Hey guys. I've had half of this in my drafts for months, and once again, I finally got round to finishing it. So, if you notice a massive change in the writing style towards the end, that's because it was written about five months after the rest. Anyway, enjoy!

Maddie Fenton was not an idiot. She may have been called one enough, usually because she was usually seen around her husband who was on occasion an idiot, but she herself was proud to say that she had stayed away from idiocy when she had married into the Fentons.

She prided herself on being very intelligent – she had made more progress in ectology than any scientist in the last decade – and she wasn't ashamed to admit that she kept her various trophies on a special shelf in the kitchen. Well, that last bit wasn't quite true. She didn't actually have any trophies, because the science community continued to be blind and ignorant, but she and Jack both had hopes that one day they'd get just a bit of recognition as something other than complete nutcases. As of now, it was a pipe dream.

Anyway, the point was, Maddie wasn't stupid. She was fairly observant – she had to be to notice some of the things she did about ghosts. Her daughter's love of psychology hadn't come from nowhere either; Maddie had always had a love for the brain, and she transferred this passion over to observing ghost behaviour.

Because of these factors, Maddie had noticed there was something wrong with her son. Honestly, it was about as obvious as Vlad Master's disgusting crush on her. You could see it from a mile off.

It had all started when Danny was fourteen, around the same time he started high school. He had suddenly started acting shifty and unnaturally clumsy. That could have been passed off as normal teenage secrecy or his father's genes finally kicking in, but Maddie had a feeling it was not just that. It took her a while to realise that her son was slowly distancing himself from them, although he began to take a keen, if not obsessive interest in their weaponry (which he previously wanted nothing to do with).

Sighing, she wandered down to the lab with the intention of working on that ectoplasm sample she had got from the hunter ghosts the other day. She had made it to her microscope, and was about to start humming, when there was a crash.

Ordinarily, she would have chalked it up to Jack, tutted a bit and then left it be. Today however, Jack was out shopping in town, and she knew for a fact that both of her kids were out… somewhere.

She whipped around quickly. Just quickly enough to catch a certain ghost boy standing open mouthed and looking very much as if he had been caught with his hand in a cookie jar… which… Maddie narrowed her eyes. The ghost was holding two things. One, a Fenton thermos, and two, a large stack of the cookies she and Danny had made earlier.

Maddie gaped.

"Mo… Maddie!" the ghost cried, stuffing one of the cookies into his mouth and hiding the other behind his back, altogether acting like a three year old. "Maddie Fenton! What are you doing here? At Fentonworks. In your lab. Ha ha, what a coincidence!"

Maddie frowned, eyes calculating and eyeing the cookies suspiciously. "I live here." She said flatly. "What are you doing here, ghost?"

"Yeah…" he laughed, grimacing. "About that."

"Yes?"

"Well, I was just uh… emptying my thermos. You know, I catch the ghosts, gotta put em back somehow. The only other guy with a portal is Vlad and I'm not going anywhere near him, so I uh… use yours. Hope you don't mind?"

"Hope I don't… what?" Maddie spluttered in disbelief. "Get out of my house!"

"But…"

"And leave the cookies behind."

"Maddie!" he whined, and in that moment, he sounded exactly like Danny. Danny Fenton that is. She nearly forgot that he liked to be called Danny too.

She shook herself out of those unsettling thoughts. "Go." She said. "And put them back on your way out. You can't even eat."

"Well…"

"Go away!"

"Ok. Going!" and he phased up out of the lab. Maddie heard the clatter of the cookie jar lid, and felt just a little smug satisfaction that he had actually put them back. It occurred to her later on that he really had eaten one of the cookies, which should be impossible. Sure, ghosts could make imitations of a human body. Some even had lookalike organs and bones inside, but they could not actually perform any bodily functions. It was a simple fact that she was quite sure of after years of dissection and study.

So why was Phantom different?

