"Sweetie, that's the third plate you've broken so far!"
"Danny, why do you keep dropping your books?"
"Mr. Fenton, clean up that mess! And detention for destroying school property again."
"Gosh, Danny, you've gotten so clumsy lately..."
"Danny, your hand's gone missing again."
Danny groaned as she thrust her hand under the lunch table hurriedly, looking around the room to see if anybody noticed. No one glanced in her direction, though Sam and Tucker were looking at her with matching looks of concern.
Focusing hard on the desire to make her hand visible again, she peeked at the offending limb to find that it was thankfully visible again. Danny sighed in relief and dropped her head to the table. She ignored the spike of pain that only added to the headache that was already there.
"Danny...?" Tucker said softly. "Are you alright?"
"No, Tuck," said Danny miserably, her voice muffled. "I'm not. I don't understand what's happening to me. People don't have body parts go missing or-or fall through tables or have stuff fall through their hands! It's not possible!"
"Danny, hush, you're getting too loud," Sam said hurriedly, noticing the mild attention their table was getting. After a few seconds of silence, their attention went elsewhere and the three of them sighed in relief before Sam turned back to the distraught girl.
"Listen, Danny. You've put this off long enough. It's been a week. You can't ignore it and this stuff is obviously just not gonna stop on its own. We need to confront this."
"Sam's right," Tucker added, and he grimaced when Danny's miserable eyes were turned towards him. "This isn't going away. We need to figure out what's up."
Danny stared at the two of them silently, wishing that she could simply ignore her two best friends and keep trying to pretend that everything was normal. But with no warning, her legs began to tingle strangely and the support of the bench she sat on disappeared as she fell through it and collapsed in a heap on the unsanitary floor of the cafeteria.
Instantly, the whole room burst into jeering laughter. All except Sam and Tucker, who leaned over in both fear and worry to check on her. Danny's cheeks burned with humiliation and misery as she groaned in pain. Rubbing her back, she looked up at the two of them and nodded subtly with resignation.
She couldn't ignore it any longer. It was time she stopped trying.
After school that day, Danny and Tucker both headed for Tucker's house while Sam excused herself to hers to gather a few things for the meeting. The two of them had no clue what she was getting, but didn't bother asking.
When they arrived at the house, Tucker made some half-hearted excuse about playing video games as they headed up the stairs to the boy's room. When they got there, Tucker closed the door and locked it. And they both sat in silence for a good minute and a half as they both waited for the other to speak.
The silence was broken when Danny felt herself tingle again and groaned before falling through Tucker's bed and onto the floor below it. Tucker cried out in alarm, but Danny, having done this before with her own bed, could only wrinkle her nose a little.
"When was the last time you cleaned under here, Tuck?" she asked. Tucker couldn't help but snort at the absurdity of the question, which in turn made Danny laugh and then sneeze from the dust, making Tucker laugh harder. Within seconds, the two of them had fallen into near-hysterics.
After a few minutes of harsh breathing, during which Tucker had helped his friend from under the bed, the silence threatened to overtake them again. But this time, Tucker wasn't having it and chose to make the first move. "Okay, first thing's first," he said, making Danny look up at him. "Can you make yourself... change?"
Danny paled a little. "W-What?"
"You know. Change. To the way you looked... After." Danny could practically hear the capital letter. "When you were a-"
"I know what you meant," Danny cut in, her eyes shut. "But I don't think I can."
"Okay," Tucker said carefully. "Why?"
"Well, because..." Danny sighed in frustration. "Okay, it's not that I can't. Heck, I can feel it, I know that I can. I just... don't want to."
Tucker blinked at that. "Wait, really? How come?" Danny looked across at him with this dark look on her face, making Tucker feel like he missed something really important.
"Tucker... I was dead." And Tucker froze, remembering. "My heart wasn't beating. I felt so cold. My skin was pale, my hair was white, my eyes were green... everything was wrong." Danny stared off into middle distance as she remembered. "But at the same time, it didn't feel wrong. The only way I knew it was unnatural was because I knew what I usually looked and felt like, but it was in that same way that you wouldn't know that a green sky was strange unless you grew up knowing it was supposed to be blue. I... I'm not explaining this very well..."
