Jasmine Fenton is no stranger to fear, but the terror-worry that bites in her gut is always worse when it's Danny.
He's her little brother, her charge. She's Big Sister Jazz, protector of baby Danny, and he's out there being shot at, swiped at, cut through. And she's here. Useless, guileless Jazz, who's accidentally sucked Danny Phantom into his own thermos more than once. Useless, guileless Jazz, standing rooted to the cracked concrete sidewalk, watching the lightshow as ectoplasm (blood) splatters the ground in wide, enchanting arcs. It shimmers like oil, unnatural in the sweet, burning sunset.
The ghost he fights is bigger than they're used to, meaner. It hits harder. Jazz thinks she caught Sam talking into the Fenton phones, calling it Salmacis. It's beautiful, in a horrific way. It's a woman, sort of, serpentine and dripping with phantom water. It weaves and darts between buildings, lashing out at Danny as he tries his hardest to keep up. It slips like liquid through his every grip, and there's only so many tricks he can pull, running as he is on about three hours of sleep and overexerted ecto-energy.
"Come on, Danny, come on," she chants to herself, her scuffed flats immovable as she watches, enraptured. Most of Amity Park knows to run from ghost fights by now; the ones who don't have just gotten a tad too comfortable. As it is, she—and Sam and Tucker, though they're hidden—is alone, out in the center of the carnage. She's the only one with a front-row seat. The only one to watch green cover the walls glowing, horrible in the wicked slashes it paints.
Salmacis is big as a small storefront, and Danny is so small. All his fighting has built him some muscle, and he's grown in stature over the past four years, a far cry from his scrawny fourteen. Before this ghost, though, he's a boy again, baby-faced and terrified. Before this ghost, running on nothing, he's got the same grip on his powers he did then: next to none.
It is not a surprise—it's awful, gut-wrenching, yes, but not surprising—when he goes down. And he goes down hard, slammed by Salmacis' tail, all muscle, into the side of an apartment building. If this were an action comic, he would've made a crater with the impact. As it is, this is real, and she's watching, and all that happens is she hears the sickening slap of his back against the brick before he's falling, crashing to the alley between the apartments and the tattoo parlor next door.
It's faint enough that she knows no one else will have noticed it, and this is the smallest of mercies, but she sees it—the tell-tale gleam of his transformation reverting, his body becoming human to expedite his healing on the human plane. Danny Phantom has run out of juice.
Salmacis hovers victorious, still dripping, its open maw full of pointed, vicious fangs. Its great head swivels to look down at Jazz, the only person in sight for a block.
Jazz does not have a Fenton thermos on her. Nor does she have a wrist blaster, or a lipstick ray, or the Fenton Peeler, which she has gotten fucking good with, by the way. All she has are her teal yoga pants, black flats, and her cracked cell phone tucked into her pocket. Nothing that will help her. Nothing that will save her.
Then, as it lingers there in the air, letting Jazz's fear mount, a comparatively tiny blast shoots toward it, hitting it in the side of the head, where an ear would be on a human. Salmacis whips to the side. Jazz follows its gaze. Across the street, ducked behind a parked car, Tucker crouches with an ectogun trained on Salmacis' intimidating stature. Jazz nearly cries out a warning as it lunges, but fear keeps her voice locked tight.
It's to her immense relief when she hears the signature sound of the Fenton thermos powering up, and a bright stream of light tugs at Salmacis' form, sucking it into the small capsule too fast for it to turn back around. It's Sam, just a few paces down the sidewalk from Jazz, hidden in a bush. Tucker had been her distraction.
Sam immediately stands and starts out into the street, beelining for the alley Danny had fallen into. She looks over her shoulder as she goes, making eye contact with Jazz. "You good?" she asks.
"Yeah," Jazz replies after a moment, her tongue unsticking itself from the roof of her mouth. Sam nods, then continues on, Tucker meeting her as they weave their way between slabs of cracked and broken stone and asphalt. After a moment, Jazz remembers motion, and she follows after them like a faint shadow, heading toward Danny. Her baby brother, bleeding.
