Subplot liek whoa!
And theshout-outs...
katiesparks - Oh, no! n.n;
Soni - Thanks also for being my 150th review! I'm so glad that you're enjoying the story so much!
Galateagirl - Nah, I think Jazz is too relieved to see him to wonder too much about Sam's role in this, plus he has good reasons for being in her house, as you'll find out...
mrit - can be thanked for the opening line of this chappie :P
animeobsessed3191 - Maybe I'm just crazy? I don't have a lot of time on my hands, but I do have the inspiration to let this take up most of my free moments these days!
Flashx11 - That would be "b."
Crossover Fiend - Your poor brain! And I threw some more unplanned plot-thickeners in this time, too!
Epyon Zero - "Policeman for the living impaired," my God, you're awesome XD
silvermoonphantom - It's cliffhanger-tastic!
wandering star - Sorry to confuse, I meant she'd been kept in the dark up until that point!
GhostAnn - Two Tuckers! I expect you'll want to wait until I get to that part to find out why. :P
Millions of thanks also to katiesparks, chocolatemercury, RoseGirl from planet Pluto, starlight wishes, Zarz, Anomaly25, conan98002, Esme Kali Phantom, Jimmy the Gothic Egg, L'ange-Sans-Ailes, Lessien Sharpwind, nutte, leppers, dArkliTe-sPirit, and Sparky the Wonder Weasel for your wonderful comments and death threats and all that. :P
Plus a shout-out to Ami-chan/Scythe Zero for reading this and putting up with my endless Danny-fangirlism, and for what you said today about this counting as 'work'. -big glomps!-
Finally...I can't believe I haven't shown you guys this yet. I was being selfish and keeping it for myself! Plantman.EXE illustrated a scene from Chapter 7 which is just just gorgeous; I nearly cried when I saw it. There's a link to it in my profile as well as one to her website, or you could copy-paste this link and take out all the spaces -
www . shimegami . com / ichijouji / dpizumifinal . jpg
Do I ever owe her! XD That picture is so being printed out and going on my wall. Anyway, for people who really like Jazz (such as myself), this chapter is for you. Also, if you like not being completely confused by this very detailed plot of mine, you'll be grateful to know that I'm about to answer most of your questions.
Estrelas
Chapter 13
by Shimegami-chan
She opened her mouth to greet him, or scream, one of the two, but all that came out was the breathless question, "...Why?"
"I know, I know I have a lot of explaining to do," Danny moaned, covering his eyes. "I can only take so much abuse, so can you please hear me out first?"
Jazz sighed loudly and put her hands on her hips. "Danny. I'm not going to pretend I'm not furious with you, but come on, before we get to that part, I am really glad to see you're all right. I'd thought...well, I guess I don't know what I thought."
"Thanks," the raven-haired boy said meekly, wiping his brow. "It's good to see you too. You've, uh, aged well."
"So have you," she said dryly.
Danny cringed, but continued to smile. "Before that, though, we should probably go somewhere a bit more safe. Ghost hunters and all that."
"Of course."
Sam was still staring in shock at the woman. This was Jazz Fenton? She hardly looked like a woman of seventy-two years; still sporting medium-length, fiery orange hair that was held at the back of her head with a blue clip. Her face was careworn but she had a youthful smile and a bright azure gaze framed by cat's-eye glasses. Sam might have pegged her at fifty-five or sixty years old even after getting close enough to see the age lines under her eyes - this woman was clearly a makeup master that she could admire.
"This is Sam, by the way," Danny added with a clumsy wave at the Goth. It seemed that he was a little uncoordinated in his human body - Sam couldn't wait to hear his explanation for that. "She's a friend, so we can talk freely."
Jazz eyed the girl. "You said you'd never seen a ghost. You lied? Danny, how much does she know?"
"She lied to cover for me, she knows enough," the blue-eyed teenager said tiredly. "Now, can we please get out of here before someone sees me?"
The woman had the grace to blush and offer her hand to Sam for a quick shake. "Sorry about that. I still have that 'overprotective big sister' thing. Especially seeing how my little bro ran off for fifteen years without ever telling me where he was going." She glared at Danny, who cringed again. Sam approved; Jazz certainly knew how to speak her mind. She made a mental note never to get on the elder Fenton's bad side.
