Chapter Three: When You Wish Upon a Star, Sometimes It Does Make a Difference Who You Are

Awaking with a start, Danny glances at his clock as he snaps up in bed. It's only three a.m., and after taking a long, deep breath he flops back down, wiping the sweat dripping down his brow with the back of his hand even as he shivers from the cold. He's pretty sure he didn't scream in his sleep—after all, his sister isn't standing in the doorway right now, and neither are his parents—yet he knows he had nothing but nightmares. Desperately he wishes he could recall them, yet the only thing he remembers from his dreams is feeling a horrible pain in his chest and something cold against his back.

As he lies awake in bed, a puff of cold air escapes from his mouth, his ghost sense fogging the air for a moment. Although he knows that he promised his mother mere hours ago that he would not fight ghosts without a team of allies behind him, Danny finds himself shifting forms and flying through his window as he quietly hums the song that is still stuck in his head. Although it hurts, Danny forces himself to ignore the pain that seems to flow through his ghost form as he goes outside to face the threat.

And much to Danny's surprise, the ghost floating through the city is the very ghost he was desperately hoping to see, no matter what he told his friends and family earlier.

Desiree.

"I wish that I knew the truth about what happened to me during those three weeks I was missing!" he declares loudly when he's mere feet away from her, and the wishing ghost jerks in surprise as she twists about to face him, already starting in on her catch-phrase.

"So you have wished it, so shall it—oh, it's you," she pauses when she finally realizes just who made the wish, and a strange smirk appears on her lips. "Unfortunately for you, young Phantom, I don't have to grant your wishes anymore."

"What?" he sputters, his green eyes widening in surprise. "But—but you grant every wish you hear! That's, like, your whole thing!"

"Except yours, now," she chuckles. "Someone else wished that I would stop granting the wishes of you and those pesky little friends of yours. Oh, and your family. Just about every person who knows your secret can no longer ask me to grant your wishes, so don't think you can just suck me into that thermos and have one of your silly little allies do it for you, child."

"Who?" snaps Danny as he charges an ectoray in his hands. "Who told you to do that? Was it Plasmius? Skulker? Walker?" Desiree smiles at him, merely floating there with her arms crossed arrogantly across her chest. Her red eyes gleam in the darkness, for the wishing ghost clearly enjoys that her newfound inability to grant his wish is tormenting him much more than even she could've hoped for. "Which one of my enemies was it?"

"What makes you think it was an enemy?" she taunts, and at this point, Danny can't contain himself anymore. Firing a powerful ectoblast at Desiree, Danny flies forward and then slams her with his energy charged fists as she dodges the shot he fired at her. His blows send Desiree careening towards a wall, and the wishing ghost barely manages to go intangible in time to pass harmlessly through. Her laughter echoes powerfully through the silent, empty streets, and Danny's eyes flash in frustration.

"Perhaps it was a friend," she continues darkly, and Danny's glances rapidly around the empty buildings as he tries to figure out where she's hiding. He knows that she's close, but it's so dark, and he's hurting so much, and that stupid song won't leave him alone long enough to concentrate anymore. He knows now that he definitely wasn't ready to start fighting again, to start patrolling and protecting the town, for it's been ages since he's actually struggled in a fight against Desiree. At this moment, he's wondering if he even has what it takes to face down the Box Ghost, which for him might be one of the lowest points in his entire ghost-fighting career. "Someone you consider an ally."

"My friends wouldn't do that to me!" he growls stubbornly, unable to help himself, but the thought nags at him anyway. "Damn it, Desiree, just tell me who did it!"

"Why should I?" she laughs. "You're my enemy, Phantom. I have no desire to do you any favors."

As Danny floats there, he heaves a heavy sigh. He's in no mood for this, for her games and her taunts in the dark. The one hope he held onto in case Jazz fails is now gone unless he can somehow manipulate Vlad or someone else into making the wish for him (which even he knows is depressingly unlikely), and floating back down to the ground, he lets himself transform back into a human, not caring that he's in the middle of his street. It's three in the morning, after all, and the few who might have woken up when the ghost attack began are likely hiding in their beds. "Fine, then. You win. I don't care. I didn't even grab the stupid thermos. By the time people are actually awake and making stupid wishes, the ghost hunters will have found you and caught you anyway."

At first his frustration is greeted by silence, and believing Desiree to be gone, Danny heads back towards his house. He knows he should fly back to his room so that his parents will be less likely to notice that he left, but he just can't bring himself to transform again tonight. This time was by far different from earlier when he was showing off in front of his family and friends. It hurt much worse, and that cold feeling wouldn't leave him at all.

"You're actually walking away and letting me do as I please?" she speaks when Danny is about ten feet from his doorway, and he pauses, turning back to face her in what was an empty street only moments before, yet now she's floating there, her head cocked to the side like a dog as she tries to figure out if he's simply tricking her somehow. "You're going to just let me win?"