"No, no, you're okay," Tucker said, scratching his head in thought. "So, you're scared to change because you think you'll die?"
"I... yeah."
"But you're alive now."
Danny blinked. "Um, yeah, Tuck. And I kinda don't wanna die again."
"But see, that's my point. You didn't die in that accident. If you did, you wouldn't be here, or it would've taken a medical team to bring you back instead of a fancy light show. I... I think you might've become some sort of ghost."
Danny stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "Tucker, being a ghost kinda involves dying."
"Except that you're not dead." Tucker stepped towards Danny, grabbing her hand and placing it flat on her chest, where they could both feel the slow but firm pulse. "Your heart is still beating. You're standing here, talking to me. We didn't pull your body out of that Portal, you walked out of it yourself." Tucker's voice cracked here, and Danny took a shuddered breath. "Now, we need to figure this out. You've already thoroughly shown that ignoring it does absolutely nothing to help, so we're gonna have to learn about it. And the first step that I can think to take is to trigger that transformation. Okay?"
Danny stared hard at Tucker, and there was something behind her eyes that made Tucker want to shiver, but he held firm and stared back at her. After several long seconds, Danny finally nodded and stepped back. Tucker let her, dropping her wrist and giving her space.
A moment passed, and nothing happened. Tucker stood by watching intently and Danny stood with her eyes closed and her jaw clenched. But then, as though a switch was flipped, a ring of bright light formed around her waist. Tucker took a step back and watched with awe as the rings split into two, one breaking apart as it hit the floor and one dissipating into the air a few inches above her head.
Just as the rings disappeared, someone knocked loudly on Tucker's door, startling the two of them rather badly. Tucker crossed the room opened the door warily and sighed in relief as he saw Sam instead of his mother.
"C'mon in, Sam," he said, letting her in and locking the door behind her. "I've just gotten Danny to transform."
"Really?" said Sam with excitement, dropping the bag she brought with her to the floor. "Where is she?"
"She's right..." Tucker trailed off as he realized that Danny was no where to be found. "Danny? Danny, you still here?"
"Yeah," came a disembodied voice, and both Tucker and Sam blinked at the unfamiliarity of it. "Yeah, I'm... you startled me, Sam," she said reproachfully, and Sam grinned apologetically.
"Sorry about that," she said sheepishly. "Can you come back for us?"
"Uh..." after a moment of silence, Danny finally faded back into view, making Tucker and Sam's heads spin towards her. They couldn't help but stare as they got their first good look at Danny since the accident.
She was still dressed in the hazmat suit, but it was mostly black with silver gloves, boots, belt and collar. Her hair spilled in a wild tangle across her shoulders and down to her lower back, and was colored a brilliant white. Her eyes were a supernatural shade of light green.
And she was undeniably a female.
"This is amazing!" Sam said with her hands over her mouth, and the two other teens looked at her with vaguely amuzed expressions. Though Danny's was so interlaced with fear and discomfort that it came off as more of a grimace.
"Yeah," said Danny dubiously. "...Amazing."
"What, you don't think so?" Sam asked, circling the girl and looking her up and down. Danny had to firmly repress the urge to go invisible again.
"She was scared since she says she's dead when she's like this," Tucker offered, looking just as interested as Sam but having the self-restraint to keep his distance. "I disagree."
That made Danny turn towards him with wide eyes, her expression equal parts confused and upset. "What do you mean, you disagree? I can feel it, Tucker, I'm not alive right now. I'm-"
"Not dead," Tucker cut in firmly, his eyes filled with such conviction that Danny almost literally had no choice but to shut up. "Your heart may not be beating right now, but you're still here. And you can change back whenever you want, I bet. It's like this guy I saw on TV once - he could stop his heart for a full minute and restart it on his own no problem."
Danny stared at him. "...I've already been like this for five minutes, Tuck."
"Then it makes for one heck of a trick then, doesn't it?"
