A/N: Hey. *nod* This took longer than expected, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Very different from writing oneshots of a similar nature for DGM, though... *muse* Bad things like this just don't happen in Danny Phantom, so they're not prepared. On the other hand, in the Order, it's more of a surprise for awful things not to happen.

Thank you to RMStudio, Lol, Kit, Invader Johnny, person, Kiri Kaitou Clover, xelano123, and guest for reviewing!

Title: Veritas

Author: liketolaugh

Rating: T

Pairings: None

Genre: Tragedy/Angst

Warnings: Character death

Summary: In the end, it's ghost hunters who end Danny Phantom. (Danny's death, and then the things that come after.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom, nor do I want to. If I owned it, I'd have to take responsibility for the monstrosity that is Phantom Planet.

Jazz got the call at eleven at night.

"J-Jazz, your brother's i-in the ho-hospital. We… we need to… to tell you something."

Her mother's stuttered speech had lit a panic in her like nothing else, but before she could ask any questions she'd hung up. Five minutes later, she was driving to the hospital as fast as she could, praying to God that she was wrong.

Please, let her be wrong.

She got to the hospital in record time (and possibly ran a few red lights) and barely remembered to turn her car off before she stumbled out of it.

Inside the waiting room, Jack had one arm around Maddie, but he looked to be the one closer to tears. Both of them were deathly pale and shaking, and she could swear her heartbeat stuttered.

"Is he okay?" were the first words out of her mouth when she reached them. Her flying orange hair was a mess and her clothes mismatched, with pajama pants and a day shirt she'd hastily thrown on.

Maddie's head jerked up, and she flinched as if from a blow. Jazz faltered.

"He's gone, Jazz," she whispered. Her voice cracked. "I'm so sorry."

Jazz froze.

I'm so sorry.

"You didn't," she whispered, the fears that haunted her on late nights surging up.

I'm so sorry.

Jack didn't lift his head, one huge hand covering his face. Maddie's arms were wrapped around herself, leaning into her husband, eyes reddened and swollen and face streaked with tears.

Still, her eyes widened like a deer caught in the headlights. "Jazz. did you… did you know?"

"You killed him," Jazz realized, voice rising and high-pitched, too horrified to process the way the activity in the (regardless mostly empty) waiting room stopped. "You killed Danny!"

Jack's head jerked up, and his eyes were swollen too. "We didn't know, Jazz! Galloping gargoyles, if we'd known… If we'd known he was Danny Phantom..." He swallowed, and his expression was crushed and sickened and Jazz didn't care, she didn't. Every bone in her body was screaming that they killed Danny, they'd been trying and they finally succeeded!

"You shouldn't have been trying!" she screamed, tears starting to spill down her face. "We might've done everything we could to keep you from finding out, but Christ, what kind of parents can't tell that their child sneaks off to fight every day? Every night?"

Maddie surged up, horror and misery and realization mixing together to create an ugly, hurtful sort of anger. "You did- Were you covering for him, Jasmine? You didn't… you didn't condone this?"

"Of course not!" Jazz snapped, breath hitching. Oh, God. He's dead. Danny's dead. Mom and Dad killed Danny. "But he's my little brother and he was terrified, Mom! I wasn't going to break his trust, because I thought you'd never really kill him!"

There were murmurs in the background. There were only a few people in the waiting room, one or two or three, but all of them were talking, frozen still and watching them. Jazz didn't care; all of her attention was on Jack and Maddie.

"We were trying," Jack croaked. He might've been up with Maddie, backing her up, but Danny's death seemed to have hollowed all the spirit right out of him for once. "We were always trying."

"He was a hero!" Jazz snapped back, voice cracking horribly. "I thought… I thought you were smart enough to realize that eventually!"

"You could have told us," Maddie hissed, face scrunched with the effort of holding back her tears, fists clenching. "This should never have happened."

A sob ripped free from Jazz's chest. "You're damn right, it shouldn't." She turned to leave, and Maddie reached forward to grab her elbow.

"Where are you going? We're not done here, young lady!"

"I'm going to Sam's," Jazz replied, trying to keep her voice as steady as it was venomous. "Someone needs to tell Danny's friends that he's dead." She hesitated, and then continued, glaring at the ground with her voice twice as heated, "And I'm not coming home tonight. Or tomorrow. I might not come home ever."

Maddie's expression fell all over again, crushed as if by the weight of the world. "Jazz…"

"Goodbye, Mom."

She pulled free and headed for the door again, and this time, she was met with no resistance save the sobs of her mother and father.

