I'm Still Here
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

Chapter Three

He took a shower around lunch, not bothering to make the bed before phasing through the windows in search of something to eat. His eyes were a little brighter than yesterday, his movements not as robotic and blank. After getting a meal from one of the large supermarkets, Danny walked down one street after another, his mind back on planning.

Going back to his own time sounded impossible at this point. Not only could he not get to the ghost zone, it sounded like Clockwork wouldn't be there anyways. And getting trapped in a giant world of nothingness didn't come across as something he wanted to do. So for the moment, the plan to try to turn back the clock seventy years had to be shelved.

The only other option was to stay here. He would have to start his life all over again – destroy his old one and remake himself as a new person. Danny Fenton was dead and it would raise too many problems if the world found a sixteen-year-old that should have died seventy years previously. There was no way he could just reinsert himself into the life he'd lost.

He could go talk to Jazz, see what she recommended he do. Maybe she knew what had happened to Sam and Tucker. He wanted to ask her a bunch of questions about how everything had turned out seventy years ago; he needed to understand exactly why things had happened they way they had. And then he would get out of her life.

Danny wasn't going to give up hope on getting back to his own time, but there was no way he could be Danny Fenton here. As he walked through the streets, he tried to come up with a list of things he would need to do. No ties to his past – except he'd probably write his sister and visit every now and then. He'd need to go through the department of records and take out everything that tied him to Danny Fenton: fingerprints, photographs, dental records, things like that. He'd have to find some kind of job and make money, stealing things was eating away at his conscience now that he was willing to listen to it. And he'd need to find a place to sleep – the hotel wouldn't cut it for long.

Before long, he found himself in front of his parents' old house, staring up at it. There was movement in the upper windows, someone was home. He walked slowly up the walk, catching sight of the name plaque by the doorbell. Silby. He hesitated for a moment, then reached up and touched his finger against the doorbell.

The door was wrenched open before the ringing even faded away, the taller of the two boys staring at him. "It's you," he said, then turned back towards the house and screamed, "GRAMMA JAZZ! DOOR'S FOR YOU!" Then he vanished back into the confines of the house.

Danny took a small step forwards, catching the door before it could swing shut on him. He peered into the living room from his vantage point at the door, watching as the kid went to join his brother on the couch, eyes fixed on the movie. The inside of his parents' house was amazingly similar to the way it had been seventy years previously. The television was in the same spot, the couch looked eerily like the one his parents' had destroyed when he was fourteen, and even the wall color looked creepily familiar.

"Danny."

Glancing up the stairs, Danny spotted his sister making her way carefully down the steps. She was staring at him with a smile, surprise and gratitude on her face. "Jazz."

"You came back," she whispered, stepping off the bottom step and throwing her arms around him. "I didn't think you'd come back."

Danny hugged her back, holding her close. "I need to know," he said softly. "I need to know what happened."

"Come into the kitchen, I'll get you something to eat." Jazz disentangled herself from Danny and walked towards the kitchen, Danny trailing behind.

Where the living room could have been his parents', the kitchen was nothing like the one he knew. There were no strange inventions, no glowing tubes on the counters, and no scratched up appliances. The kitchen was a chef's dream, full of stone and stainless steel. "Sit," Jazz directed, pointing one of her wrinkled fingers at the stool by the new island.

Danny sat, watching her bustle around and then drop a plate in front of him. He smiled a thanks, took a bite of the sandwich, then waited.

"Mom and Dad came home bragging about catching you," Jazz finally said, boosting herself carefully onto the other stool and helping herself to the bowl of potato chips she'd set out. "I was worried - I knew you were in one of the Thermoses. I spent all night searching through the lab and the entire house, opening up every Thermos I could find. When I couldn't find you, I called Sam and Tucker."

"They came to help?" Danny asked.

Jazz nodded. "We looked all over, even talking to Mom and Dad about where they had put you, since you were such a trophy catch. None of us could get an answer out of them."

Danny looked down at his plate, running a finger around the smooth edge. "When did you tell them who I was?"

"On the third day, we started to get worried that you were getting any food or water. We thought you might die in there with nothing to eat. Besides, Mom and Dad were getting worried about where you'd run off to. So we told them. They didn't believe us at first. It took all the evidence we had and a lot of convincing." She smiled sadly. "They refused to believe that they'd been hunting their son, or that a half-ghost could exist."

"So they didn't let me out?"

"No, we got to them in the end. It took about four hours to convince them, but once we proved it they never questioned it. I could tell when we finally got through, because Mom was off the couch in an instant, racing for the basement."

