I realize that the last chapter left off on a very confusing note, and I hope things will be adequately explained...eventually. But maybe not in this chappie. :D

Also, sorry to keep you waiting. I don't think I've gone this long without an update since I started this story, and it couldn't have been a worse point to leave off. (Especially since I specifically told some people it'd be up yesterday...ooooops!) Things have been a bit busy for me. :P Even tonight I ended up going out with friends, but took the laptop with me, and so this chapter was written in an indoor, man-made beach that my friend's father created in their house, and I think mrit and I are actually sunburned from the halogen lamps. Many thanks to her for being such a help while writing this chapter; you deserve much credit for everything!

Here be shout-outs! Obviously a lot of people asked questions pertaining to things that'll be explained in this or other chapters, so I'll refrain from answering them. ;)

Kagome M.K - Whoa, that's a new one. XD Will do!

chocolatemercury - All will be revealed. ;) And thank you!

katiesparks - Yep!

Ohka Breynekai - I can't tell you yet how he turns into his human form, really, but the question of his powers can be answered here! You'll recall in Fanning the Flames when Danny and Sam had just been caught by Mr. Lancer; Danny turned them both invisible and then they flew off through the wall. He was quite human in this scene (and in the opening credits, when he pushes Dash into the locker) which gives me the impression that he can use his powers, or at least some of them, while he's Danny Fenton. He also tends to go invisible when human when playing pranks in the show. Guess the costume just looks cooler for fighting, or to hide his identity, or unleash the full potential of his ghost form. Who knows, but it was useful to me here!

Anasumi - I already replied to you via email, but again, thank you so much for your kind review. Hope you enjoy the new chapter!

Crossover Fiend - As long as the readers aren't as ticked as the heroine. ;)

Thanks also to conan98002, A. Delashmit, Rebecca The Animorph, Epyon Zero, HAlFa34/Not Important, L'ange-Sans-Ailes, Anomaly25, Soni, dArkliTe-sPirit, animeobsessed3191, starlight wishes, Galateagirl, wandering star, Jimmy the Gothic Egg and Leppers for their comments. Sorry I couldn't give you all the answers yet, but that's what the upcoming chapters are for! n.n I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend, and enjoy your Easter holidays!

And, this chapter is dedicated to mrit, of course! May you continue inspiring me for the next 12,500 words at least!

Estrelas

Chapter 11

by Shimegami-chan

Sam's eyes widened and she tried to turn, but found his hands clamped tightly on her shoulders again, and the tingling feeling of invisibility flooding through her. She looked over her shoulder. "Danny...?"

"Guilty as charged." He wouldn't meet her gaze, probably because of the growing fury on her face. "Listen, Sam, I'm sorry I lied to you--"

"Lied to me?" she screeched, causing him to clap a ghostly hand over her mouth. "Mmph--"

"Shh - that ghost--"

She fell silent and fumed to herself, trying to sort out the events of the last few moments. The fight by the library, and then the boy in the forest - so that was Danny after all. But how? He was missing his ghostly aura, and his appearance was drastically different...and yet that was undoubtedly Danny's voice, minus the echoing sound she had come to associate with it. It had to be him.

He was sorry for lying. What did that mean? Lying about being a ghost? But that was impossible; she'd seen it all with her own eyes. Just what was he admitting to, exactly?

She jumped as an angry, feminine voice resonated from somewhere behind them. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

Danny stiffened, holding his hand firmly against Sam's mouth. He didn't move or speak, but she could sense that he wanted her to stay still - someone or something was looking for them.

It's that ghost, Sam realized with dread. Spectra. But can't she sense us the way Danny sensed that ghost before? She held her breath as the monster passed overhead, pulsating with black energy. It looked about, eyeing the lake and the small marble pillar that stood in the shade by the waterline, then put her hands on her hips. "Well, I guess he wouldn't be stupid enough to come here."

The ghost shot back over the boulder and into the trees, outside of Sam's vision, and after a long moment (he was holding his breath, she noticed, for it came out in one gasp long after Spectra had gone) he pulled his hand away and released her, causing them both to wink back into existence. She turned to face him, very slowly.

Danny, to his credit, was doing an admirable job of concealing panic. "Hi there."

She looked him up and down, hands on hips. "Okay, Danny, get out of that poor sap."

"Huh?"

"Out. I never figured you for the kind of guy who took over peoples' bodies, or was all that stuff you were saying about Inviso-Bill 'destroying your family' really true?"

"Uh...it's true in a sense." He looked embarrassed. "But there's something I've gotta tell you, and it's going to come as a big shock. I got my memory back, and--"

"And what?" she retorted angrily. "And you remembered all the terrible things you'd done? You think I wanted to know about all that?"

"It's not that, I was trying to protect you," he said desperately. "I didn't really--I mean, I kinda lied about some of that. I remembered some things about myself that I think I'd rather have stayed forgotten."

She backed away from him, out of the shadow of the boulder and onto the rocky, grassy area that lined the lake. "So explain. Fast."