Danny, shrinking under her gaze, put on a smile and attempted to change the subject. "D'aww, you brought me flowers! I'm flattered."
Jazz rolled her eyes. "Come on, we'll take my car."
Twenty minutes later, Sam and Danny had arranged themselves on the couch in Jazz's split-level house, waiting for her to join them to begin the interrogation. Jazz's tastes was clear from her decorating; the walls in the living room were a creamy off-white and occasionally punctuated with a ground of framed certificates, newspaper clippings or portraits of people Sam didn't recognize. It seemed like she lived alone, but Sam didn't want to ask outright, and she couldn't take for granted the fact that the woman still used the Fenton surname as proof that she'd never married. The house was perfectly quiet, however, and wedding photos were conspicuously missing from the mantelpiece. Ignoring the phone, which was ringing loudly on the table, the retired psychologist set three cans of soda on the table in front of Sam and Danny and sank back into an armchair directly across from her brother. "Okay, talk."
Danny frowned and stared at his feet. Sam wondered who'd get their explanation first - probably Jazz, judging by her take-charge attitude. The violet-eyed girl could not help but get strange shivers when seated so close to her companion, so similar to their meetings in the attic, and yet the atmosphere was completely different. Dark to light, cold to warm, and in many instances on the Danny, he was like a negative image of his ghostly self. His attitude had changed a bit - it wasn't that she didn't like this slightly more outspoken, this breathing version, but he didn't seem like the same Danny anymore to her. The fact that she was still pretty angry at him, Sam thought, probably had something to do with it, too.
"There's something Sam needs to be told about first," the boy said quietly. "Or, well, I guess she needs to see it to believe it."
"At this point I have difficulty disbelieving even the craziest things, when he says them," Sam dryly told Jazz. The older woman laughed, and then gestured back to her brother, ensuring that Sam's eyes were on him as well.
"Going ghost," he said suddenly, and Sam drew back in shock as the most extraordinary change happened right in front of her eyes. Two rings of white energy formed at his waist, so close that she could feel the sizzle of power emanating from them, and travelled to either end of his body, changing his form as they went. When the light had faded, suddenly he was familiar to her again, black-jumpsuited and white-haired.
"What the heck?" Sam blinked and stared at him. "How did you do that?"
"You didn't tell her you were a ghost?" Jazz demanded.
"Ack! No! Go easy on me!" Danny protested, holding his arms up as though to wield off an attack. "She knows I'm a ghost, she's just never seen me change, that's all."
"I didn't know you could change," the Goth said, still taken aback.
"Neither did I until Bertrand put a hole through me," he said grimly, leaning over to inspect his abdomen. The jumpsuit had reformed over the wound, and he prodded the area gingerly with two fingers, as though to ensure it wouldn't suddenly begin gushing ectoplasm.
"Didn't know?" Jazz repeated, confused.
"I started being affected by paranormal memory loss," Danny confessed, looking at his gloved hands instead of at his sister. "I, uh, kinda forgot what I was doing. I just didn't remember I could change back, until I was so badly injured that my body did it automatically."
Jazz looked horrified. "You forgot you could change back? For how long? Is this why you've been gone...?"
"I'll get to that. I need to explain the halfa bit to Sam first." Danny remained in his ghost form, somehow sensing that the change had put her at ease. He ran one hand through messy white hair. "This whole thing started when my parents were working on their first ghost portal. They'd built, pretty much, a machine that could become a gateway to the Ghost Zone, the area where ghosts naturally exist. Obviously nothing like the Portals people use nowadays for sending captured ghosts there, because the technology wasn't nearly as advanced back then."
Sam nodded and waited for him to continue. Danny sat back, crossing his arms across his chest, and she was surprised to feel comforted by the slight chill his solid form had taken on from the transformation back to being a ghost. "The portal...wasn't really working right. They'd pretty much given up on it, but I was always pretty good with fixing things, so I slipped in there one night to take a look. I hit some kind of switch and it turned on...and pretty much electrocuted me. We still don't really know how or even what happened. When I woke up, I was just...like this. A ghost."
"Well, you thought so, at least," Jazz interjected.
