~Chapter 16~

Danny grunted as the needle was pulled from his neck. How could there have been a mix-up in the lab?! And he hadn't yet recovered from the previous vampire session. To make things worse, he was still going to be tested. He wanted to get back to his family and make sure they were okay. What if a ghost had escaped from the portal? It would be loose in the house! And with the twins...and they were so young and defenseless... He took a breath, remembering that Sam, Jazz, and his parents were there. Jazz wasn't much of a fighter, but she had the smarts to form a plan in case it was a powerful ghost. Sam knew where the Fenton thermos was; she could grab it and go if she needed to. His mom was a top-notch ghost hunter and knew exactly what she was doing. His dad...uh...well...yeah.

It was a comforting thought to know that if something happened to him, such as an accident during a test-or, as he recalled the agents telling him, a termination-his family would be safe. That was what mattered most to him. Maybe it was just because he was a hero. Maybe it was because he was a dad. He'd matured enough to understand these things now. Things that he didn't know when he was fourteen.

They took him into another room, one with a desk. There was a machine behind it with cords and what he assumed to be electrodes.

He was told to sit in the chair. He sat, feeling lightheaded from the loss of ectoplasm. One of the three agents who had escorted him here tore open little holes in his clothes, so the ends of the electrodes could be taped onto his skin. None of them were on his face, neck, or shoulders. The tape itself didn't hurt. The electrodes themselves didn't hurt. That is, until the test started. First he heard a buzz. The machine was being turned on. One of the agents walked around to the back of the chair. Another got in position to monitor him. The third stood sturdily in front of the door, guarding it in case he attempted to escape.

He heard a flick of a switch from behind him, where the machine was. He felt nothing though. The second switch was flipped. This time there was a strange, almost itchy sensation. With the next switch came a tingly feeling on his skin, only in the places where the electrodes had been attached. The fourth switch brought on a small pinch. The fifth, a harder pinch. The sixth, a sharp pain. The seventh, a sharper pain. It was enough to make him cringe. The eighth, a sensation that felt like a knife almost breaching his skin. The ninth, a severe pain flowing from and out of where the electrodes were. It made him jerk.

"What is this supposed to do?!" he shouted before another switch was flipped. A very sharp, longer-lasting-than-the-others pain spread throughout most of his body.

"It's electricity," the man behind him answered.

"You're electrocuting me?"

The man at the door smiled. The man behind him said, "Sort of. It may be painful, but it's not deadly. We want to see how ghosts react to large amounts of electricity."

Another switch. Danny grunted and started to struggle a little bit. "We react just like you do!"

No answer. Another switch.

"Look, Sam," Jazz's voice rang.

Sam had refused to come out of Danny's room. Well, technically it was a shared room now, but she still thought of it as his. Right now she liked thinking it was his. It let her feel closer to him...wherever he was.

"Yeah?"

Jazz sighed. "I'm sorry."

Sam's head shot up and she turned from the window, which she'd been staring at in hopes of seeing a white-haired ghost with catlike green eyes fly by. "Huh?"

The older teen looked down and took a deep breath before continuing. "I'm sorry for how I treated you earlier. I was just upset."

"It's not like you to admit you're wrong," Sam pointed out.

Jazz looked back up at her. "I know. Listen...the more I think about what you said to me, about me not knowing anything, the more I get the feeling you're hiding something."

Sam felt her heart do a lovely little acrobatic flip. "I-I'm not hiding anything, really. It's just...some things are better left unsaid."

"Yeah. Some things are."

Jazz continued staring her down. The girl could see into people's souls, read their minds, sense their aura! She was like a psychic! A strange, yet incredibly bright psychic! And she wouldn't let up until Sam told her everything. And sadly, this girl knew when someone was lying to her and when they were telling the truth. There was no getting out of this. Why did she have to be this way?!

Sam threw her hands in the air, surrendering herself to this situation. "Alright. You have me figured out. I...sort of slept with someone else."

"That's not all."

Turning back to the window, Sam found it a tad easier to continue. Now that she wasn't facing Jazz, things could be better. Plus, she could still keep an eye out for Danny.

"No. It's not," the goth gave. "I...I don't know who I slept with."

"Party?"

Sam shook her head. "I wish. I can't remember him."

"Drunk?"

Well, actually, yes. At one point when she'd supposedly taken her shirt off in front of Danny and called him sexy. But she wasn't drunk any of the three times she'd been attacked.

"No... Can you keep a secret?" the goth asked, not taking her eyes off the window for a second.

"I've been keeping Danny's for a long time now. But it depends. Is it good or bad?"

