A/N: Chapter title courtesy of quasar-crew on tumblr.

In less than two weeks, Wes had realized two very important things about Danny Fenton.

One: Star's assertion that Fenton was a loser was reinforced daily by the school bully, and Dash never saw any reason to pull his punches. If Fenton decided to mouth off, he paid for it. If he decided to grin and bear it, Dash took it upon himself to wipe the smirk off Fenton's face. It wasn't pretty, but no one ever moved to intervene.

Wes knew he should, on a moral level if nothing else, but knowing he should and committing social suicide were two different things. He might've stuck his neck out if it had been any kid besides Fenton taking the regular beatings and not just the occasional ones, but he couldn't bring himself to seriously contemplate taking action when it was on Fenton's behalf. Besides, Fenton seemed to encourage Dash to focus on him, and Wes had enough athletic ability to stay off of Dash's radar if he kept his head down. (Thankfully, getting on to the basketball team—albeit as a replacement for a kid who had broken their leg on some freak ghost ice a few days before Wes had moved to town—meant he'd never be seen as competition to everyone's favourite up-and-coming football star.) As for Kyle, well, he was an expert at avoiding fights, and no one ever saw him as a threat, Dash included.

Two: Dash's star quarterback status wasn't the only reason the teachers turned a blind eye to the treatment. Oh, it was a contributing factor, no question about that. Wes didn't know much about school finances, but funding was a big deal, especially when said school was routinely getting attacked by ghosts and was left on the hook for all that damage. It wasn't that none of the teachers ever heard whispers of a fight or the very real sounds of it, either, even if that's what they pretended. When it came down to it, Dash's favourite target didn't choose to fight back or otherwise kick up a fuss, and he didn't show the damage he was taking, so it was easy to brush the whole matter aside.

Wes had seen Fenton picked up by his shirt and shoved into his locker more often than Mickey was into his, but the math nerd showed the treatment of it, even if he never made any complaints, official or otherwise. Mickey had bruises. Scratches. He still smiled, still had a cheerfully subservient attitude in the hopes that it would prevent further treatment, but he'd walk with a limp or eat only soup for a few days or stumble into class just before the bell with red marks crisscrossing his skin.

Fenton did not.

He'd be punched. Tripped. Kicked. All manner of 'accidentally knocked into' and 'accidentally knocked down'. And it never showed. Despite what Kyle had said when Wes had tried pointing this out, it wasn't just that he didn't bruise easily—or at all, as far as Wes could tell. Fenton wasn't favouring any limbs. He didn't complain (at least in Wes's hearing) of being sore. He didn't act as if he were hurt. Ever.

Kyle said he was thinking too much. What did it matter if Fenton didn't bruise easily? If he was resilient? Some people just were. The kid was lucky, that's all. He deserved some luck if Dash insisted on whaling on him all the time. What should Wes care if that luck came out as Fenton not being very hurt at the end of it? That was a good thing, wasn't it?

Wes pushed back. He laid out all his gathered evidence—including that not bruising didn't necessarily mean that Fenton shouldn't be hurt, since they'd both seen the dent left in Fenton's locker door when Fenton had decided to dodge a punch last week. That certainly didn't come from a lack of force, and Dash had wound up shoving Fenton inside an even smaller space than usual. Human bodies shouldn't be able to contort to that degree.

That was too close to simple speculation, though, so Wes stuck as close as he could to the facts. He'd been watching Fenton every day, trying to figure out what was up with him. He didn't quite have a conclusion yet, admittedly, but he had something. He might not know what exactly was off, but he had proof enough that Fenton wasn't normal.

Kyle snorted, much as he had every other time Wes had brought this up. This time, though, he went farther, undoing Wes's careful arguments with a characteristically simple statement. "Dude, no one in school thinks the Fentons are normal."

"What?"

"C'mon. Their parents hunt ghosts. Ghosts aren't even real."

"They are!"

"Okay, I know you've bought into the mass delusion—"

"It's not a mass delusion."

Kyle shrugged. "Conspiracy, then."

"It's not—"

"Yeah, it is."

"I have proof."

"Uh-huh. What?"

Wes crossed his arms and glared. This wasn't the kind of proof that was easy to show. It's not like he could take a picture of an injury that wasn't there, and Kyle would assume that any photograph he produced of a ghost had been doctored, especially when he didn't believe in ghosts who were right in front of him, doing very obviously ghostly things. Still, Wes had seen enough to know what he was talking about, both when it came to Fenton and to the ghosts that were all over this town. That should be enough for Kyle.

It wasn't.

"Just because you fell for this, doesn't mean you need to drag me into it. Besides, if you were actually on to something with Fenton, don't you think someone else would've noticed by now?"

Wes wasn't able to argue that, either, so Kyle was naturally convinced that he'd won. Which, well, he kinda had. Wes hadn't heard anyone else comment on it. Not about Fenton's freakiness, anyway. No one ever did. Even though it was right in front of them.

