Author's Note:
I've had this written since 2016. Why did I not post it then? WHO KNOWS. But it does mean an awful lot of it is already pre-written. Have fun.

Inklings
1

Things wouldn't come into focus when she first opened her eyes. Her memory had been obliterated, replaced by a horrific, gleaming flash of white and green, reduced just to this and nothing more. The dark floor tiles were almost spinning in front of her – she felt almost as if she had flown, but the ground had come up underneath her far too quickly for things to have been as pleasant as that. Her body twitched with electricity and god knows what else. It was all she could do, to just process the sensory information running through her being. Thinking could come later. This was overwhelming.

The floor only stopped spinning after she'd laid upon it, nearly face-down, for several minutes. Her surroundings had become silent, the great big machine now receding back to its former status of paper tiger, the room nearly black. The power had surged, knocking out the lights, but even so the tiles laid themselves out for her, one by one by one.

She reached out a hand. Clutched the floor with the pads of her fingers, slid herself forwards upon shaky limbs. Thought she felt a snap somewhere deep inside her, but didn't know what it was, and being one of the least horrifying things she'd felt in the past few minutes, she ignored it for now and continued.

One hand in front of the other, even if they glowed. Her addled mind put it down to the electricity, which she was only just beginning to process in her brain, even though deep inside she knew electric shocks didn't cause one to exude light like a bulb. Her body was at least getting easier to move; when she had begun her crawl it had felt indeed like she was being weighed down by bricks, but now, one by one, the bricks seemed to be disappearing.

This isn't right.

The words rang in her mind clear as a bell, clearer than anything she could see, even though her eyesight was becoming surprisingly sharp in the non-existent light. What scared her most wasn't the fact that her own thoughts had felt tangible and real, but that what they had said was undeniably correct. The snapping sound wasn't right. The glowing wasn't right. That pain… pain beyond anything she had ever experienced, anything she could imagine… followed by this feeling of nothing. It wasn't right.

Jazz got to her knees. Her body was all glowing, not just her hands, which seemed a few shades darker than what they'd been previously. Then, she got to her feet.

There was at least a foot of clean, fresh air between her toes and the ground.

She floated there, dumbstruck, for at least a minute. This wasn't possible. This wasn't supposed to be possible. How could she be floating like this? Defying gravity? She wanted to say it was some kind of bizarre hallucination, and psychology certainly supported this hypothesis, but her mind, her mind was telling her that things were a bit more serious than that. The gravity of the situation hit her mind, even if it missed her body completely.

She turned.

Fears became reality. Layers of orange-red hair splayed out all over the floor, hands and head face down on the tiles, all just before the beast itself; the Fenton Portal, great and mighty and clearly non-functioning.

"It's not real…" she whispered. Her words echoed back to her in the small underground lab, taunting her from every direction.

Light poured in; the laboratory entrance had been opened. She span around to face it midair, her hair following suit in a magnificent white twirl. She was unable to do anything but remain where she was, more petrified than she'd ever been in her entire life. Footsteps could be heard.

"Jazz…?!" It was Danny's voice. "Jazz, are you alright? I heard—"

Danny stopped dead. The siblings locked eyes with each other even if it was short-lived; it wasn't long before Danny's own eyes were racing back down to the Other Jazz lying face down on the ground, singed and electrified from a portal that clearly wasn't going to work. She wanted to cry, but the trigger just didn't seem to be working.

"I-I was curious, I just wanted to see inside, and—" but she could manage no more, and found herself dropping to the ground until she fell back to her knees in a crumpled heap, eyes obscured by clutching fingers. "Danny, something's wrong with me!"

She didn't dare look up to meet his eye after that. She could feel him getting closer, almost as if his presence even without his footsteps was enough.

"You're a ghost, y-you're dead!" he stammered out. "Jazz, you look just like what mum and dad talk about! You're glowing, and, and, your hair is different and back behind you there's—"

"Don't say it," Jazz whispered back, starting to remove her fingers from her face one by one. "Please, Danny, don't say it."