"I think you're missing the point here, Tucker," Danny said through gritted teeth.
"What, that you're dead? Which we all know you're not? Right." Tucker walked over to Danny and placed his hands on her shoulders. They both blinked, realizing that he had a couple inches on her now. Tucker shook it off, continuing to speak. "Danny, if you were dead, I couldn't do this. I couldn't touch you. I couldn't talk to you. I couldn't try to convince you that you weren't dead because it would be a fact that you were. So stop it."
Danny, too overwhelmed to speak, simply nodded. She looked over her shoulder to find Sam standing apart from them, her eyes suspiciously glassy. She still smiled, however, when she met Danny's eyes. "So," she said, almost cheerily but not quite. "How does it feel? Describe it for us."
Blinking at how surreal the situation was, Danny focused on herself for a moment. She pointedly ignored the uneasy stillness in her chest and paid attention to everything else. "I feel... light. Like there was a weight on my shoulders that I never knew about that's been completely removed."
"Is that because you're a ghost, or because you're a girl?" Tucker asked, and Danny marvelled that she had to think about it.
"You know, it might be a little of both," Danny conceded, before frowning. "But we never agreed that I was a ghost."
"Well, I don't see what else you could be," Tucker said candidly, stepping away from her and sitting down at his computer chair. "I mean, if nothing else, this sorta proves that ghosts exist, right?"
"...Right," said Danny slowly, not really seeing his point. Sam could, though.
"And your parents did say that turning invisible and intangible were the most basic abilities a ghost could have..."
Intangible. Is that the word for it? Danny thought to herself, but what came out of her mouth was: "You guys listen to my parents?"
"Hey, we're there for nearly just as many lectures on ghosts as you are, Danny," Sam said, rolling her eyes. "Even without believing they exist, something had to stick."
"Yeah, okay," Danny said, leaning against the wall. "But that doesn't prove I'm a ghost."
And then she turned intangible and fell through.
Twenty minutes and some panicking later, the three of them were finally back in Tucker's room. Danny grudgingly broke the silence this time.
"...Okay, so... I'm a ghost," she said, having spent the better part of the time with her upper body in the hallway and her lower half still in the room, trying to figure out how to purposely go intangible all while trying to stay quiet so that Mrs. Foley didn't come up to investigate. "I've seen the light. Now what?"
If Sam noticed the deadpan tone, she didn't say anything about it. Instead, she picked up her nearly-forgotten bag and said, "Well, one thing we can do is get you out of that jumpsuit."
Both Danny and Tucker looked at her like deer in headlights. "Huh?"
Sam sighed heavily in frustration. "Danny, do you realize that that thing is hanging off of you?"
Danny blinked and looked down. She was so caught up in everything else, she never even noticed. "Huh. Guess I'm a lot smaller now than when I'm in my... human form." And damned if that wasn't really weird to say.
"In any case," Sam said, "I brought some clothes from my closet for you to try. We're not the exact same size, but I'm closer to it than that suit is. Tucker, out."
"Wait, what? Why?"
"Because, even though Danny's always been a girl on the inside, she's now a girl on the outside too, and I don't think she'd appreciate having a peeping Tom for a best friend." And with that, Sam practically shoved the boy out of his own room and slammed the door behind him. The last thing he heard was "Now, I can't do much about those boxers now, but we'll get something for you later" and Tucker all but fled downstairs to the kitchen, never knowing that his red face matched Danny's entirely.
After gathering a large plate of cheese and crackers as slowly as he could get away with, just barely remembering Sam's eating habits and being strangely uninterested in meat at the moment, Tucker warily went back up to his room and knocked on the door. "Hey, uh, girls? Is it safe to come in yet?"
A beat of silence, then: "Come on in, Tucker. We're ready." Tucker hesitated a moment more, and then opened the door. What he saw nearly made him drop the plate.
Danny looked... well. She was dressed in form-fitting black jeans that showed off hips that she never used to have, along with a white tank top that reached down to her upper thighs, decorated throughout with abstract green designs. She also wore a jacket colored light green, and seemed more for appearances than to actually keep her warm, since it had such short sleeves. Sam had also apparently had another pair of black boots that nearly matched her own, and a green scrunchy barely contained the wild mess of hair that fell down Danny's back.