"Like I said, what's the point?" he grumbles. "I'm tired, and talking to you is getting me nowhere. Go harass Valerie or Vlad or something. Just leave me alone. I'm not in the mood to listen to you taunt me, and I've been kinda having trouble with the witty banter lately."

"You're not as fun as you used to be," she complains. "Half the reason we ghosts come here is to fight you and test our skills against yours. If I knew you'd be like this, then perhaps I would have granted his wish differently."

Danny freezes in his tracks, and for the first time, he feels a kind of cold that has nothing to do with ice powers or lost memories. It's dread, pure and simple, that comes from an understanding so powerful that it's practically an instinct. "You're the reason I have no memory?" he whispers. "Someone wanted me to lose my memories, and they used you to do it, didn't they? I knew it! I knew it wasn't just some stupid repression thing!" He pauses, then, as he starts to really think through what this means. "But if it's because of a spell, then that means I can't recover my memories through Jazz's stupid therapy sessions, can I?" Danny receives no response from the wishing ghost, but the look she gives him just before she vanishes from sight again suggests that he's right. "But why isn't it like that time with Sam and her wish? Why am I—why does it hurt all the time?"

Suddenly he's no longer talking to Desiree as he continues to ramble on, pouring out this heart to darkness. "Last time I didn't remember anything at all, but this time that stupid song won't leave me alone, and there's that weird cold feeling I get and the pain and the nightmares . . . Why's it different? Did whoever wished for me to lose my memories want it to be like this because they knew I'd go crazy or something?" Silence greets him from the darkness, and Danny nearly falls to his knees as the tears begin to build. He's never felt quite so hopeless as he does right now—or at least, as as far as he knows he hasn't. "Damn it, Desiree, can't you at least tell me that much since I'm just letting you go?"

For a moment he waits there, and doubting that she'll ever answer, he eventually forces himself to walk the rest of the way down the sidewalk and to the door of Fenton Works. His hand is on the knob and the lights from the neon sign are casting their faint, eerie glow on Danny when she finally replies.

"Because, Phantom, she didn't wish to erase your memories. She wished for me to rewrite time, and since those experiences never actually happened in the rewritten timeline, you had no memories of them," explains Desiree, and it sounds as if she'll say no more when another whisper from her comes to him as if carried on a breeze. "And besides, child, some memories leave scars that can never be completely erased."

And it's then that he knows that while his memories might not have been repressed by his subconscious or anything like that, that doesn't mean they aren't as terrible as he and everyone else believes, and suddenly it's more important than ever to him to get those memories back. Someone thought that they were important enough-or terrible enough-to have erased from his mind forever, and since Danny refuses to believe that one of his allies ever would have dared to tamper with his mind (or disrespected him enough to do so, as the case might be), he believes that whatever his memories contain must be some piece of crucial information that one of his enemies doesn't want him to have. Maybe it was Vlad. Maybe the man finally caught him and tortured him, or maybe he accidentally revealed some piece of secret information to him. Or if not Vlad, then maybe it was Skulker or Walker or the Guys in White (although he seriously doubts the GiW is responsible since Danny is unwilling to believe that they would be willing to enlist the aid of Desiree to take care of the problem). Whatever it is, knowing now that someone deliberately tampered with his mind just makes it all the more important to Danny that he figure out exactly what happened to him, and the sooner the better.

As he quietly slips inside Fenton Works, Danny is amazed that he manages to make it up to his room without being caught by his family. As he lay in bed, he once again finds that he cannot sleep, although this time it's not the nightmares that are keeping him up.

Instead it's a plan, the knowledge that he must do something to fix what has happened to him before it's too late, and there is only one person that he believes can help him now if Desiree can't.

Or rather, one ghost.

A/N: An early update, but I felt like I should do it since I finished editing this chapter and, y'know, in honor of the fact that I'm going to be meeting some very real ghost hunters that are coming to my work tonight (yes, it's Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson from the SyFy show, so I mean it's not exactly the real-life equivalent to the Fentons or anything . . . if those even exist, lol. Still, it should be fun even if I'm generally a huge skeptic when it comes to the existence of ghosts and the supernatural).

This chapter was a bit short compared to my other ones, too, but there's not many left now and I didn't want to needlessly drag the story out, so hence Desiree conveniently showing up. And I should admit that I totally had to rewatch Memory Blank when I started editing this chapter. It's been ages since I last saw it, and now I feel like the whole episode is full of plot holes or maybe subsequent episodes are as a result. A certain wishing ghost has kinda been giving me a headache with this story since I've had to write and rewrite to justify things, and watching that episode almost made it worse (because really, what is a wishing ghost that grants every wish she hears with very few limits on her powers anything but a giant, potential deus ex machina? I mean . . . ugh. Are we just supposed to assume Aladdin rules transfer or something or what? Pff. Whatever. Frustrating is what she is, that's all, and her presence, necessary though it might be for my story, has given me a headache).

Next chapter, though, you guys will be getting A LOT of answers. Maybe too many, lol, but there's literally only two, maybe three chapters left now so it only makes sense.

And, as always, please review.

'Til next time!