"Depends on what you consider 'bad'," Sam said. "I seriously don't want anyone to know about this. They'll get the same idea you did."

For a second, Jazz didn't reply...didn't even respond. Sam assumed she was trying to make up her mind about whether she could keep a secret or not. Danny's secret was huge and she'd been keeping it for some time, yet all of a sudden that which, by any other person, would be considered a less significant secret was too much to handle? It was absurd! And kind of offensive...

"Fine," Jazz said at last.

She sighed. Telling Jazz while facing a window was...surprisingly easy for some reason. "Okay. This goes way back, even before I found out I was pregnant. I was walking home from school when I got jumped by a man I didn't know. Three weeks later, Danny came to check on me. I was upset, I told him what happened, and he brought up the idea that I might be pregnant and got me some tests. The first two I took were negative and I thought I was fine, but then I had symptoms of pregnancy, I took a third test, and it was positive. Danny covered for me by saying he was the dad and everyone believed him. When I told my parents I was pregnant with Danny's kid they kicked me out. I got jumped again by the same man in an alley beside my house...my old house," she corrected, "and Danny found me. He brought me here and told me I could stay. He told me he wanted to help me raise the baby."

Deciding it was best if she left out everything that happened at Other Ways, she threw in a little time skip. "After about three and a half months we found out that the baby turned out to be babies. Danny said he was fine with twins. And he's been helping me raise them ever since they were born. He's even told me he wants to be their father."

Sam waited for a reply.

It didn't take long before one came. "I'm so sorry, Sam... I...I had no idea... I wish I could've been there-"

"To help?" The goth cut her off. "It's the same thing Danny said when I told him what happened."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?"

"Because..." She faltered. Because what? She'd been scared, ashamed, weak. She got depressed, started cutting because of it, and wound up in a hospital. Two hospitals actually, if one counted Other Ways. But there was one thing she didn't want... "...I don't like the pity."

"Maybe that's true, but there's something else, isn't there? Something deeper," Jazz replied.

She sighed. Of course the psychologically-obsessed person in the household would guess the truth about this. "Yeah. It was embarrassing. And...I didn't want to admit I was so defenseless."

"Why were you so ashamed? It's not your fault," the red-haired teen said.

"Again, same thing Danny said," she pointed out. "But the truth is, I could've prevented this. All I had to do was take a different path home, and none of this would've ever happened."

Jazz thought for a second before asking, "Did Danny ever tell you how badly he blamed himself for that? And for everything else that happened to you?"

"No...he didn't..." Sam thought aloud.

Jazz began to explain. "I only realized it after he came back from Other Ways. He got mad at himself-really mad-and threw the pamphlet across his room. Then he punched a pillow but it wasn't enough. When I finally opened the door and came in, he was shaking and crying. He didn't know what to do. He was really worried about you. He was so angry with himself that he was convinced it was all his fault. Even today, I think he still blames himself. He loves you, always has and always will. I bet when he found out you were raped-"

"Twice," Sam confessed, cutting her off at the perfect time to finish her sentence. "The first time was when we found out I was pregnant. But there was a second time when Danny found me out in a really bad storm. And until now, only he knew. But being as you tend to manipulate people into telling you more than they want to, I thought I would go ahead and tell you now so I wouldn't have to deal with it later. Don't tell anyone."

"Okay, I won't. And thank you for entrusting me with-"

"I didn't entrust you with anything. You would've found out sooner or later. It's the only reason I told you. And another thing...don't tell Danny you know about this. I hate talking about it and it'll just bring up a conversation."

"Done and done. I swear I won't tell a soul," Jazz promised, holding one hand to her chest and another up in the air.

Sam nodded her head and for the millionth time, scanned the city skyline thoroughly. As expected, no hint of Danny. Again she tried to believe he'd simply gotten lost while chasing off a ghost. But he had gone out of his way to get back to her before, and he would do it again no doubt. Well, there was no doubt in the fact that he would try to come back. There was a ton of doubt about whether or not he could make it back though.

The only real thing he suffered from that stupid test was fuzzy hair. Looked kind of like someone rubbed his head with a supercharged balloon. And here people said hat hair was bad... Thankfully it wasn't so bad. If his life was a sitcom, he'd have been zapped every other episode. He'd gotten used to it after a certain amount of time.

As he was being led out of the room, he heard through the open door two men walking up to each other. One of them was mumbling, so hearing him was pretty much pointless. However, the second man didn't mumble at all. He wasn't loud, granted, but he wasn't soft either. And Danny was glad he could hear him. There was important news he needed to know coming from that man's mouth.