Faced with this reality and knowing he'd need something bigger to have a hope of convincing Kyle, let alone anyone else, Wes decided to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open.

That was why, months later, Wes saw something he was pretty sure no one else did.

Fenton was banned from handling glassware in chemistry, but that didn't mean he couldn't help Manson move some drama props for a prank or a protest or whatever he was up to. Wes was coming out of the washroom after basketball practice when he saw Fenton drop a glass orb that had as much chance of being a crystal ball as some kind of lampshade, especially in this town. It had been somewhat precariously balanced atop a box of other miscellaneous props, and when it had started to roll, gravity had invited it to meet the floor.

It broke, as glass was wont to do when dropped onto hard surfaces.

"Crud," Fenton muttered as he knelt to clean it up. Judging by the sound the box made when Fenton dropped it to the floor, it wasn't light, even though he hadn't been struggling with it at all. Wes stepped back to hover in the alcove by the washroom, peeking out just enough to watch Fenton pick up the big pieces of glass and— "Crud," Fenton hissed again, and Wes could see the blood welling up on Fenton's palm from ten feet away. He'd somehow managed to stab himself, and the tissue he produced from his pocket and pressed into his hand to stem the bleeding wasn't doing much.

By the time he'd finished cleaning up, the tissue was soaked through.

When Fenton was done, all the glass shards balanced on his injured hand, he picked up the giant box with entirely too much ease for something done one-handed, even for someone who was supposedly used to hauling loads of weapons like that for family vacations. It didn't seem to faze him. Not so much as a grunt or a stagger. No concession to the box's apparent weight at all, not unless you count the fact that Fenton kept it balanced it on his hip as he walked, but Wes didn't. On the upside, the box was large enough that Fenton couldn't see Wes as he walked past him towards the chem lab at the end of the hall. He didn't even glance in Wes's direction.

The downside was that the box made it even harder to see what Fenton was doing.

Now, Wes couldn't quite see the door of the chem lab, but he knew it was supposed to be locked by now.

Despite that, Fenton didn't even slow down. It looked like he just walked right in. Which shouldn't be possible. Even if the lab wasn't locked, it was quiet in the hall right now, and Wes hadn't heard the door open. Or heard Fenton put down anything he'd been carrying so he could open the door, which was rather important when the handle was a knob and not a lever.

When Fenton reappeared, carrying the box in the same hand as before, he turned just enough that Wes could see him holding his cell phone in what should be his injured hand, freed not just of glass but of the blood-soaked tissue. "Yeah, I gotta fly," he said as he headed for the stairs at the end of the hall. "See you in a minute." He pushed open that door and was gone almost before it swung shut again. Maybe before. Wes wasn't entirely sure.

Wes waited until he was confident Fenton wouldn't come back, and then he walked over to try the door to the chemistry lab.

It was locked.

Peering through the narrow window in the door, Wes couldn't tell if anything had been moved within the darkened room, sharps discard container included. It looked like Fenton had never been inside, but he'd certainly gone somewhere, and there wasn't anywhere else he could have gone.

The next day, Wes made a point of looking for some sign of what had happened. Unfortunately, a new custodian must have been hired to replace the one who had quit a few days ago, as the garbage was empty when Wes got to the chemistry lab first thing in the morning. To top it off, the sharps discard container was enough of a jumble of jagged glass that it told him nothing useful.

Fenton did. Not in words, true, but he didn't have so much as a band-aid on, and there was no sign of a telltale scab. In Wes's opinion, that was damning evidence.

"I'm telling you," he said to Kyle as they walked to the Nasty Burger after school, "he cut his hand badly enough to need stitches, and he's fine today. That's not normal."

"So he heals fast."

"That is not just healing fast. There isn't even a mark."

"Apparently makeup can do wonders."

"Why the heck would he use makeup for something like that?"

"I dunno, you'd have to ask him."

"I'm not going to ask him! Are you crazy?"

"Says the crazy one who won't admit that he's obsessed."

Wes pressed his lips together. Kyle still didn't believe in ghosts. He didn't know how Kyle couldn't believe in them, because they were right there, almost every single day, but he didn't. He'd come up with some logical, if far-fetched, explanation every time. It drove Wes nuts.

That was why Wes had been holding off on confiding in him about his pet theory. That, and the fact that no one else had ever said anything about it. But if Kyle was all about reasonable explanations, which was a laugh considering he never seemed to put that much thought into anything else, then surely he'd see this as reasonable.

The Fenton family hunted ghosts. They were also ghost researchers. Paranormal investigators. Wes had heard practically every term imaginable thrown around, and it all boiled down to one thing: if it was a ghost kind of weird, it wasn't impossible. Not in Amity Park. Not with them around.