It is—worse, significantly worse, than she expected it to be, when she gets there. Panic seizes Jazz as she gazes down upon his battered body, near entirely purple with bruising, dribbling (pouring) blood from cuts and scrapes and gashes, eyes closed, his breathing audible with the strain. Jazz's hands rise to cover her mouth involuntarily, shock an unconscious impulse.
Sam and Tucker are similarly frantic, but they deal with it more productively than she does, frozen, staring. Sam's pulled a shoddy first-aid kit from her purple spider backpack and is patching up what she can. Her wraps scream temporary, not even disinfecting the wounds. Tucker arranges Danny's limbs into a transportable position. Once that's accomplished, he grabs Sam's car keys—she gives them up without contest—and speed-walks out of the alley to, presumably, pull Sam's car up. She'd gotten it last year, when she turned sixteen. Since, it's replaced their mopeds as their main mode of transportation. Jazz has heard Danny refer to it as the 'getaway mobile' more than once.
Fuck, it's hard to think of him so endearingly right now.
"Jazz," Sam says, and something in her tone snaps Jazz out of whatever trance she'd fallen into. There's something about her voice: this sharp, violet, no-nonsense pressure. It startles Jazz into action, and she follows Sam's directions as if on autopilot. "Grab his legs. I'll get his shoulders. We're going to put him in my backseat."
"Okay," she replies, her voice small even to her own ears. The smooth hum of Sam's engine fills the alleyway as Tucker pulls up. "Okay."
Four years of ghost hunting and her limbs are still locking up. As she moves Danny's body with Sam's help, hefts it into the back of a teenager's car, she thinks—four years, a thousand fights, countless hours with the Fenton peeler pressed tight to her sweating skin, and she's still locking up. She knows this routine. She knows Danny's taunts, the choreography of his fights. She knows how to patch him up after. She knows Tucker and Sam's supportive maneuvers. She's done this song and dance and she—
She's still standing on that sidewalk, wide-eyed, afraid.
Sam drives. Tucker takes the front seat, and Jazz sits in the back with Danny's head in her lap. She strokes his hair, matted with dirt and blood and ectoplasm, and whispers reassuring things more for herself than him. Sam heads for her house; Pamela and Jeremy are out of town for an environmental law conference. Sam had wanted to go. She's probably glad she stayed; it would have killed her to be too far away to help.
"Big wet bitch," Sam is saying, her hands clenched on the steering wheel. Jazz barely registers it, her gaze locked on the blood in Danny's hair. "If Danny weren't so tired, he'd have wiped the floor with her. She got lucky."
They pull into the Mansons' ridiculous driveway, and this time both Tucker and Sam help carry Danny inside. They don't get farther than the parlor, where they settle Danny carefully onto a couch far too expensive to justify staining with blood. None of them particularly care; the Mansons can afford to replace it, and Sam's always all for wasting her parents' money.
"Sam, get some water and a few washcloths. I'm going to go upstairs and grab the big kit. It has disinfectant in it, right?" Tucker says, taking charge. He's always been the most competent of them when it comes to first aid. Sam nods, then gets up from where she'd been kneeling beside the couch.
"Jazz, could you get him out of some of his clothes, so we know there aren't any injuries we're not seeing?" Tucker asks her. That's—yes. She has a job. She can do it.
"Yeah," Jazz says, nodding, and then reaches back to tie her hair up.
Tucker and Sam both head out of the room, Tucker for the upstairs bathroom and Sam for, presumably, the kitchen. A goal now in mind, Jazz sets herself to peeling back Danny's overshirt, then his shirt, then, where necessary, his jeans.
He has a substantial scrape on his side that'll need disinfecting, but isn't deep. He has some bite punctures on his left arm, and his right calf. His thighs and waist are alright—it's a relief to be able to save him some modesty—but his feet are scraped, and he has bruises all over his chest, back, and going up his neck. She takes his overshirt all the way off, feeling bad for having to manhandle his unconscious form to do it, and removes his jeans. His calf injuries could be attended to with them still on, but they'd have to cut away part of his pant leg or risk cutting off his circulation by rolling it up.
"Okay," she murmurs to herself, sitting back on her heels and looking him over. She hears Tucker's feet coming back down the stairs. Sam's still in the kitchen.