Danny ran his finger around the edge of his plate one last time. "And…"

"And they opened the Thermos that you were supposed to be in. Obviously, you weren't." Jazz was silent for a long time. "Mom and Dad tore the house apart over the next few days. None of us got any sleep until we dropped where we were standing. You weren't… anywhere." She shrugged, picking up another potato chip and studying it. "We didn't know if you were still in a Fenton Thermos, or if you'd been taken, or where you were. The only thing we knew is that you weren't in the house."

Staring out the window, Danny bit his lip. His parents did care about him; they hadn't left him in the Thermos on purpose. Now this morning's screaming felt a little childish.

"We couldn't find you, Danny. Mom and Dad were never the same. They gave up ghost technology all together, selling the ghost portal to the Guys in White." Jazz looked at her brother. "And when they finally succeeded in wiping the ghost zone, they were frantic. I know both of them thought you might have vanished into there. I don't think they ever gave up hope, though, even after the ghost zone was nothing but a blank slate. Mom kept a box of your stuff in the attic the rest of her life and refused to get rid of it. How the Thermos got buried in the back yard I have no idea."

Danny nodded. "What happened to Sam and Tucker?" he whispered.

"Tucker moved to California and became some hot shot computer programmer for a video game company. Got married when he was twenty-five and had a kid before he died." Jazz touched Danny's arm sympathetically. "Car accident when he was twenty-nine. It took all of us by surprise."

"And Sam?" Danny asked into the silence.

"Got married eventually, then divorced, and never had any children. She adopted a little boy when she was about forty – he was this cute boy with scruffy black hair and sapphire blue eyes." Jazz smiled at him. "His name was Danny, and Sam absolutely fell in love with him. She thought every now and then that he was you, reincarnated or something. She's living a few miles outside of town now and keeps to herself quite a bit. I don't think she ever got over you vanishing."

Brother and sister, sixteen and eighty-eight, sat next to each other in silence for a long few minutes, finishing off the sandwich and potato chips. It was, if Danny closed his eyes, almost like no time had passed. But it had, and each time he had to open his eyes he was forced to remember it.

"What was it like?"

"What was what like?" Danny asked, popping another chip into his mouth.

"Seventy years inside a Fenton Thermos."

Danny thought about it for a moment. "Nothing, really. You can't see, you can't hear or feel or smell or taste or… anything. It's just blankness." He shrugged. "Until I ended up here, I had no idea how much time had passed. It could have been hours or months." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I never would have dreamed that seventy years had passed."

Jazz glanced in his direction. "What would have happened if Taylor and Mike hadn't found you?"

Danny shrugged. "Probably would have stayed in there until the Thermos opened somehow. Someone finding it, or time wearing a crack in it, or something." It was an uncomfortable thought. If those two boys hadn't dug in the exact right place, he could have been locked, unaware, in that Thermos for centuries.

They fell back into a comfortable silence, neither of them wanting to dwell on the thought of Danny being stuck in a Thermos for all that time. Jazz broke the silence first. "I'm… sorry, Danny."

"What for?" Danny asked.

"For not rescuing you. If I would have told them sooner…" she whispered.

"Jazz."

"I knew how forgetful the two of them were. I should have known that they would lose the Thermos. I should have told them right away."

"Jazz," Danny said sharply, turning to face her for the first time. "It's not your fault. You don't have to be sorry."

Jazz smiled sadly at her brother. "Thanks, Danny, but it's been my fault for seventy years, and it'll probably stay the same for the rest of my life."

Danny rolled his eyes, getting off his stool and grabbing the two glasses to refill them. "You did rescue me, you know. Your grandchildren did, anyways. And you saved me at the cemetery – I'm not sure what I would have done if you wouldn't have sat down next to me." He set her glass of water in front of her and put a smile on his face. It felt a little forced, but it was the best he could do. "Of course, telling me to scram was a little mean. I mean, they're my family too."

He grinned a little wider when his sister's smile grew. "You looked like a zombie that had just dug its way out of its grave, you know," she muttered back, a little twinkle in her eye.

"Ah, but I'm the nice kind of undead," Danny quipped back.

Jazz laughed, then she shook her head, still chuckling. "I missed you, Danny."

Danny drained his glass and then put it in the sink to be washed. "So…" he hesitated, "what do you think I should do now? I mean, I can't…" he trailed off, unsure of what he was trying to say.

"You call Sam." Jazz nodded, getting off of her stool and grabbing the handset hanging on the wall. "She's got empty rooms galore in that house of hers, much more than this cramped place. You can stay with her for a bit until we figure out what to do."

"Sam?" Danny whispered his mouth strangely dry. This wasn't the sixteen-year-old Sam he was half in love with… this was eighty-six-year-old Sam. Calling her seemed a little weird. What would he say?

"Her last name's Madel now, she never changed it back after she got divorced." Jazz held out the phone until Danny took it, staring down at the bank piece of plastic. There were no numbers, there was no speaker, and there wasn't anything to dial with. After a moment, Jazz sighed. "I'm sorry, Danny, I forgot. Phone, Dial: Samantha Madel."