"We found something interesting you might want to know about," the man said.

He was shoved out the door and into the pure white hallway, where they would either subject him to another test or finally set him free. He stopped for a moment, and surprisingly the guard behind him allowed him to stay put, and he could clearly hear the rest of the conversation.

"What's that?" the guard asked.

The first man looked-probably seriously, considering those glasses blocked almost all expressions-at the guard; the second man followed this action.

"That ghost kid you're escorting," the first man began, again soft-spoken, "isn't all ghost. He doesn't take on the form of a human, he is a human."

The guard almost laughed, smiling in disbelief. "Humans can't turn into ghosts."

"Well this one can. He's only half ghost. His DNA proves his other half is human," the first man said, clarifying any suspicions the guard had. He quickly added, "A living human."

"This is preposterous. Do you even hear yourselves? If he's really half human then he would..." The guard's eyes widened and he looked at Danny in shock. "Then he...would have to have a family..."

"Exactly. And in order to be half ghost, one parent would be a ghost and the other human," the second man told them both.

The first man turned to Danny. "We've figured out who you are. Now you're going to tell us where your family is, or else we'll find out ourselves. I doubt you'll want that."

The halfa's eyes widened. They weren't kidding. Even though they were wrong about his parents, they would go to the ends of the Earth trying to reveal who brought him into this world. Even his friends would suffer from this. And worse...if they found his parents, they would find Sam. If they found Sam, they would find the twins. If they found the twins it was all over. Something would happen, he just knew it. He couldn't let anything happen to anyone. He'd rather die the most horrible death than let them be discovered.

It was utter betrayal to tell them anything about his family. "I haven't seen them in years, don't have a clue where they're at."

"You're too young to have left your family behind, if you really are half human," the guard pointed out, gripping the back of the rope tightly to prevent any attempts to escape.

They already had his DNA to confirm that he was indeed a halfa. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't argue with them. He had to face facts, they'd figured him out. And all with a needle, too. Which kinda sucked considering he didn't need to go through those tests to begin with.

"I won't tell you anything," he spat. "You can do whatever you want to me, but leave them alone."

"We can't do that. How do we know you haven't already bred, what with your teenage hormones and such?" Wow...that had to be the most uncomfortable question ever. Technically he was raising kids but he never 'bred'. That was just uncalled for. And really, really mortifying.

"I don't even have a girlfriend!" he lied.

"And what reason can you give us to believe you?" the first man asked, this time speaking up. "How can we know you're telling the truth?"

Danny struggled in his rope, testing it to see if there was any loose spot, any possible way to somehow squirm out and free himself. But there wasn't. Even with the guard holding it, the rope was still too tight to escape. Plus, there were agents crawling all over the place like disgusting little cockroaches. It seemed like an impossible place to get out of unless they let him. Another thing that sucked...

"Just leave them alone! Please! They didn't do anything wrong!" he pleaded.

The guard let go of the rope and pushed him forward which he tried to resist. It only made him fall to the ground.

"They've been harboring you this whole time. They've hidden you from the government for too long now. We can't take any chances," the first man explained, forming a line in the middle of the guard and second man.

The guard pulled him up. He wanted to keep resisting them, he really did, but it was impossible. They knew he was half human. They knew he had a family. They knew his family had protected him all this time. He had to get back to them somehow. At first, time was nothing. They would've let him out anyway. But now time was everything. They never said they knew what he looked like, they only said they knew he was human. It wasn't enough information to catch him once he got out of this place.

His eyebrows furrowed. No. He had worked way too hard to be cooped up in some government facility that was now threatening everyone he loved. By refusing his freedom, they refused his cooperation. Now they were about to see what a breeding human-ghost freak could really do, powers or not.

A/N

Sorry about the delay, guys. :( We don't know what's causing them, but I've been having really strange, sudden, and frequent dizzy spells. They can last hours and are so bad that I won't be able to see the letters on the keyboard. The only way I can describe it is this: a rocket taped to a merry-go-round. Again, we don't know why I have them or what triggers them, but if this keeps up I'll have to go to a hospital. So please, PLEASE forgive the slow update and perhaps the next chapter's delay (hopefully there won't be one, or at least as long and update as this one). And if I have to go to a hospital because of these dizzy spells, then it means a slower update for the next chapter. I am so sorry, guys, but I have no idea what's going on with me. Again, I'm really sorry about the slow update and maybe the slow update of next chapter.

I'm starting to feel a little dizzy already, and it'll turn bad soon, so no review quota and no review replies. :( I won't be starting on the next chapter anytime tonight. I seriously can't tell you how sorry I am. D: