Mirror, Mirror

A Danny Phantom Fanfiction

Danny allowed himself to be shooed by his parents back into the kitchen with his sister, but as soon as the last hair on his father's head disappeared behind the wall, he rounded on his lookalike.

"Alright, game over," he said, gazing directly into Daniel's eyes. "I thought we had a truce."

Daniel stopped in his tracks and gave Danny an unreadable look. "A truce," he repeated blankly as if he didn't know whether to make it a question or a statement.

Danny crossed his arms. "I don't know what you're doing here, Amorpho, but it needs to end. Now."

"Amorpho?"

Daniel did look genuinely nonplussed, but Danny knew better. "You're a clone, then," he accused.

Daniel offered the accusing boy nothing more than a raised eyebrow. "Even if medical science was that sophisticated," he intoned, "what makes you think they'd clone a dumb teenager?"

Danny found himself at a loss for words. "Well…what else could you be?," he sputtered, giving Jazz—who was both intently listening and stirring the Spaghetti Sauce—a brief glance. "People don't just look the same. I mean—" Upon seeing Daniel's furrowed brows, Danny reconsidered saying anything further. "Oh, never mind."

Daniel frowned. "What were you going to say?" Danny didn't immediately answer, so the boy looked to Jazz. "What was he going to say?"

"Don't look at me," she said, calmly pulling out a ladle full of pasta to check if it was fully cooked. "I can't read his mind."

All three teenagers spun when they heard Jack's lumbering footsteps. Maddie popped her head around the wall right behind her husband with a clearly forced smile. "Jazz is the pasta cooked?"

Jazz nodded. "It's done, Mom."

Maddie approached her daughter, her smile slowly fading. "Thanks, honey. Go, sit. I'll serve."

Jack was the first to take a seat, at his usual spot at the head of the table. Danny and Jazz sat next to each other on one side, and Daniel sat alone on the other. Maddie found her chair at the other end of the table.

The meal was thick with tension. Jack couldn't help but send glances in between the two lookalike boys while Maddie couldn't keep her eyes away from Daniel. Jazz barely touched her food. Danny was busy slurping away at the noodles; Daniel twirled them neatly around his fork.

He ate hesitantly and his bites were sporadic, but somehow the boy managed to clear his plate faster than anyone else. When dinner was over, Maddie began to tell Daniel that she would clear his plate, but he denied her help and scraped his plate clean over the trash can and left it in the sink.

She watched the mysterious boy allow himself to be shown the upstairs by her own children before standing to scrape the leftovers into a small Tupperware bin. She washed Danny and Jazz's plates much slower than usual; reflections and thoughts spun through her head at incredible speed.

---

Upstairs at the foot of his own bed, Danny grudgingly opened the cot that had been lying useless in the back of his closet for years. It was already lined with dusty white sheets. The only thing missing was the similarly dusty pillow which Danny dug for through piles of old junk accumulated over the years.

"Here's the pillow," he said unenthusiastically, dropping a saggy, deflated pillow onto the cot. Turning from the boy, he recited, "Extra toothbrushes are in the bathroom. Soap's there, too." Halting at the door, he twisted back to see Daniel gazing at him with no expression at all, his face blank and free of expectation.

"Just don't…." Danny hesitated, considering stopping mid-sentence. There was something passive about Daniel that made it hard for Danny to hold any animosity towards his lookalike. But he finished his sentence anyway. "Don't try anything."

He left without looking back, leaving Daniel alone in his own room. Danny shrugged away the annoying paranoid feeling and made his way to his sister's room.

"Jazz?" he called, knocking on the door.

Jazz opened the door on the third knock and Danny blinked up at her. Even though the night was growing darker, she still had her school clothes on. She gazed at him with uncertainty. "Yes?"

"I just want to…." Even though his need to talk with someone was great, Danny was still apprehensive about his listener being Jazz, the resident self-proclaimed psychologist. "I just wanted to talk with you about--"

"I was waiting for you to ask!" she said and pulled him inside her room. Shoving him down into her desk chair, she said, "I knew you'd be having a hard time with this."

"Who said I was having a hard time?" her brother asked.

"No one said anything, but for one, he is an exact replica of Danny Fenton…," she trailed off, falling back onto her bed. "And you don't know anything about him."

"It's not just that," Danny admitted reluctantly. "What are my friends going to say?"

"What friends?" she said without missing a beat. "Sam and Tucker?"

"And Val," Danny added ignoring her barely veiled criticism of his social life.

"Well," Jazz sighed, "I can't say anything about Valerie, but Danny, Sam and Tucker are there to help you." She gave her brother a smile, but it faded when she caught sight of the clock. "It's getting late. You should go to bed."

"Okay, mother," the dark haired boy sighed, rolling his eyes.

As he stood, Jazz felt the burden of the older sibling. She couldn't stand it when her brother was upset. "If it makes you feel any better," she added as Danny walked towards the door, "I really don't think he's here to hurt you. I think he's just as confused as you are."

Danny gave her a questioning glance. "How can you tell?"

She gazed back at him solemnly. "I can't. But the least you can do is give him a chance."

--

At Casper High the next day, Danny nervously stood by his locker. Daniel leaned motionless against the wall, gazing down the hallway boredly. "I have to stay here all day with you?"

"Hey, listen, buddy," Danny said, the anxiety of introducing his friends to Daniel momentarily replaced a slightly less passive emotion. "If I have to go to school, so does my clone."

Daniel rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. "I'm not your clone," he said with little feeling. "You're mine."

"Yeah? I can tell you what happened all fourteen years of my life," Danny snapped. "Can you say the same?"

Daniel opened his mouth to snap right back, but he was spared from having to come up with an insulting reply when two strangers approached him with smiling faces.

"Hey Danny!" One of them, a short boy with heavy black rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, greeted with a small wave.

Danny spun, his nervousness back ten-fold upon seeing the two. At the sight of both boys, the other newcomer's dark purple lips turned down at the corners. "Whoa," was all she said. Turning to the boy she had arrived with she raised an eyebrow. "You don't see that every day."

"Danny, what are you doing, man?" the boy with the glasses asked Daniel urgently in a low whisper. "People are gonna see you!"

Daniel's brows furrowed in reply, but it was Danny who answered him. "I'm Danny." The two newcomers stood back to study them both as Danny continued. "Tuck, Sam, meet Daniel. Daniel," he sighed, waving a hand noncommittally towards his friends, "Sam and Tucker."

Sam's expression slowly became a mix of disbelief and confusion. "Are you going to explain to us why there are two of our best friend?"

"Um, well, see…," Danny trailed off, not knowing exactly what to say. He was saved, quite literally, by the bell. Danny followed his two friends to Mr. Lancer's classroom, dragging Daniel reluctantly behind him. The two lookalike boys found seats in the front row, avoiding all the incredulous stares they received from their classmates. Lancer, like always, began the class by handing out graded papers.

"Your pop quizzes are in," Lancer droned as he passed from desk to desk, sliding overturned papers onto his students' desks, "and I'm very disappointed." When he finally made his way to the front, he said, holding out the last quiz in his stack, he said pointedly, "Specifically in those who didn't study." When he reached Danny's desk he froze in hesitation, his eyes growing wide. "Great Expectations, Mr. Fenton!" he gasped. "There are two of you!"

Danny, never good at thinking fast on his feet, sat upright in his seat to tell his teacher, "This is my long lost…."

"Brother," Daniel supplied simply with a nod, drawing Lancer's attention towards himself. "We recently discovered we had been separated by birth when my legal guardian unfortunately passed away." Danny turned to give his doppelganger an amazed glance, but Daniel took no notice. Instead he extended a hand towards the plump teacher. "I don't believe I know your name," he recited as if he had been trained to do so.

Lancer took the boy's hand with a small frown. "As long as you're in school, you will call me Mr. Lancer."

"I'm Daniel," he replied with a firm shake of his hand.

"Interesting," Lancer said weakly, quickly releasing Daniel's hand. He moved on without looking back at two boys until he sat at his desk at the front of the room. "Today's class will be a continuation of yesterday's lecture." The class groaned in unison and Lancer ignored them. "Haikus are a very unique form of poetry…."

Danny hunched his shoulders forward, trying to ward off the stares he could feel boring into his back. He doodled absently on his note paper without looking up. He had almost finished drawing the arms on a three-eyed monster when a chill running up his spine caused him to gasp. Not a moment later, a huge tentacle crashed through the wall nearest the teacher, bringing the bricks tumbling down with a huge crash. There was a moment of shock before students all screamed together in panic. They ran towards the exit, Lancer quickly ushering them out of the door.

Danny found Daniel running with the rest of the classroom and pulled him back by the collar of his shirt. Daniel spun, giving Danny and his two friends, who were standing right behind him, a look of terror.

"Let go!" He tried to raise his voice above the screaming. "We have to get out of here!"

Danny almost let go of the boy, shocked. Either Daniel didn't know anything about ghosts or he was just trying to throw him off. Either way, Danny wanted to make sure he stayed safe. "Stay with Sam and Tuck!" Danny had to yell to be heard above the chaos. "They'll tell you what to do!"

"What about you?" came the reply.

Danny paused to come up with a plausible response. "I'm going to go get help!" With that, he dashed away towards the courtyard door, leaving his lookalike with his two best friends.

A/N: Sorry about the OOC-ness of last chapter! I hope this chapter is more in character. I dunno, I had just figured that since the Fentons can't be earning much from their profession and they live in a large house in the middle of a decent sized city where taxes have to be high, another child--especially one that didn't come with belongings/clothes except the ones on his back--would seem like a big, plausible problem. I also was trying to go for two stories in one: the tales of Jack and Maddie trying to manage their family and the adventures of Danny and his new "twin brother." So sorry that it didn't seem in character! Okay, gotta run--I'm supposed to be working... Thanks so much for the encouragement and reviews!