A/N: Woah! I haven't uploaded anything to FFN in ages, and the first time I uploaded this I screwed it up massively. Oops. Anyways, I know this fandom is basically half-dead (snrk) but to be honest I just got back into the show and had a lot of feelings, lol. Jazz and Danny are the best big sister/little brother combo, and rewatching the show now that I have an adopted brother of my own... I don't know, it just made me super emo. I hope y'all enjoy (however many of you are left, lmao)
The fourth time he'd broken a metacarpal was the time Danny had figured out he could phase his bones back together; it had been desperation that had driven him to try, desperation born of the sound of frantic screams and the high-pitched shrieking of a ghost with four mouths, seven eyes, and a voice like a whip racing through the air. Let me save one person, he'd thought, please, God, at least one. After that he'd asked his mom for self-defense lessons; he needed to learn to throw a punch, and fast. He couldn't risk mangling his hands any further. He'd cited bullies, which was true enough. She'd been ecstatic. He'd learned a lot, but the first thing he'd learned was that Maddie Fenton was an elite hand-to-hand combatant, and utterly terrifying in every way.
The human hand is a delicate instrument, she'd said, straightening his wrist. We weren't designed to throw punches. The only knuckles that can take the force of the blow are the first two. The hit has to land on those.
And then she'd wheeled around and punched the hanging bag so hard it shook the rafters. Like that, she'd said, smiling at his awed look.
Injuries had racked up quickly, in the early days—his learning curve had been less of a curve and more of a ninety-degree-angle. His powers hadn't fully manifested; he was strong but not as strong as the ghosts he fought, he was fast but not fast enough. It hadn't seemed all that dangerous, but to a kid who grew up with loving parents in relative economic stability, in the nice part of town, nothing seemed dangerous. Danger was a foreign concept.
He'd learned, and quickly, what it felt like to have broken ribs; the first time he'd broken his ribs he'd had to run a mile in gym the day after, because for whatever reason, whatever power up above hated him especially. He'd run for a couple minutes before the agony rocketed past his pain tolerance, and he'd thrown up on the track. Dash had laughed—everyone had, actually, at weak, small Danny Fenton hurling his guts up after a little running—but Danny's ears were ringing and his skin prickled with heat and his chest was on fucking fire.
He'd learned, and quickly, that he had to tape his knuckles beneath the gloves of his ghost form, because the gloves didn't provide enough protection to keep his knuckles from splitting constantly. He learned how to kick in a way that didn't make his kneecap feel like molten lava. He learned that he had to stretch frequently, to lessen the muscle cramping from overexertion. Most of his ghost fights were brawls, but every so often he did get sliced open—Skulker would get in a lucky hit with his blade, he'd meet a ghost with claws or teeth, or shrapnel he didn't see coming would nick him. So he'd learned to stitch himself up with a sewing needle and floss, and when Jazz had caught him struggling to pull the skin together on a wound on his lower back, fingers slick with ectoplasm, she'd fumbled her way through it for him. She'd been crying. Danny didn't like to think about it.
The first time he'd lost a tooth, he'd panicked—but he figured out if he stayed in ghost form long enough it would grow back. Or, if he managed to catch the tooth and it was whole, he could phase it back into his mouth. The first time he'd broken his nose, he'd set it wrong, and now there was a frustrating lump in the bridge of it. His first concussion had been a mild one, but the second one had been gifted to him straight from hell; he could hardly stand without vomiting. Danny learned the hard way that his metabolism processed human drugs too fast for ibuprofen to be of any use—and Sam, using whatever mysterious connections she had, somehow got her hands on morphine to try and ease the pain enough so he could act normal. It lasted half an hour.
The broken jaw had been an interesting one. He'd had to ask Sam—in scribbly, messy handwriting—to direct him while he phased the bone back together. Initially he'd asked Tucker, but when he'd turned his jaw invisible, revealing the mesh of acid green muscle and yellow tendons beneath, Tucker had vomited. Sam at least was able to save the throw up until after Danny was done.
The injuries stacked up. When it became clear that they didn't just conveniently go away after they healed, that old breaks ached still and his scars twinged and itched on bad days and he started getting awful migraines after one too many concussions, Tucker had started listing things on an encrypted app in his phone. These days it was added to infrequently—Danny had gotten good, better than good, out of necessity. It was one of the things he didn't admit to anyone; the danger. How he woke up from nightmares of fighting already shifted into his ghost form, how his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth when his ghost sense bubbled up his throat, how he kept letters to his friends and family behind the fake back of his sock drawer just in case he couldn't crawl home fast enough. These days, he could, more or less, handle himself. But the muscle memory of the constant, looming threat of death had eaten away at him.
The physical damage was done. There were the good days, where he was fine, and there were the bad days, where every tiny fissure in him throbbed.