Besides, there was all the stuff Wes had seen, and everything he very conspicuously hadn't seen, and just that vibe that Fenton gave off. He might pretend to be a goofy kid, a bit of a klutz, someone who laughed with his friends and was always getting detention because he fell asleep in class or didn't finish his homework, but there was so much more to it than that.

Wes had enough classes with Fenton to have noticed how he sometimes went from drooling all over his math textbook to sitting up straight with his hand stretched in the air, asking to go to the bathroom. He'd followed a few times, never often enough to be suspicious, by asking to be excused for the same reason or to get some water, and every single washroom on that floor was invariably empty, at least of Fenton.

Wes had sat close to him twice, once in English when Foley was sick and once in math when Manson was sick. He was pretty sure he'd seen Fenton reach through his desk to grab his dropped pencil in English, and he knew he'd seen Fenton shiver even though hot sun was pouring through the windows. Wes had written it off as the air conditioning at first, since it had been relatively cool at the time; his arm nearest Fenton had even had goosebumps, despite the other one feeling like it was scorching in the sun. It wasn't until the next time he'd sat near Fenton and it had happened again that he'd realized it wasn't just a one-off thing but a being-around-Fenton thing.

Not that that had stopped Kyle from blaming the air conditioning when Wes had pointed this out. Or from offering up the completely unhelpful, "That cold's going around. Maybe you're getting sick." He'd even hinted that Wes might be delirious—from some phantom illness or from lack of sleep, which had been hard to argue when he'd been up half the night in both cases.

Wes felt more prepared to make this argument, though. He'd been thinking about it for a long time. He'd gotten more than one raised eyebrow from Fenton when the kid had randomly turned around to catch Wes staring, but he was pretty sure mind reading wasn't something Fenton could do. Probably. Which meant that Fenton didn't know exactly how much Wes knew, and Kyle was good to keep a secret when it was important.

It didn't need to be a secret if Kyle took this well, of course, but Wes needed someone to test the waters with. And, frankly, he just needed to get this off his chest. To tell someone. Out loud. In a real conversation instead of a rehearsed one in his head.

"Okay, look, I know how this is going to sound, but hear me out."

Obligingly, Kyle stopped and looked at him.

Wes glanced around, but no one was near enough to overhear their conversation, and the wind should sufficiently scramble the words anyway. He edged over to stand by a lamppost so anyone who did walk by would be able to get past. Kyle followed, clearly amused if the smirk on his face was anything to go by, and leaned against the lamppost to wait. Careful to keep his voice low, Wes said, "I think Danny Fenton is actually Danny Phantom."

Kyle burst out laughing.

That response wasn't entirely unexpected, but it definitely wasn't the one Wes had hoped for. He scowled. "I'm serious! They sound exactly the same. They look the same. And they're never in the same place at once! Everyone seems to be fooled by the green eyes and the white hair and the costume change, but Phantom is Fenton. He has to be. Even their names are practically identical!"

Kyle kept laughing, even though he'd since slipped from the lamppost and banged his funny bone in the process of trying to stay on his feet. Now, he was just hugging the pole, trying to stay upright and drawing entirely too much attention to them.

"Stop it! I'm not making this up."

Kyle started shaking his head and finally choked out, "This is what you've been trying to wrap your head around?"

Wes crossed his arms and glowered at his brother, who had slid so that he was bent double trying to catch his breath. "Fenton is Phantom. You can't deny that."

"Dude," Kyle finally managed as he straightened up again to look Wes in the eye, "I don't need to."

"What?"

"Fenton is Phantom. Yeah. I don't know why you think that's such a big deal?"

"Wh—? Because Phantom is a ghost. That's a big deal! Being a ghost means he's dead."

Another round of laughter escaped Kyle, even though he should know by now that this was serious. "Hate to burst your bubble, but there's no such thing as ghosts. It's a costume change, like you said."

Wes had anticipated needing to further back up his argument that Fenton and Phantom were the same person, not that ghosts were real. He'd assumed acceptance of ghosts would come with the acceptance of Fenton being Phantom. He had no idea how Kyle could believe that a human could do everything they'd seen Phantom do. "Phantom flies. And…and he shoots energy blasts. And turns invisible. And goes though things. That's not a simple costume change."

"Yeah, the special effects rock."

Wes stared at his brother. "You…you can't call all of that special effects. You've seen how much Phantom can lift, right?"

"It's called a prop. Do you need me to draw a diagram? Teach you how these things work? Come to the Nasty Burger, oh young one—"

"Don't pull that. You are not that much older than me!"

"—and I will teach you the ways that are such a mystery to you."

Wes rolled his eyes. He'd need to gather more evidence to convince Kyle that ghosts were real, but maybe he hadn't been the only one to notice the similarities between Fenton and Phantom. Maybe Kyle was on to something. If Kyle didn't have any trouble seeing the resemblance—if he just thought it had taken Wes forever—then maybe everyone else was aware of it, too, but no one had had the guts to say it yet.

Well.

He could fix that.