"Okay," he sighed, looking extremely uncomfortable. "You're probably not going to like to hear this, but that ghost that's looking for me is Penelope Spectra. As in, your psychiatrist."

Sam bristled at the word. "Coming from the guy who just admitted to being a liar, I don't know how to take that."

"Like I said, I was trying to protect you! Did you want to go with that Ghost Squad guy?"

"That wasn't what I meant! Did you want me to hate you by telling me all those things?"

"Yes," he said simply, looking away. "As I see it, it's better for you to hate me for a little bit now, rather than get tangled up in my life and inflict long-term hurt. I was right when I suspected before that there was more to this situation. I can't have any friends."

"What kind of nonsense is that?" Sam demanded. "It's not up to you to decide who I associate with."

"It does if I'm the one you're associating with!" he cried, exasperated.

"Well, you could have said something like 'I don't like you anymore,' for God's sake!"

"But it wouldn't have been true. Listen, I'm sorry, but this is a really long story," Danny replied tiredly, his face showing clear signs of fatigue. "I'll explain it all if you'll just give me a chance."

"Without lies?"

"Does 'selective truth' count as 'lies'?"

"Yes," she decided. "I'm listening."

"Okay." He sighed. "You need to know about Spectra first. It may interest you to know that she's actually a ghost."

"You said that part already," Sam pointed out acidly. "Now convince me."

"Fine. You'll probably find her in that book of yours, because she's been around for about twenty years, posing as a high school therapist. She's pretty good at disguising herself as a human, as if you hadn't noticed—" Sam scoffed-- "and her talent is to find out peoples' fears and feed off their despair in order to keep herself looking young."

"Hm…she does look a lot younger than my mother, now that you mention it."

"I don't know how she found you specifically," Danny continued, "but during summer vacations she and her assistant Bertrand – that ghost I was fighting with by the library – prowl around all the time looking for energy to feed off of, since they can't get anything from the schools."

"How does she stay employed if she kills children?" Sam asked, incredulous.

"She doesn't usually kill them, though there was this one incident fifteen years ago where she tried to kill a guest speaker at the school." He rushed on, cutting off Sam's question. "She's been involved with a ton of incidents, but they're never attributed to her. Mostly because the schools like to blame me, and whose word are they going to take, the therapists' or the ghost boy's?"

Sam narrowed her eyes. "Okay, I see your point."

"So as far as I can tell, Spectra went after you and tried to make you her next victim, but she figured out that you were involved with a ghost somehow, and goaded me into showing myself."

"Why would my mother have gotten me into something like this?" Horrified, Sam tried to think back to when she had first met Penelope, and the story the therapist had given her. College friends, housemates, hadn't she said?

"Maybe she never knew what happened to Penelope after graduation," Danny said quietly. "I never knew her until she became a ghost. Since she used her real name even after she died, Jazz and I were able to do some research on her, and found out she'd been killed in a car crash. Probably around the same year you were born, actually."

"My mother got pregnant with me just after she left school," Sam replied quietly. "I was born in 2003."

"That sounds about right." The ghost (if he even was anymore, Sam thought to herself with indignation) frowned at the grass. "She had a lot of issues she had to work through, it seems, so she stayed around and made herself a nuisance by preying on all the kids in town."

"Then…" Sam swallowed, not quite sure if she was understanding this right. "Penelope was the one making me so depressed."

Danny nodded slowly. The Goth teen crossed her arms over her chest, giving the idea serious thought. Penelope had been the one behind it…okay, that mostly made sense, because even before she'd met Danny, the therapist had managed to make her cry, a feat that really hadn't been duplicated by many other people. She was a bit more inclined to believe that Danny hadn't been behind her recent self-loathing, mostly because it was clear this Spectra had some similarities to Penelope (Sam couldn't believe she hadn't recognized the ghost's voice!), but also because something in Sam had been desperately hoping that Danny wasn't as evil as the book painted him as.

Despite the fact that he'd lied to her. Sam scowled. "So, I guess you two don't get along very well, am I right?"

"Yeah," he confessed. "I've messed up her plans a few times. She knows I'm weakened from the fight with Bertrand, and she's probably looking for an easy opportunity to get rid of me now."

"Why didn't she sense you? And what did she mean by saying you wouldn't be 'stupid enough' to come here? What's terrible about this place?"

"She probably hasn't developed a good ghost sense." Danny shrugged. "I can't imagine why she wouldn't have sensed me in the attic, if not for that. As for why she didn't expect me to stick around here…" he sighed and pointed over Sam's shoulder. "Well…this is where I died."

Taken aback, Sam turned slowly on one heel to look at the spot Danny had indicated. Under the shade of a huge, drooping tree - a weeping willow, she thought - was a small marble pillar, about waist-high, with some kind of glass display in its centre. She looked briefly back at Danny, frowning. "This is the lake?"

"Yeah," he said softly. "I wasn't really aiming for it, I just wanted to get you away from Spectra, but this is where we ended up."

