Content warning: foul language in this one.

I realize that this chapter is late, so I'm sorry for that. I had a lot of personal business delay me but we're back on track with the final part of the "Boxed Lunches" arc! I hope you like the conclusion to Danny's first ghostly fight and encounter, and I can't wait for the next one! Let me know what you think!

-Song

Food and cutlery fell to the floor of the kitchen and covered Danny in lettuce and meat.

His vision was blurry and his ears were ringing. The flash of light that signaled his transformation made him blink - he hadn't done that himself. Sam and Tucker burst back into the kitchen. Their voices were garbled and distorted. They were reaching for him, but before Sam could put a sticky hand around his wrist, Danny's knees buckled, and he fell to the floor.

Tucker and Sam gasped.

"What happened? Is he okay?" Sam asked first, kneeling down immediately to brush Danny's black hair aside and press a hand to his face. She pulled on his cheek to see his eyes - blue - and with shaking fingers, checked his pulse. "Oh, thank goodness," she said when she found a heartbeat.

Tucker reached down and took the thermos out of Danny's limp hand and shook it gently. It wasn't heavier or different than it had been before, but Tucker was acutely aware that it now held a real-life ghost inside it.

"I can't believe this thing worked," he said, his voice incredulous. "His mom is a genius."

"Tucker, Danny's out cold. What do we do?"

"Well, it's not like we can call his parents."

"So we just carry him and leave? What about the mess?"

"Pfft, like Hell we are cleaning this up. Let's just get out of here!"

Tucker raised Danny up from the ground and put his arms around him. He held him up by the back of his torso and nodded to gesture for Sam to grab his legs. They slipped and slid through the fallen food and the mess that they had made, carrying both their friend and all their ghost hunting gear between the two of them.

"What I wouldn't give for Danny's super strength right now," Sam grumbled as they exited the school. Gently, they lowered Danny to the ground, and Tucker re-engaged the school security system.

"What if someone finds out that it was us?"

"Just because Casper High has a fancy lock," Tucker said with a final press of a button, "doesn't mean they can afford cameras. Don't worry, no one's gonna know."

They looked down at Danny, who was asleep on the cool grass.

"Now what? We can't exactly carry him all the way home."

Just because they were all seventeen now didn't mean they had a single car between the three of them. Even though Sam's family was fabulously wealthy, they were still against the idea of her having a car (aka easy access to get away from them) and refused to insure one if she bought her own. Tucker's parents couldn't afford a third car, and Danny's parents insisted that he pay his own way. Jazz had her own, one that she bought herself using part-time job money and allowance meticulously saved since she was twelve years old, but Tucker and Sam weren't going to call her.

Sam sighed and pulled out her phone.

"Sam, there is not a single Uber or Lyft on this planet that is going to let us into their car covered in all this disgusting food."

"I'm not calling for a service. I'm calling Henson."

Tucker blinked. "No way."

"Way."

"Your dad is gonna kill us if we fuck up his fancy car, Sam!"

Sam pressed 'send.'

"Henson won't tell, and Dad's out of town. Good thing dry cleaning is cheap," she said.

"Yeah, to you."

Sam shrugged, embarrassed but determined. "A couple of month's allowance for a Mercedes deep clean isn't going to kill me."

Tucker was getting woozy thinking about the amount of money that Sam was about to throw away on a car ride when Danny stirred on the grass. They jumped and knelt down to check on him. He groaned and pried his eyes open to look up at the moonlight. His arms shook as he raised them to hold his head.

"What happened?"

"What do you mean, 'what happened?' You caught a real-life ghost, dude!"

"I am a real-life ghost," Danny joked and grimaced. The blood-pounding sound in his ears had returned with his human form. There was no more cold, ghostly ecto-blood running in his veins. Now he felt way too warm and heavy like stone. Too mortal. "No, I mean… I remember catching her, but why did I go down? Did she hit me?"

Sam racked her brain. "No, I don't think so. We saw the bright blue beam from the thermos, all the food fell to the floor after the ghost screamed, and you collapsed in a flash of light."

"Yeah, it didn't sound like she hit you?"

"Well, she hit me once. I know it hurt."

"How bad?" Sam asked.

Danny didn't say. He wasn't ready to try and explain that not only did his heart stop beating when he was a ghost, that his ectoplasmic blood ran cold, but also that pain… worked differently for him when he was like that. None of that was in the Gothica - something he'd avoided on purpose - and he meant to keep it that way until he was ready.

"Maybe you fainted from the shock of kicking so much ass?" Tucker joked.

"Maybe I overdid it by going intangible so much," Danny said. "I think I have to be careful how much I use my powers at a time."

"Yikes, dude, do you have a weak stamina bar we don't know about?"

"I guess so."

"Then let's make sure Tucker and I are more prepared to help you next time. You shouldn't be doing this all on your own, right, Tucker?"

"Right. I felt so useless in that fight."

"You guys aren't-"

"Yes, we are," Tucker interrupted. "But not for long. We'll get better."

"You really think there are going to be many more ghosts?" Sam asked.