"What am I supposed to say?!"

"Anything, just not that!"

Her brother blinked at her. Tears started to well up in his eyes, but what was she supposed to do about it when she was in a state like this? The shock was rippling through her in dreadful waves. She didn't know what to do. For the first time in her life, she really, really didn't know what to do.

"C-can I touch you?" he asked, eventually.

Jazz reached out a hand as she slowly got back to her feet, this time remaining grounded, and caught his hesitant palm right in hers. It was solid. It felt solid. And before she could see anything else coming, Danny's arms were wrapped around her shoulders, tears streaming down his face, grabbing at her as if she might disappear at any moment.

If she was being honest, she wasn't completely sure she wouldn't.

"Danny, what are we going to do?"

She hated asking him this. Forwardly she knew she was placing all of that burden squarely on his shoulders, but she genuinely didn't know, and she genuinely needed help. Gingerly, she began to return the hug rather than just stand there looking stunned, and clasped either side of his back.

He refused to let go of her. "We have to tell mum and dad!"

That's when it all flashed through her mind; images of her mother hovering above her, scalpel in one hand and syringe in the other. The most well-meaning look imaginable plastering her face, but at the end of it all, looking at the specimen below her for what she saw it as – more specimen than daughter.

Had she been breathing, she would have stopped. She hadn't noticed that yet.

"We can't! Danny, they're…"

"They're ghost researchers! They'll know what to do!"

"No one will know what to do, Danny!" She was yelling. She couldn't stop herself from yelling, and her brother was reeling back from the sound. Sound that seemed to come from all directions at once, as if jumping out at you. He was too young to think about experiments and becoming some sort of lab rat. She was too young. She had to protect his poor little mind, because if this wasn't some kind of bizarre hallucination, then—

—Then he was the one that mattered.

"We have to leave everything as it is." And now her voice was back to whispering, the contrast so great between that and her previous panic causing Danny's expression to fall into something quite unsure. "I need you to do some things for me, okay?"

"W-what?"

He was still crying. She held him by each of his shoulders, wondering at what point she might start sliding through him as if he didn't even exist. "First you need to call an ambulance. Th-they'll probably tell you to try to resuscitate… that thing, so just do what they say. Then you need to call mum and dad."

"What am I supposed to tell them?!"

This was killing her… if the portal hadn't already. She didn't know, but she needed to say something. Give him some sort of direction…

"Tell them I'm hurt really badly, and there's an ambulance coming. Tell them to meet you at the hospital."

"I can't lie to—"

"It's not lying, Danny," she insisted. "Don't tell them everything on the phone. It's bad. Really bad. Tell them when you see them—that way the doctors can help you. And don't say anything about…" her voice dropped until it was nearly inaudible. She was shaking. She could feel herself shaking, this was one of those decisions that she would regret forever or be thankful for until the end of her days, wasn't it? "Don't say anything about me. Being a ghost. Nothing at all, okay?"

Danny shook himself out of her grip, doubling back at least two steps until he'd taken a stance that made him look like he might flee at almost any moment. Jazz gritted her teeth back. She had to be strong.

"We both have to be strong, okay?"

Her voice wavered like the flicker of a candle.

Some sort of trigger struck inside Danny. His eyes wandered upwards, to the malfunctioning portal that towered over them both. "I've gotta get my phone," he stammered, before turning tail and scrambling up the stairs.

Soon enough, she found herself back on her knees. How could she tell him that he needed to be strong like that when she herself was barely holding it together? Asking a fourteen year old to literally deal with a dead body…

No, she couldn't think like that. She couldn't think like this! Her mind would be cast to the heavens faster than she could blink, off to the throes of everlasting insanity. There was good in every situation. This was how she got through life with her parents, how she got through life being so protective over Danny. There was good in every situation. There was good…

She turned back to look at her body again with the shakiest head, and instantly regretted doing so.

That orange hair was her college degree. That unglowing, weighted form her career, her future family, all of the things she was in time going to use to define her life.

