacks, which gave her a certain satisfaction. A big, thick stack of books meant there was work to be done, and where there was work to be done there was progress to be made. She rested them on an elevated knee while she coaxed the door into unlocking, and once inside she stumbled up to her room, formerly known as the TV room. Another thing about Grandma: her TV was the size of a toaster. The sight of the little thing had been Jazz's first clue that the move couldn't possibly be too terrible.

She took a nervous preemptive flip-through of a book on child psychology, lightly perusing it until it occurred to her that they wouldn't have anything on super-powered little brothers, and besides, if she needed step-by-step instructions from a book she was already dead meat anyway. So Jazz stashed her books on an empty chair, took a deep breath, and headed into the hallway.

The attic stairs could be extended by pulling a ring in a panel of the ceiling, and a strict procedure of knocking before entering had been established and enforced by both Danny and his parents. Jazz reached up and tapped the panel.

"Can I help you?"

She nearly jumped out of her skin. Danny stood right behind her, a bored look on his face and some old papers in his hand.

Jazz recovered "Yeah. Look, Danny, we need to talk."

The bored expression disappeared, anxiety sweeping in. "Talk?"

"I'm worried."

Danny rolled his eyes, his posture relaxing. "Everybody's worried. I'm fine, really. Just because… Tucker and Sam…" He started to blank. There was no other way to put it. Danny melted for a second, his eyes drooping, limbs going slack, face turning oh-so-slightly down…

Then a slight tremor rippled through him, hardly visible at all, really, and he was fine. "Everybody's overreacting. Mom and Dad already have a house checked out, and after a while it'll be like it never happened. Really."

Jazz blinked. She'd never seen anything like it, but her memory proffered a morbidly diverse series of explanations. Post-traumatic stress disorder headed the list, and Jazz had been pretty sure he'd had that one to begin with, but after that one there was always low-grade schizophrenia, clinical depression, maybe epilepsy, and a handful of others. Jazz got herself under control. "I think you might be underestimating things."

"Whatever. You want to see the basement?"

It took her a moment to register that one. "What?"

"The basement." Danny grinned, seizing the opening. "Grandma's got all this really neat stuff packed away down there." He held out the papers to her. "See?"

Obscure directions and a few diagrams spread themselves over the packet, the pages crackling and yellowed with age. "What's this?"

"Instructions for that old plane up in the attic. There's a whole kit down there, and a box of tools and stuff nearby. I bet I could finish it."

Jazz added bipolar disorder to the list, although that one was a little far-fetched. It was supposed to be mostly genetic, after all, but then so were most of the others. Jazz canceled that train of thought before it got any further. "You want to finish it?"

"Sure. It's not like anybody else is doing anything with it." He reached for the ladder's pull ring.

Jazz put a hand on his arm. "Danny, stop."

He frowned and looked up at her. "What is it?"

"I know who you are. I know you can turn ghost."

A thick silence passed. Danny gulped, retracting his arm and averting his face. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I saw you changing, once. I know you're Inviso-Bill, or whatever the press calls you."

Danny rubbed the back of his head, letting out a slow sigh. Jazz put an awkward hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off. Jazz licked her lips and put her hands in her pockets. "It's alright, Danny."

"No it's not," he muttered.

"Really, I don't-"

"I got Sam and Tucker," Danny began, his eyes flashing erratically. "-My two best friends, KILLED because of this stupid 'hero' stuff I do. That's not alright!" His shoulders shook, and he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes as his mouth twisted into a tight grimace.

Jazz reached out impulsively to hug him, but she thought better of it and folded her shaking hands instead. What to say to Danny, what to tell the parents, what not to tell the parents, why did this have to happen to her little brother…

They both waited. Jazz looked away, blushing and feeling shamefully helpless, and Danny stood there shaking, trying to deal with whatever demons he kept in his own way. At last he took his hands away and grasped the stairs' ring.

"Maybe you can show me the plane later?" Jazz asked quietly.

Danny, already halfway up, looked down at her. "Sure. Later." He yanked up the ladder and slammed the panel shut.


A/N: Wow, I got readers! Glad to hear you like my style, Mujitsu Yume. I've been playing around with it, and it's nice to know the effort pays off. Thanks everybody for the reviews. Hopefully this chapter cleared things up a bit for the befuddled among you. Please review and tell me what you think of it.