By the time Jazz reached Sam's mansion, she was half a step from a breakdown, and when she reached the front door, her face was blotchy and she couldn't stop crying long enough to speak.

Danny, I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry…

The man who answered the door tried to speak to her, but she wasn't listening. Fortunately for her, though, she attracted Sam's attention, and she pushed the butler out of the way to get to Jazz, who felt the arm going around her shoulders and instinctively embraced the other girl, still crying.

"Jazz?" Sam's voice was frantic. "What's wrong? Is it Danny?"

"He's dead, Sam!" Jazz got out, squeezing the younger teen. "Mom and Dad, they-"

"Oh my God," Sam whispered. Jazz felt Sam pull at her, and she went with it, sobs slowing but still in a state of shock. "We need to tell Tucker. And-"

"I know," Jazz whispered, a little calmer now.

In Sam's room, Sam sat Jazz down on her bed and then called Tucker, barely able to keep her voice steady, and then hung up to slump beside Jazz, curling up in a ball and hiding her face in her arms. She didn't cry as loudly as Jazz had, but she was shaking.

Tucker found them like that when he burst in, wide-eyed, hat and glasses lopsided, fifteen minutes later. "It's past midnight, what happened?"

"Danny's parents," Sam croaked, lifting her head. Her makeup was smeared - she hadn't gotten around to taking it off yet - and her voice shaky. "They got him. Tucker, they got him."

Tucker stared for a long moment, uncomprehending. "W-what?"

"Don't make me say it again!" Sam tried to snap, but her voice broke, and she hid it again, shaking worse than ever. "Danny's dead. He's dead and he's not coming back."

Tucker just kept staring, and then he shut the door and fell just barely into a chair, suddenly boneless. "Oh, God," he said weakly, sounding out-of-breath and dizzy. "You're serious."

"This isn't something we could joke about," Jazz whispered. She hadn't looked up when he entered and she didn't look up now. She just stared at the floor, hunched over, Sam's bedsheets fisted in her shaking hands, and she clutched onto them like a lifeline. "They called me an hour ago and told me Danny was in the hospital, and when I got there…"

She couldn't speak after that, but she didn't need to. Tucker collapsed backward, eyes squeezed shut.

"Oh, God," he repeated faintly. "Oh, God."

After Danny's funeral, Sam went into Fentonworks.

It was the only time she could rightly expect the house to be abandoned; the Fentons had been secluding themselves there since Danny's death three days before, but they'd come out for this. Sam hated to leave Jazz with them, but she was confident that the older girl could avoid them if she wanted. And oh, did she want to.

Jazz had been staying with Sam for the past few days, unable to face her parents, and Sam couldn't blame her. Coming out was hard; Jazz hadn't, yet, but Sam and Tucker had, and they'd been pelted with questions from all angles until Sam blew up at one frightened, inquisitive boy.

Because everyone in the town suddenly knew, they knew about Danny and knew what happened, and they wanted to know more, and Sam couldn't take it.

They had no right.

Sam went straight into the basement and stared hatefully at the portal for a very long time. If this portal didn't exist, none of this would have happened. Danny wouldn't have had to fight. He wouldn't have spent the past few years hiding. He wouldn't be dead.

"I hate you," she hissed, and her fist clenched around the ring in her hand. Her voice rose. "I hate you, Danny! Why did you have to be the hero? Why couldn't you tell your parents, or run away? Why did you have to die, you idiot? Don't you know we still need you?" Her voice cracked. "Don't you know I still need you?"

She waited. There was no answer; Danny probably wasn't in the Ghost Zone. She wasn't that lucky.

After a moment, her expression twisted, and she drew her arm back and, as hard as she could, she threw the ring - the old promise ring Danny had asked her to hold - into the Ghost Zone.

"Take it!" she screamed. Her eyes burned with the threat of tears, but she refused to cry. Her pride wouldn't let her. "Take it, you bastard! And don't you dare forget!"

It was Tucker who thought of calling Vlad, a week after Danny's funeral. Say what you would about Vlad's methods - and Tucker did have quite a lot to say about his methods - but Vlad had always cared about Danny.

Tucker pulled his phone out and tapped in Vlad's number, and, seconds later, Vlad growled into the phone, "How did you get this number?"

"Dude, you programmed it into my best friend's phone," Tucker sniped back. Several times, actually, since Danny kept deleting it. "It was kind of hard not to."

Vlad was silent for a long time. "What do you want?" he finally asked grudgingly.