"Yes," Danny said with confidence. "I don't know why… but I can feel it. Something's different now. Not to mention that the portal must be open. We need to figure out a way to shut it down."

"Yeah, dude, like your dad is ever going to let that happen."

A sleek black car eased its way into the parking lot with the headlights off, ominous and mysterious. Sam smiled.

"Our ride is here."

.

.

.

Danny stood before the Fenton portal with a full thermos in his hand, the slight presence of something inside flickering, alerting his newfound ghostly senses. There were about fifty buttons on the countertop panels to the right of the laboratory and an official keypad and fingerprint scanner directly connected to the portal. Obviously, Danny didn't have clearance or access to the portal. What he did have, however, was Tucker.

"I'm serious. Your mom is insane, dude. This code is impressive."

"Can you get me into the system? Make me an administrator or something?"

"I mean, I can trick the system into creating a third biometrics profile to let you use your fingerprints on the keypad, but I'll have to hide the profile from your parents."

"Dad won't even notice."

"But your mom totally will."

Tucker was right about that. A ping on Danny's phone indicated a text from Sam which asked how things were going. He texted back that, after two deep cleans in the Fenton decontamination showers in the lab, Tucker and Danny were hard at work sending the Lunch Lady home.

They had to part from Sam when Henson had picked them up. According to him, it was too late at night for her to be away from home any longer and that he would feel better if "Miss Manson were to return to the family manor." Since Henson had done them a monumental favor, Sam agreed to go home after dropping the boys off. Tucker and Danny snuck into the house beneath Jazz and his parents' noses, and they went straight into the basement to hose off.

Now they were trying to crack the code that was the Fenton Portal. Luckily, Danny knew how to mute the alarm should Tucker accidentally trip it. Beyond that, he was lost.

"Okay, I think I have an idea." Tucker grinned. "You'll have to go ghost."

"What? Why?"

"There's a function in the code that sets off an alarm if a ghost attempts to access the portal, just like a strange person, but since you know how to mute the alarms, we can make it so your ghostly fingerprints are the only ones - alive or dead - that can access the portal while simultaneously muting the alarm at the same time."

"Why can't you just do that with my regular fingerprints?"

"Because there doesn't have to be an on-record profile of a ghost's prints. Humans with access are required to have an administrative profile."

Danny didn't have enough information to argue. "Okay, fine."

"Need a mandarin orange and some Gatorade before you try going ghost again?"

"Ha. Ha."

Danny was still shaky from the earlier encounter. Using his powers and fighting a volatile ghost for so long had taken its toll, but he had had time to take a break, and so he felt that he could at least transform once more tonight.

With the familiar flash, Tucker watched as Danny quickly transformed from human to ghost.

"Okay, now press your fingers to the keypad. You can take that hazmat glove off, right?"

"Um, no. Not that I know of."

"That's so weird. Try your fingerprints anyway."

"Just like this?" Danny placed all five fingertips to the portal biometrics pad and waited. Tucker furrowed his brow but then smiled.

"Ew, it does kind of work. Ghost clothes are weird. Now let me just log those individual markings into your own profile, and… whoa, ghost fingerprints are weird too!"

"How?"

"I dunno, like… the swirls are more swirly than normal."

Danny wasn't sure what to make of that, but he was too tired to be highly interested. Tucker tapped a few more keys, waited, and then tensed up for a second. When the alarms didn't go off, Tucker sighed with relief, finished up his code, shut down the system, and said, "Okay, you're done. Now all that's left to do is flush that Lunch Lady ghost and close the portal to prevent new ones from getting in."

Danny inserted the Fenton Thermos into its allocated slot that was next to the ghost portal keypad. He twisted it until it clicked. The green glowing lights shone in the semi-darkness, and Danny pressed a button.

"Bye, Patty," he said quietly as the thermos emptied into the 'other side.' As soon as it was done, Danny used his new secret administrative profile to shut down the portal, locking away all other ghostly intruders from using it.

"Do you think your parents even know that the portal is working?" Tucker asked.

Danny shifted back to human form. "I don't know if they've touched it since my accident, to be honest. I must have been the one to trigger it into working when I got zapped."

"Oh, so you let the ghosts out."

"Not on purpose."

"Danny Phantom, hero or villain?" Tucker continued with a huge dramatic look on his face. "Friend or foe?"

"Oh shut up," Danny laughed. "Besides, the portal is closed now. What else could happen?"

They packed their gear back into their proper places within the lab where they had stolen them in the first place.

Tucker decided to crash into Danny's room, and the two of them snuck upstairs. The next morning Danny's parents greeted them with pancakes and bacon. There was no indication that either of them, not even Danny's mother, suspected anything had gone wrong last night. They were surprised to see Tucker but not too surprised.

Danny bit into his pancakes and, now that he'd had a good night's rest started to feel better about his new role as ghost hunter and Amity Park protector. Sure, it had only been the one time, and he had gotten a bit beat up, but if all the ghosts were like that, he could handle it.

In the warm light of the morning, he felt like he could handle anything.