She heard another clatter from upstairs something falling in the kitchen. Growling under her breath, she stomped up the stairs to see what the commotion was about. She wasn't entirely surprised to see her son standing on one of the kitchen chairs and reaching for the cookie jar. Honestly, she would have been absolutely fine if he had one, since he had helped her make them. It was just, his face looked almost exactly like Phantom's had earlier on. The same wide eyes, tensed shoulders and open mouth. If she didn't know any better, she would say they were twins.

"Take a cookie and put the jar back, Danny." She said. "Don't you have homework to be doing?"

He laughed nervously, mouth stretching into an awkward grin. "Yeah. Yeah I do. Ok, thanks mom. Bye."

"Thanks for what?" she wondered, but he was already gone.

Five minutes later, Maddie could have sworn she heard the front door creak although there was no one in the house but she and Danny, both of whom were nowhere near it.

Huh.

"So, Danny," Jack said, a wide grin and eyes beaming. "How about a Fenton family games night tonight?"

If she wasn't watching him, Maddie wouldn't have caught his eyes widening and his panicked glance at his sister.

"That sounds… fun." He stammered, evidently trying to convey something to Jazz through the way his eyebrows were moving in the most interesting way. "But I can't. um, Tucker invited me to… bowling! Yeah, bowling. With him. And Sam. And uh, Valerie?"

"Danny." Maddie said. "We don't have a bowling alley in amity park."

"We don't?" he laughed, voice raising a few pitches. "Yeah, of course we don't. Totally knew that. I was just kidding. We're watching that new movie instead. You know…" his eyes glanced sideways, pleading for help from Jazz.

"Fast and furious… ah… seven!" Jazz finished, her own face panicked.

"There are seven of those things now?" Jack muttered. "Ridiculous."

Although she agreed, Maddie could not bring herself to care, because she knew for a fact that the cinema was shut at the moment for refurbs since the last ghost fight had trashed it. She chose not to say anything. Instead, she placed her hand on Danny's shoulder and smiled. God, his body was freezing.

"That's a shame. Well, we won't stop you kids from having fun. What about you, Jazz?"

Her daughter froze. "I have… homework. Essays. You know."

It was the summer holidays.

"Sure. I guess me and your father can just play alone."

Her kids winced. Maddie noticed.

As they awkwardly backed away into their respective bedrooms, Maddie put her hand to her chin in thought. Both of them had given any excuse to get away, implying that they had something to do that evening. In fact, Maddie couldn't remember the last time the whole family had sat down for a meal together in the evening, let alone spent time together afterwards.

What were they doing?

It wasn't just Danny who was acting strange either, Maddie observed. Recently, Jazz had begun acting in that same shifty way, and Maddie couldn't help but see how alike they looked when their eyes widened and their bodies got ready to bolt. Evidently, she was now in on whatever Danny was hiding.

"Hey, Maddie?" she jumped when Jack's voice cut through her thoughts.

"What?" she snapped, perhaps a little too harshly.

"Danny's got another letter home from Lancer." He sighed. "Look." He held out a piece of paper that detailed Danny's frankly appalling grades.

"He's failing physics?" Maddie asked in disbelief. "He loves physics."

"I know." Her husband replied, brows furrowing in a rare moment of serious thought. "And art. How do you even do that? Its literally just drawing. He used to draw all the time."

"There's something up." Maddie told him. "Danny's changed."

"He's a growing boy. It's inevitable. I remember when I was his age, and…"

"I know, you didn't like your Lego anymore."

"But now I miss it." Jack sobbed. "I used to have a Lego millennium falcon, but then I lost it forever and I'll never get it back!"

Maddie frowned. "Didn't you ask the kids to get you that set for Christmas?"

"Well yeah," he admitted, "But it's not the same."

"Anyway, Danny." She interrupted.

"Yes." He agreed. "Danny. They grow up, Maddie. It was the same with Jazz."

"Jazz never failed school. Or stayed out past curfew. Or got injuries. Or…"

Jack sighed. "I suppose so. I just think we should try and let Danny do what he needs to do. Let him know we're here to help if he wants it, but he won't want us butting our heads in."

"I know. Teenagers hate that, right?"

"Right."