Smoothing back some of Danny's hair, Jazz looks him over, biting her lip. As proud as she is of her brother—and she is proud, truly—she hates seeing him like this. One day he might not come back from it. The thought terrifies her.
There's still blood in his hair. Frowning, Jazz stands. As Tucker reenters the parlor, his pace swift, she turns to him. "He has wounds on his right side, his left arm, right calf, and his feet. Lots of bruising. I'd have checked on his ribs, but I wouldn't know what to look for." She glances at him, then continues, "I'm going to get some water of my own to clean up his hair. You probably don't want to wait to let him shower before you bandage him up."
"That'd be great," Tucker says, and she can tell he means it, but impatience is writ in his stance. He's itching to get back to Danny, to help him. "Thanks, Jazz." He doesn't waste any more time, kneeling at Danny's side and lifting his shirt, going for the scrape first since it isn't bloody enough to wait for Sam to mop it up.
Jazz passes Sam on her way out of the kitchen. She'd boiled water to sterilize it, and now carries a big pot with washcloths hung over its lip. She doesn't even acknowledge Jazz as she paces by, eyes dead-set on the parlor doorway.
Sam and Tucker's single-minded devotion to Danny catches Jazz off-guard, sometimes. She knows, logically, how long they've stuck around and how much they've stuck through; she knows that to have done so requires a certain amount of dedication. She's seen their love of him in their sweaty palms clutched tight around each other, in Tucker's forehead pressed to the covers at Danny's bedside, in Sam's smudged make-up, days old. In Danny, standing with them behind him, shielding them from the worst of everything—ghost attacks, yes, but high school, too. Everything they could possibly need protection from. Danny has a saving-people thing, but Sam and Tucker have a thing for saving him, evidenced in all the countless times they've practiced this routine: fight, fall, repair, repeat.
Jazz knows that she is the big sister. The nuisance, sticking her nose in her little brother's business. But they've had four years of experience doing this job together, and she's still an outsider.
She gets the water, then grabs a mini shampoo bottle from one of the first-floor bathrooms that has a shower—rich people—and heads back to the parlor, preparing herself to see him again, laid out like a corpse as Sam and Tucker while the minutes away, treating his injuries, pulling him back together.
(Sometimes she wonders what would happen if he got hurt so bad he couldn't take it. Would he collapse like ghosts do? Would his human body die? Would he become a ghost proper, or would he vanish? What would happen? What will happen?)
(She tries not to think on it too long.)
When she reenters the parlor, Tucker is on his knees, spreading ointment over the scrapes on Danny's feet. Sam has unwrapped the wounds she'd temporarily bandaged, and is dabbing one of her cloths at one of them, blood still welling from the gouge. Big, white patches have been stuck over the scrape on his side; his shirt is still pushed up enough for Jazz to see them. And he's still out cold, brow relaxed, but something of the pain he's in visible on his features all the same.
Sam is whispering lowly, and, though Jazz can't hear any of what she's saying, she can take a guess. Sam's purple eyes are red-rimmed. She sniffles, but her hands are steady, and every firm yet gentle motion she makes drips with a certain compassion. A knowing, an understanding, an I-have-been-here-since-the-beginning-and-I'll-be-here-for-the-end. Jazz has watched Sam love Danny, from best friend to more than to in-between, an equal, and she sees its epitome now: in the blood Sam wipes from his wounds, in the way her lip trembles but her hand does not.
Tucker is bandaging Danny's wounds with a precise, practiced hand. It's not quite gentle, but efficient, and this is the form Tucker's care takes: necessary more than kind, loving more than admonishing. Sam is the one who'll tear into him for his carelessness, for walking into a fight he had to have known he'd lose. Tucker is the one who'll wrap his arms around Danny's shoulders and hang there, minding his injuries, and say I'm glad you're okay. He will not say, you were so brave, because Danny was brave and it didn't matter. Tucker will say, I'm glad you're here with us, and it'll mean that much more.
And Jazz will be there, too. Watching them, those three, limbs intertwined so closely they could be one entity, like Salmacis and Hermaphroditus were, but without the coercion. This is a consensual singularity: three teenagers doing up each other's stitches, and pulling them out when the wound has closed.
Jazz inhales, lets it all out in one breath. Then she kneels, and reaches for Danny's hair.