The lack of breath, the loss of time she had spent working so hard, toiling for the life she never realised how much she craved until just this very moment.

When Danny returned, the expression upon her face made her look zombified, like a shadow of the personality that had made her her former self.

But there was nothing he could do about that.

It was gone.

Everything was gone.

"… Jazz?"

He sounded frightened, as if he truly was losing her. But her Big Sister mode was switching back on at the sound of his voice, and she turned back to him and away from the Thing that would snatch away her sanity. "You got the phone?" she asked, softly. His nod was dutiful, even if he looked a wreck.

"So I can call them now, right? I mean 911…"

"Yeah."

"Jazz, are you going to disappear?"

The words hit her as hard as a boot to the face. "Disappear…?" she said, at first unsure what he meant, but gradually it sunk in as she caught sight once more of her strange, glowing form. "I don't feel like I'm going to disappear. I don't want to disappear!"

He nodded, slowly. Something wasn't quite processing in his brain correctly.

"But how are you going to get around mum and dad?"

Her mind had obviously made the leaps for her some time ago. If this strange reality could accommodate ghosts in exactly the way her parents had described them, then that meant logically she could hide away from sight if she so wanted to. She didn't know how, of course, but it was a normal conclusion to make even if the circumstances were what she considered to be beyond a level of insane.

"I think I can become invisible?" she hazarded. "That's something that ghosts can do, right?"

"We've never actually seen a ghost, Jazz!"

She looked away. "If I can do it, I'll figure it out. …No use worrying right now, you need to make that call. I'm so sorry for making you do this, Danny."

The rest passed by in a tense blur that Jazz could barely remember. At some point Danny was asked if he could, indeed, attempt to resuscitate her, and it was at least one point towards Good Parenting that Danny knew how. But it wasn't going to work. They both knew that. And it didn't.

Eventually Danny hung up on the operator. "Said they'll be here soon," he managed. His face was white, his hands shaken. Jazz had watched her orange hair move about as he'd rolled her over onto her back, and given her one small attempt at life. Vaguely she had hoped that this all might end there, she would snap back into her body as if it had been some particularly bizarre hallucination and all would be well. But it was clear that her heart had stopped from the electrocution, and it wasn't going to start again any time soon.

She waited for him to make a move on the phone, but he did no such thing. He stared at it for some time, so intensely it was a wonder the power of his eyes didn't burn a hole straight through it, and soon he found himself dropping the phone altogether.

"I can't do it!" he yelled, perhaps to the atmosphere in general. "This is too much!"

And she would not begrudge him this—it really was too much for a small teenager to handle. He'd already held together handsomely well and even she was surprised she was not somewhat more wrecked.

She took some of her first tentative steps in this strange form towards him. Moving worked differently, and she wasn't quite sure what she was doing. It was almost as if she couldn't quite properly touch the ground, and when she did she seemed to grace it only lightly. Nevertheless she persisted, and when she got to Danny she took him by the shoulder and led him away.

Her eyes never once darted back to the horrible reminder she'd just left behind.

"It's okay, the hospital will sort this out…" she mumbled, though perhaps she was talking more to herself than she was to her little bother.

At some point, she stopped trying to tread the ground. It wasn't working.

"You're really cold," he half-sobbed. Was she? Even if she was, she certainly didn't seem able to feel it. Everything had become somewhat numb, as if not quite there, when it came to her ability to sense temperature. Lost in her thoughts she failed to reply to him.

The stairs were climbed one by one, even though it caught her attention very quickly that her feet were doing a lot more gliding than climbing. Occasionally they would grace a stair's edge but it seemed to matter not; simply they would disappear altogether just to get out of the way, and she would float through them. Somewhere in her chest what she assumed was her heart flickered; observing such a strange thing as her own being passing through perfectly solid matter both thrilled and terrified her. The impossibility of such a proposition was but one facet of it; the situation's novelty, however, was not lost.

She didn't say anything about that to Danny.

Jazz sat him down at the kitchen table, and they waited.