Danny nodded. "I found out pretty quickly that wasn't all of it. I'm a half ghost...something that those in the supernatural world have decided to call a 'halfa.' I'm the first one to ever exist, they say. Of course, now that the portal was working fine, a ton of ghosts started coming in through it all the time, and generally making a mess of things in the real world. I started trying to fight them off and put them back in the Ghost Zone; since I'd been given these powers, I might as well use them, right? That was how I ended up becoming Danny Phantom."
"Inviso-Bill," his sister corrected, deadpan.
Danny scowled. "Okay, yeah, nobody ever asked for my name, so they just made that up one time when I was on the news. I guess they were sick of calling me 'ghost boy.'"
"So then," Sam said slowly, thinking over what he'd just said. "You were involved in all those incidents because you were capturing the ghosts that had caused them."
"Yeah, and I usually got the blame for them, too," Danny replied sourly. "Especially if Val was involved."
Jazz winced. "Oh...have you read her book?"
"Sam has. I saw a bit of it." The ghost made an irritated sound.
"Valerie was a ghost hunter, though not a very good one," the ex-psychologist explained. "After she retired, she used everything she knew to write the book Legends of Amity Park. You probably noticed it was a bit biased, though I thought it was surprisingly libel-free. She was pretty objective."
"Fifty years of it probably mellowed her out a bit. I hope." Danny sighed. "Is she still around?"
"Oh, yeah," Jazz said unhappily. "She calls me whenever she revises for a new edition, checking to see if I'm dead yet and if Danny Fenton's ghost has been sighted and what-have-you."
Danny groaned. "Great, and now Spectra will have put it all over the news that Inviso-Bill is back. I can't go around as a human, and I can't be a ghost, either. Perfect."
Sam disconnected slightly from the conversation, deep in thought. After seeing the human version of Danny, suddenly she was beginning to have an inkling of what these past sixty years had been for him, but the realization suddenly crashed into Sam that if Danny had been a half-ghost because of a lab accident, the drowning accident was something else altogether. "Wait, I don't understand. You've been a halfa all this time? Then what happened at the lake?"
Danny picked up the soda and inspected it. "This can has a weird top on it. I hope they didn't mess with the formula again."
"The world of soda pop kept revolving while you were gone, Danny. Surprise."
For his part, the halfa was still trying to act oblivious, as though making jokes would detract from the severity of the situation. "I don't know if I like this 21st century of yours, Sam."
"Quit messing around and just tell her," Jazz sighed.
"If I couldn't make a joke out of everything," Danny said mildly, "I'd have a very boring eternity ahead of me, Jazz." Both women detected something strained in his voice at this; Jazz silenced immediately and nodded for him to keep going. "The accident at the lake was something even more complicated. And..." he paused. "It has a lot to do with the lies I told you in the forest today, Sam. I had my ghost powers for about three years before I noticed that something was seriously wrong with my human side, the something that is the reason why I'm in hiding now. I can't age."
Jazz opened her mouth to speak. "Danny--" But then the phone jangled again, and Jazz glared balefully at it, switching off the ringer.
The ghost had already frowned and angled his head slightly to look Sam in the eye. "I've looked fourteen ever since the day of the accident."
Mouth dry, Sam stared at him with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Somehow she'd known that he was going to say something like this, and yet she still wasn't prepared for the full impact of his words. Fourteen forever. And of course, ghosts didn't age, or the Phantom that sat beside her would no longer be a child, would never have those long, slender limbs and boyish face. This was him forever. And suddenly Sam knew why.
"You faked your own death," she whispered, clutching her hands together.
"Have you ever read Tuck Everlasting, Sam?" he enquired. For a moment, she thought he was trying to change the subject, but instead of protesting, just nodded to indicate that she had. "I thought you might. There's a copy in the attic that belonged to your father - I must have read it a thousand times. It wasn't around when I was--alive--" he broke off and nodded as though to convey that he meant during his fully human life "--but when I first found it up there, it seemed like the author had written it expressly thinking of me."
"They lived forever," Sam remembered aloud. "And instead of it being wonderful, it was a curse."