Leaving Danny standing at the edge of the forest, she walked closer to the shoreline, where the tree and the curious little pillar were nestled. It was obviously touched by age, the corners worn away by time and weather, but the words engraved on the top of the stele were as clear as the day they had been written.

IN MEMORY OF

Daniel Jack Fenton

1945-1967

Beloved brother, son, friend

You will be missed.

"What is this?" Sam said, voice hoarse, knowing that Danny was too far away to hear her whisper. He didn't seem to want to get any closer to the memorial, instead having turned to face the lake, staring at the horizon. She laid a hand on the stone, running one finger over bronzed lettering. "From your parents."

"They were ghost hunters, of course," he said, just loudly enough for her to discern. "They would have hated to see me like this."

Sam bent down to look at the display situated in the middle of the pillar, its contents forever trapped under glass. There were a number of small objects and scraps of paper in the shadow box, but the framed photo in the middle was what immediately caught her attention, because of course it was Danny as he had looked in life. A school photo undoubtedly, for he wore a white shirt full of wrinkles, and a rumpled tie. He had messy black hair and big blue eyes, and displayed a goofy smile, as though the flash had caught him in a moment of unreadiness.

She turned to stare at the boy behind her, her supposed "neighbour", who seemed to be conscientiously ignoring her. The hair was the same, the eyes were the same - like Jazz's, in the magazine photo,­ she realized with a jolt - in fact, there was no denying that the guy trying so hard to look nonchalant about her reading his obituary was none other than Danny Fenton himself, in the flesh. "Okay," she said slowly, crossing her arms. "Now I really need some answers."

"Ah, so, you're not going to beat me up now. I hope." Danny grinned meekly.

"I'm seriously considering it."

The sound of an engine nearby caught their attention, though, and Sam paused with mouth open to try and locate the sound. "Is there a parking lot around here?" What if it's those ghost hunters, going around on hoversleds or something?

"Just over there." Danny pointed off to the right, and then disappeared into thin air, causing Sam to curse loudly at him. She cast around for someplace to hide, but being so far from the tree line, she opted to look very interested in the memorial instead, and hoped that the visitors were just tourists. Or something.

Something it was, because instead of a Ghostbuster, a lone woman appeared from the gravel path Danny had indicated, wearing a smart-looking grey pantsuit and carrying a shopping bag. Her hair was swept up in an updo, and she looked hurried, as though she had somewhere else to be. She didn't look like a ghost hunter, Sam thought, but it never hurt to be careful. She edged back into the trees, but the newcomer was heading right in her direction.

"Oh-" Looking surprised, the woman stopped about ten feet from the memorial, finally noticing Sam. "I'm sorry, I didn't see you there."

"It's no problem," she apologized, eyeing the visitor. She looked like a regular civilian, getting along in age (sixty-ish, Sam thought; somewhere around her grandmother's age), with a careworn face. "I was just leaving, anyway."

"Come looking for a ghost too?" the woman said with a knowing smile. She gestured at the pillar. "I heard he'd been sighted in the area."

"Ah--yeah," Sam said quickly. No point in dismissing an excuse that had been so conveniently dropped into her lap. "I've never seen a ghost before."

"Consider yourself lucky," she replied, stepping close to the pillar to look at the engraving. "You must be new to Amity Park if you've never seen one."

"Yeah, I am," Sam said with relief.

The woman knelt down to look into the casing, rubbing at the dirty glass with the side of her hand. The window desperately needed to be cleaned. "It's a mess," she commented, peering at the photo. "You can hardly see anything."

Realizing that she hadn't actually looked at the contents of the shadow box, other than the photo, Sam also bent to look inside. In the spots where grime had been rubbed away, she could see various objects - a class ring, a yearbook, a folded piece of black-and-white clothing. Pinned at the background, around the picture, were small squares of white paper inscribed with short messages for Danny. Sam peered at the one nearest to her, a note printed neatly in typeface:

Danny-

I'll miss you, man. You were

like a brother to me. Hope we

see each other again someday.

-Tuck

Sam smiled. So "Tuck" was the friend Danny had mentioned? She wondered if she'd have gotten along with this boy too.

"He was pretty well-liked when he was alive," the woman noted, tapping on the glass.

Nodding slowly, Sam didn't know what to say in reply. Instead she looked at the message below Tuck's, straining to read the scrawled handwriting.

Hey Danny-boy!

Hope you don't become a ghost!

We'd have to go after you, and I'd

hate to do that!

Love, Dad!

(Jack!)

The Goth's eyes widened. "What kind of epitaph is that?"

The woman laughed. "He was certainly a character."

Sam knew she meant Jack, but the words still put her on a slight defensive. "You...knew Danny Fenton?"

"Oh, yes." She opened the shopping bag and allowed Sam to see the bundle of flowers inside. "You could say that I'm the caretaker of this monument nowadays."

Someone who knew him. Someone who cared enough to watch over the monument. It can't be—

"No way…you're—!"

"She's my sister," Danny cut in, still very invisible. "Long time no see, Jazz."

-to be continued...