Maddie tried to believe it was just a case of teenageritis, she really did. She tried to dismiss his wide eyed panic as a disregard for authority and not an animal being threatened. She tried to let him get on with school by himself, and watched as his grades became worse and worse. She tried to ignore him sneaking out of the house at three in the morning and was there to do the obligatory grounding when he got back.

Nothing Maddie tried helped at all, and she watched her son get more and more visibly exhausted, and wanted to help more and more.

She tried sitting down to talk to him one time, which resulted in him storming out of the room after getting defensive, and Maddie didn't know what to do. Teenagers were supposed to be impulsive and irrational, but this was getting ridiculous.

There was something seriously wrong with Danny, and she had to find out what.

Maddie's next bit of damming evidence was another encounter with Phantom, who blanched away from her, and gave her the exact look her son had a few nights before. It was jarring to say the least.

The most horrible thing was, it was not the first time Maddie had seen the resemblance between Phantom and Danny. If you didn't take his white hair and green eyes into account, they could practically be identical, and that chilled Maddie to the bones.

Was Phantom impersonating her son? Was he taking inspiration from him, or taking his body completely? Perhaps it was some kind of possession, which would explain Danny's recent behaviour. If that was true, Maddie couldn't say for sure if Danny had given his consent or not, because his shiftiness and avoidance suggested he knew exactly what was going on and was fine with it. She shook her head. That didn't bear thinking about. Surely Danny knew never to fraternise with a ghost? She and Jack had taught him that at least.

She took off home, her head swirling with unwelcome thoughts.

Not more than a week after that encounter, Maddie finally got her answer. It was an answer she didn't even consider, and she wasn't even sure if she believed it.

All it took was the right place at the right time.

The family had gone out for a meal at a local restaurant, and Maddie had gone to the bathroom before the food came, mostly because she was bored. She was coming back when she noticed a shape running down the corridor and pausing outside the men's bathroom. She realised with a start, that it was Danny.

Maddie watched as he glanced around, as if checking for watchful eyes, and then muttered something under her breath.

Bright rings of light erupted around his waist and she saw blue jeans turn to black spandex and that infernal logo appear on his chest.

She watched as her son died before her eyes.

She knew she let out a sound, but Danny (Phantom?) was so focused on himself that he didn't notice. She stood there as he took flight and phased through the wall, presumably to go and fight some ghost.

Maddie was frozen on the spot for some time after that. Her brain tried and tried to comprehend what she'd seen, and when she was able to move, she stumbled home in a thoughtless daze. She registered Jack asking what was up, and she nearly tripped over one of Jazz's textbooks as she went up the stairs. She collapsed into bed, but didn't sleep for hours.

Maddie mulled over what she had seen in her head. It should be impossible. By all the known laws of science – that she herself had contributed to – Phantom shouldn't exist. According to all known laws of aviation, there was no way he should be able to fly, or turn invisible or any of the crazy and inhuman things that her son apparently did on a regular basis.

Was he even her son at this point? Maddie knew from all her research that ghost's mental stability deteriorated over time, and as they became older and their cores matured, they became more erratic and violent in nature. Phantom was certainly one of the most violent ghosts Maddie had encountered.

Then there was the question of why Phantom chose to keep living as Danny. Why didn't he go back to the ghost zone? Why hadn't she noticed her son was dead?

Maddie let a single tear stagger down her cheek, before turning over to face the wall. She needed sleep. She could deal with this in the morning when she could think logically and come up with a solution. She needed to get down in the lab and somehow get some of Phantom's DNA. Would it act like normal, or would it be ghostly? Would it give her some proof that she had really been living with a dead son for almost two years?

As she gave in to exhaustion, Maddie settled down onto her pillow, but her dreams were plagued with horrible images over and over and she woke up in a cold sweat several times.

Next to her, Jack slept soundly on, unaware of her emotional turmoil. And, in the next room, the ghost crept out of its bedroom window for another night of fighting. Maddie watched it go with a stoic silence.

Damn that turned kinda angsty. That wasn't meant to happen.