Two-Player

By Marisa

Disclaimer: Danny Phantom and all related characters are copyrighted to Butch Hartman. I take no credit for their creation. I am not making a profit off this work of fiction.

-------------

Prologue

Jazz's eyes followed Danny as he strolled through the kitchen, dragging his backpack behind. "Hey, Danny!" she called, but the boy only shot her a cold glare in response. Jazz almost shuddered. She watched quietly as her brother angrily snatched a piece of toast from Jazz's plate and stuffed it in his mouth, slipping his pack over his shoulders and making his way to the living room.

"Want me to drive you to school?" Jazz asked suddenly. Danny froze; He turned slowly, his reply muffled by the toast in his teeth. She frowned. "What did you say?"

"I said," Danny took a large bite of the toast and yanked the rest from his mouth, chewing for a moment, "I said I'll walk, thank you."

"Are you sure?" Jazz urged, "I mean, you've looked kind of stressed lately -- maybe if you relaxed for a little bit--"

"I'm fine." He shoved the toast back in his mouth and stormed out of the kitchen, and Jazz heard the front door slam before she could make a reply. She sighed.

Danny had been acting so weird lately -- it had started the other night, when he had come home way past curfew...

...Or rather, when he had been taken home. Sam and Tucker had carried him inside. Luckily, Mom and Dad had been distracted by something down in the lab, too busy to notice the time, which had allowed Jazz to quickly usher them upstairs to his room.

"What happened?" she remembered asking them, as she helped them lay him onto his bed.

"We don't know," Sam had admitted, as she pulled Danny's shoes off and set them down by his desk, "we knew he had been fighting a ghost -- we didn't know what kind, he didn't tell us when we called him--"

Tucker, meanwhile, had been helping pull the comforter over his friend. "The line was cut all of a sudden. I managed to track where the signal had been, though, so we found him pretty quickly."

"Bad news is, we found him like this," Sam had then kneeled down and helped brush a few stray locks away from Danny's eyes, "and we can't tell if he's just exhausted, or..."

Jazz placed her hand a few inches above Danny's face and sighed. "At least he's breathing," she murmured with relief, turning back to Tucker and Sam, "Now, you two go home -- I'll call you if anything happens to Danny."

"But we--"

"No buts. It's late and you need to get home. I'll call tomorrow and tell your parents to thank you for... uh, helping him study so hard," Jazz had smiled then, trying to be comforting, "they might have an easier time believing you if it comes from me."
That last line had sounded pretty insensitive, Jazz realized now that she thought it over, though now it was too late.

Jazz had stayed by Danny's bedside all night after that, waiting for him to stir -- and stir he did. His eyes fluttered open, and as he gazed around, confusion and fear plastered onto his face like a grotesque Halloween mask.

"W-what!" He stammered, sitting up slowly, "How..." he then gazed down at himself, "how did I get... get here?"

"Shh," Jazz had cooed, "it's okay, Danny, it's okay..." Jazz put a hand on his shoulder, "just rest for now, I'm here."

Danny's eyes widened, and he turned to gaze frightfully at her. "Wha... no, how did.." his eyes darted around the room, "When...?"

"Sam and Tucker took you home, thank goodness. I've been here all night." Danny started to reply, but Jazz stopped him. "Just go to sleep, Danny -- I can tell you're tired. We'll talk in the morning."

Even then, as Danny tried to interrupt, his eyelids began to flutter closed. He quickly drifted off into a light slumber, and Jazz followed not long after, her head resting on his sheets.

We'll talk in the morning...

Oh, they had talked, all right; more precisely, they had screamed - and kept screaming. Danny was now raising his voice at anyone and anything that remotely annoyed him. He snarled, he snapped -- in more extreme cases, he threw his fists with every intention to cause damage. Jazz had even seen him almost blow up a table wth his ecto-beams -- yeah, she'd have had no trouble explaining that one to Mom and Dad. She managed to stop him and was rewarded with a hundred decibels of Danny's grotesque new attitude.

Jazz slowly brought herself back to the present and glanced at the clock on the wall. School started in about forty-five minutes -- it was a five minute drive, but she liked to get filing done in the early hours. With a sigh, she took her plate to the sink, grabbed her backpack and headed out to her car.

The drive to school was dull. Jazz was lost in her thoughts, trying to make sense of what was happening. It was possible that whatever ghost he had been fighting had done something to him -- which would be much easier to figure out if Danny were willing to say something about the event. Maybe ghost fighting in general was just getting to him -- stress could easily make a person hostile, especially when they were losing sleep...

She had been turning the situation over in her head for the past week but nothing was revealing itself. With a sigh, she pulled into the school's parking lot and pulled her backpack from the back seat.

Hopefully, she sighed mentally, he'll get over this soon.

And if not, she'd do everything she could to figure out what was wrong.