Sam snapped her fingers in Tucker's face, and he realized that he'd been staring.
"You..." he squeaked, and then he cleared his throat a little. "You look good."
There must've been something in his voice, because Danny's eyes widened. "Oh God, you're not going to try hitting on me, are you?"
"No. No, I'm not... that is, not that you're not... I mean..." Tucker continued to splutter and both of their faces steadily got redder and redder, and Sam just sat back and enjoyed the show for a little while.
Once the hilarity and embarrassment of the situation died down a bit, Sam went into details. "Some of the clothes are mine, and some of them are clothes that my parents bought for me," she said. "That's to say, anything lighter than dark green in the house is all them. But you look good in those colors," she added, making Danny blush. Interestingly, her cheeks turned green instead of red, but neither Sam nor Tucker thought it prudent to mention it.
Sam continued, "Still, what I really think you need is an outfit that's all you. So, that'll be my project."
"What do you mean?" Tucker asked, and Sam grinned.
"The way my parents are, there have been times where I haven't been allowed to buy anything darker than beige. So I had to make my own clothes. I've gotten pretty good at it." Danny and Tucker stared.
"Wait, are you saying you'll personally tailor an outfit for her?" Tucker managed to choke out. Sam nodded, and Danny gaped like a fish.
"W-Wait, wait, hold on. You're both talking like this," she gestured to her body as a whole, "is going to be a thing." Sam stared at her seriously.
"Do you want it to be?"
Danny blinked, thrown. She fell backwards onto Tucker's bed and absently played with the ends of her hair. However, the moment she started to speak, white rings appeared around her waist without warning, splitting apart and leaving her as a human boy again. The three of them were startled by the suddeness of the change, and Danny's fingers twitched helplessly in the air as the hair she so coveted had vanished.
Sam stood and walked over to Danny, only to sit beside her and place a hand on her shoulder. The outfit had vanished along with her ghost form, but Sam had a feeling it would still be there if and when she changed back.
Nobody said anything for a while, all of them lost in their own thoughts. Finally Danny lifted her head, clenching her hands into fists in her lap.
"I... I don't know what all this means," she said quietly, making the other two look at her. "But... I don't really want to give it up. I..." she chuckled ruefully. "I like it. It's strange, unnatural even, but I can't help it. I..." She felt a hand on her fist and looked up to see Tucker smiling with a vaguely grim look on his face.
"We get it," he said, and as Sam squeezed her shoulder in agreement, Danny couldn't bring herself to doubt him. "There's still a lot we need to figure out about this, but you wouldn't go back to the way things were even if you could, would you?"
"No," Danny said immediately, startling herself. Tucker nodded.
"Then it's settled," he said. "This is a thing now." Danny chuckled a little along with Sam. Tucker smiled. "You ready for it?"
Danny looked at him and Sam both, thinking. "Not really," she said, twisting her fingers into the hem of her shirt. "But I'll figure it out. You'll help me, right?"
"Was there really any doubt?" Sam said with a smile, and Danny knew with absolute certainty that there wasn't. Not even a little.
Okay, that's that for this chapter. Next one may or may not involve Vlad, depending on whether or not I can find a copy of Bitter Reunions that I can watch online and if I can reliably write an AU version of that episode without seeing it again. Vlad's hard and complicated to write, and I wanna do it convincingly, even if his lines wouldn't be original. Plus, I'm sure none of you just want a transcript of the episode, just with a female Danny, so there's that to consider.
In other news, thanks for all the support I've gotten so far! NebulousMistress, Remmy18, Princess of Rose, and GhostWriter267, you all get cookies! And thank you to all those who've alerted and favorited this story. It means I'm doing something right.
So, anyone with prompts or advice, please let me know! I even encourage criticism, as long as you're not being outright mean about it. I'm always working to improve my writing and make this plot as believable as possible. Please review and gimme your best shot!