"Look." Tucker sighed and leaned back against the wall, feeling tired. He'd always felt tired lately. Things just… weren't the same without Danny. "I hate talking to you as much as you hate talking to me, so I'll make this short, alright?"

"Then do so," Vlad gritted out.

"Danny's dead."

It was like a blow to his chest, every time he said it aloud. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, fist clenching. Vlad was again silent.

"What?" Vlad asked at last.

"He's dead," Tucker repeated, strained and frustrated. "He's gone. How many ways do you want me to say it?"

Silence.

"This isn't funny," Vlad said, but his voice was sort of strangled and breathless where it wasn't enraged. This far away, Tucker wasn't worried.

Much.

"No," Tucker agreed. "It's really not." He paused, but Vlad didn't seem ready to speak. So he continued. "Look, I don't really like you, and Danny didn't like you, but I know you cared about him, alright? So I thought you should know. And you missed the funeral, by the way. It was pretty big." Since his identity had been exposed right after his death. It had been hard for all of them; Sam had left early.

More silence. And then Vlad hung up.

Tucker couldn't even bring himself to care. He just sighed and slumped a little further against the wall. "You're welcome," he said to the air.

As it turned out, Vlad took Tucker's words very much seriously, and he flew straight out to Amity.

He didn't stay for very long.

Tucker wasn't there for the fight itself, but Sam was. Jazz wasn't - she was still staying with Sam.

"He didn't reveal his own secret, but it was a close thing," Sam told them. "He called them irresponsible and terrible and so on- And he's not wrong," she added with a scowl. "I thought Mr. Fenton was gonna cry, he looked so awful." She shrugged, scowling at the ground. "And he looked like he'd been crying, too - Vlad did, I mean. He's really cut up."

Jazz sighed. "He texted me," she said suddenly. "Offered to let me stay, and pay for my college to boot."

"Are you gonna accept?" Tucker asked her, hardly able to believe he was even considering it.

Jazz just shrugged, dipping her head so they couldn't see her eyes.

"But that wasn't the most important thing," Sam said suddenly, drawing both their attention. "I think… I think the Fentons are going to go back into ghost hunting."

Jazz's head jerked up, eyes going wide. "They wouldn't."

"They would," Sam said with a scowl. Then she slumped abruptly and sighed. "But I can… See where they're coming from. We can't keep the ghosts back ourselves, and… It's what Danny would have wanted."

The last sentence cast a silence over the small group, and then Tucker nodded.

"Yeah," he muttered. "I guess he would have."

The weirdest thing, Sam thought, was the effect the revelation and Danny's death had on the population of Casper High.

All of them were walking on eggshells around Sam and Tucker. And with how fragile Sam suddenly felt, how close to screaming or to tears, she couldn't really blame them, though she wished they would stop. She just wanted to forget it.

She wondered if her parents would consider moving.

The Guys in White weren't in town anymore; they'd left, suddenly and mysteriously. Dash had apologized to Sam and Tucker - Tucker told him to forget it, it didn't matter anymore. Sam agreed.

Dash hadn't approached them since.

Valerie hadn't come back to school yet, Sam saw Paulina crying by herself several times, Kwan was wondering around sort of lost…

"Ms. Manson," Lancer called out, voice soft like he thought she'd break. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to refocus.

"Sorry," she muttered.

Lancer just nodded at her, eyes solemn, and turned back to the board. Without looking at them, he added, "I'd like to speak to you and Mr. Foley after class."

Sam nodded, not really caring that he couldn't see her, and he seemed to accept her lack of an answer, continuing with the lesson.

After class, Sam and Tucker both went up to Mr. Lancer, who fisted his hands on his desk and took a deep breath.

"Mr. Foley… Ms. Manson… About Mr. Fenton." He trailed off, and Tucker crossed his arms, turning his head away. Eventually, though, he prompted,

"What about him?"

Sam crossed her arms, but it ended up more like she was hugging herself and she didn't even care. She clenched her jaw and focused on not crying. It was harder than it should have been. She wasn't this weak.

Lancer stared at them, and for a few minutes, he opened and closed his mouth, making several false starts before he finally sighed and shook his head.

"Nothing. I apologize for taking up your time." He pulled over a couple and late passes and filled them out silently. "Have a good day, Mr. Foley, Ms. Manson."

"Yeah," Sam said acerbically, even knowing it wasn't Mr. Lancer's fault. "We'll have a real good day."

So I hope that this seemed in character and believable... Like I said, it's been a while, and never this intense. *smile* Thanks for reading, and please review!