"Danny?" Jazz called, through the door. Her knuckles rapped sharply against it.
Danny rolled over, muffling a groan. "Jazz," he growled.
"Can I come in?"
Danny blew out a breath between his teeth and smothered himself with a pillow. The movement was stiff, jerky. His upper arm ached from a compound fracture he'd gotten a year ago. "Yeah," he mumbled.
The door opened slightly and Jazz slipped in through the small space, which, for some reason, annoyed him. She could've just opened the fucking door. But everything annoyed him on a bad day, so he screwed his eyes shut, refusing to meet her gaze.
"You don't look so hot," she said, cautiously.
Danny shifted. "You try fighting ghosts all the time. It's so much fun."
Jazz lowered herself on the edge of the bed. Her hand found his, and wrapped around it, delicately—everything Jazz did had this edge of softness, of tenderness, of kindness. She was too good for such an awful town. Danny was glad his eyes were closed, because they stung, a sensation suspiciously similar to how it felt just before he started crying.
"What can I do?" she asked.
Danny squeezed her hand and swallowed. He finally opened his eyes to glance at her, and her smile-that-was-actually-a-frown, her sharp eyebrows pinched together and raised upwards just slightly. Her pity tasted like bile in the back of his throat.
"I'm fine," he said.
Jazz's sad little smile turned downwards into a harsh frown. "Don't lie to me."
"It's just a rough morning. That's all."
"What kind of rough morning?"
"Y'know. Rough."
"Little brother," she said, "you have so many different kinds of rough mornings that doesn't narrow it down even a little."
Danny sighed. He rolled over until he was flat on his back, still holding her hand. "It's an 'everything hurts' day, I guess. I was up all night chasing Skulker. And now I'm paying the price."
Her thumb brushed his knuckles, rubbing the rough, scarred skin there. The gesture was so tender-hearted that his breath got stuck around a frog in his throat. Jazz had that effect on people, and Danny found it alternately annoying, alternately the lifeline he needed to pull through.
"I feel like I'm fifty fucking years old sometimes," he said, quietly. "And I can bench press a freight train. That's so fucking unfair."
Jazz leaned forward and pressed a kiss into his hair.
Danny wrinkled his nose. "Ew, gross, physical affection from my gross sister."
Jazz snorted. It was an ugly snort. "Physical affection is important to a healthy social life," she parroted.
Danny stuck out his tongue. "Bleh."
Jazz stood. "Hold still," she said. "Do you have a med kit in here?"
"What, are you kidding? It's under the loose floorboard over there. Under the space shuttle model. No, not Enterprise, under Atlantis. There you go. C'mon, of course I have a fuckin' kit in here, I only come home bleeding bright green once a month."
Jazz pried up the floorboard and dug through the kit, finally procuring a tube of Icy Hot. "This might help?" she said.
Danny sat up, wincing at the movement, and cupped his hands. "Toss it."
She lobbed it at him. He caught it deftly. "Thank fuck I haven't ran out," he said.
"I have more, in my kit."
Danny raised an eyebrow. "Your kit? The one you keep in your car?"
She nodded. "Just in case."
She settled back on the edge of the bed, watching him slather Icy Hot over his joints and old breaks. It helped. The pain wasn't erased, but it was better, and maybe there was, also, the warmth from knowing that Jazz knew enough about his hard days to keep extra.
"Do you want me to tell Mom and Dad you're sick?" she said. "I know—"
"Don't," Danny said. "They'll barge up here and scan me for, I don't know, ghost influenza. I'll just try and take off to Tucker's."
"They wanted to do spring cleaning today," Jazz said.
Ice burned up Danny's throat and he blew out a long, frigid breath. "Fuck," he said. "I have to go. I'll just take the grounding. Tell 'em I'm gone?"
"Ghost?" she asked.
Danny nodded, and, stiffly, slid out of bed. "Fuck me," he said, stretching.
"We need to clean up your language," Jazz said, with a sly grin. "It's unbecoming of a young man such as yourself."
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Danny chirped. Cold, tingling electricity swept over him, over his skin—his heartbeat slowed, his breathing all but stopped, the part of him that was staunchly human hissed wrongwrongwrongbadwrong. He kicked off the floor, floating a few inches off of the ground. "I have an ass-kicking date. And, uh. Thanks, Jazz."
She beamed. "Go save some people, hero. I'll tell Mom and Dad that Tucker had an emergency and needed a friend. They'll believe me."
Danny nodded. Hero, she'd said, casually—it warmed him, even despite the icy core beneath his sternum. He went invisible and intangible and took off through the roof, following his ghost sense.
It was easier to ignore the aches and pains if there were lives on the line.
A/N: And that's my first ever DP fic lol. Hope you enjoyed!