"I realized that everyone around me was going to grow old and die while I watched," Danny continued, unable to keep a note of bitterness out of his voice. "I think I was sixteen when I finally realized it; that I hadn't gotten taller, that while my weight occasionally shifted because of what I ate and how much exercise I was getting thanks to ghost hunting, I wasn't developing the way I was supposed to. I was scared that I'd be made into some kind of lab animal, because I didn't think I'd really die no matter what tests were performed on me, and at the same time I knew my parents were going to find out about my ghost self if it kept up.
"The accident was really an accident," Danny said quietly. "There was a ghost - it was Youngblood - in the lake, and Dad wanted to exorcise it, and of course it attacked the sub - what could I do? I hid behind a crate and transformed and fought him, but it still got completely trashed, and I had to take my parents and phase out of there to bring them to safety. But when I got them laid down on the beach, I realized that this was my chance. I could take off and get away from all the worry that I'd be discovered. So I left, and I let them think I hadn't made it out." He swallowed. "You're probably going to say that it was selfish, and yeah, I've had sixty years to come to terms with that. I was only thinking of myself. I was already so used to the idea of being a ghost that I hardly considered how my death was going to affect other people." He aimed a careful look at Jazz, who looked like she wanted to say something, but nodded for him to continue. "I hid out with Tucker for a while, staying invisible all the time, using my ghost powers to steal food whenever I was human long enough to need it. I had to go human sometimes, or I thought I'd just go completely crazy. And that was how Jazz found out."
"I never knew about his powers," the older woman explained. "Once we heard that people had seen Danny, I thought he'd become a real ghost that would end up being a danger to himself and everyone else. That was when my parents gave up ghost hunting."
"And you became a paranormal psychologist," the Goth supplied. "To help him."
"That's right." Jazz laughed. "It was a pretty big shock to find out that he was all right after all. If I hadn't been so glad to see him, I probably would have punched him in the face when he went from Inviso-Bill, Public Ghost Enemy Number One to my little brother Danny right in front of me."
"She guilted me into revealing myself," Danny grumbled, trying to look begrudging and not doing a very skillful job. It was obvious to Sam that the siblings were still very close, despite the length of time since they'd seen each other. "And I guess it was a good thing she did, because my parents moved out pretty soon after that and put the house up for sale. If not for Jazz, I'd have lost access to our ghost hunting weapons, which were coming in pretty handy at the time."
"So how exactly did you end up in my attic?" Sam asked, looking from Danny to his sister.
"Oh my God, don't tell me you were in the attic the whole time. I looked for you there, Danny, a lot!" Jazz glared daggers at him.
Danny supplied Sam with her answer first. "Your grandparents bought our old house, so once Mom and Dad moved to California, I moved back in. My parents sealed up the basement in the lab when they left, so it was pretty easy to live there and keep an eye on the Ghost Portal. I'd sometimes go up to the third floor and read the books up there or play board games, and eventually it just got to the point where I spent most of my time in the attic."
"There's a lab under the house?"
"Yeah, I'll show you sometime," he promised, looking pleased that she was interested. Now that he remembered the lab's existence, he was eager to get back down there and check up on the Portal. "It's really high-tech, considering when it was built."
"Okay." Sam smiled before catching sight of a light flashing on the phone with the silenced ringer. "Jazz--your phone again--"
"I don't get it, what's what all these calls?" The woman hesitantly reached for it. "Somebody really wants to talk to me, I guess." As she touched the receiver, though, a loud knocking sounded at the door, startling all three of them. "Now what?"
"You're pretty popular, it seems." The ghost boy smirked.
"Danny, turn human," Jazz snapped as she strode to the door. "It's probably just the paper carrier again, I didn't pay him this week--"
But as she unlocked the bolt the door burst open, and a woman with dark skin and wavy silver hair was standing in the frame, out of breath. "Jazz! Thank God you're here! We need to talk, you'll never believe who called--"
Then her eyes travelled over Jazz's shoulder and into the living room, where Sam and Danny were eyeing the noisy newcomer with curiosity. Too late, Sam put one hand on the boy's arm to warn him that he was still visible, but he didn't turn his attention to her right away, instead staring hard at the woman in the doorway. She put both hands over her mouth. "Oh my God...Danny!"
"Valerie," Jazz seethed through gritted teeth. "Won't you come in?"
-to be continued...