"Dialing: Samantha Madel," the phone answered in a pleasant voice.

Danny jumped, nearly dropping the phone when Sam's grandmother suddenly appeared in miniature, hovering over his hand. "What? Who is this?"

"Uh… I'm looking for Samantha Madel," he stuttered, wondering to himself how in the world Edna Manson was still alive after all these years.

"Speaking," the old woman answered and Danny did drop the phone. It clattered to the ground and the hologram of Sam – really really old Sam – put her hands on her hips and glared. "Who the Hell is this? Jazz? This is your number… what kind of game…"

"Sam…" Danny breathed. He bent down and scooped up the small receiver, studying the hologram of his best friend. "You look… like your grandmother."

Sam's eyes narrowed. "How would you know, you're, what, seventeen?"

"Sixteen," Danny shot back, "Going on eighty-seven."

"Yeah, right," Sam muttered sarcastically, sounding incredibly like her sixteen-year-old self. "How in the world is that possible?"

"It is when you've been locked in a Fenton Thermos for seventy years," Danny muttered darkly.

Sam's eyes locked on his and Danny felt a strange moment of vertigo, then he heard a soft, "Danny?" just before the hologram of his best friend vanished.

Danny blinked in surprise, turning the handset over in his hand, wondering if he'd done something wrong.

"It's okay," Jazz said with a smile, "she dropped her phone."

When the image of Sam reappeared, she looked shaken and pale. "Danny? Danny Fenton?"

"Can… can I come over and talk?" he stammered, a little worried about how fragile Sam looked right then. She sounded like the teenage-can-do-anything-wears-army-boots version he remembered, but she looked like she would break in half if the wind blew too hard.

Sam nodded faintly, her mouth opening and shutting wordlessly.

Danny felt a hand touch his shoulder and Jazz put in her two cents. "I'll give him a map. I'm living with Sarah now, and there's not enough room here. Can he bunk in one of your spare rooms until we get everything figured out?"

"He'd better," Sam said darkly. "After seventy years, if he doesn't stay for a few days I'll track him down and kill him and there will be a body at his funeral."

Then the hologram faded and the phone gave a quiet chirp. Jazz chuckled, taking the phone back out of his hand and replacing it.

"I had a funeral?" Danny whispered. "Without a body in the casket?"

"We had to do something after you couldn't be found," Jazz said softly. "It was years after you vanished, though, just before Sam and Tucker moved away for college. It was a kind of closure for them, knowing you wouldn't be back anytime soon. It let them move without feeling guilty about it, wondering if you'd come back and they wouldn't be there anymore."

Danny nodded quietly for a moment. Then he arched an eyebrow, glancing at his aged sister. "Map?"

The map itself was definitely the neatest invention Danny had seen so far, although he was a little too depressed to really care much about the phone – he was working primarily on autopilot. Jazz gave him this small device that hooked over his ear like the headsets of cell phones he remembered. Yes, you could make phone calls from it, but it wasn't just a cell phone. This thing was like an iPhone on steroids. It projected a small holographic display in front of his eyes that overlaid perfectly with the world around him. Floating several hundred feet above Amity Park, he could fix his eyes on any given landmark and information about the place would pop up before him, seeming to float in midair.

Sam's house on the map was marked with a red 'X' some distance away. The computer displayed a nice line that showed which streets he should follow and it gave an indignant chirp when Danny ignored it, flying straight towards the 'X'. After a minute or so the computer seemed to catch on, erasing its previous line and creating a new, perfectly straight one that led from Danny's current position to his destination.

Danny was anything but confident about the upcoming meeting he had with the friend he'd just seen a few days… or seventy years, depending on your perspective… earlier. The Sam he'd seen during the phone call had seemed very old and frail. Doing a little bit of math in his head, he figured that this Sam was even older than Sam's grandmother had been. She was so different from what he remembered.

And everything else he'd heard…

His parents had been crushed by his disappearance. Tucker was dead. Danny'd had a funeral already. Sam and Jazz were so old. Everyone had moved on… but him.

He was stuck – a kid from 2008, stuck in the world of 2078.

His flight slowed as he chewed his lip, trying to figure out what to say to his once-upon-a-time-almost-wish-she-could-have-been-a-girlfriend friend. What do you say to someone after seventy years? Does 'Hi!' cut it? To make it all worse, he was having this squirming feeling in his stomach that made him want to apologize to her for being gone for seventy years even though there hadn't been anything he could do about it. It was probably due to all the bruises he'd gotten before he'd learned Sam logic: apologize even if you don't think it's your fault and just get over it because she's going to win anyways.

With a startled blink, he suddenly realized he'd come to a total halt in the air, so wrapped up in trying to figure out what to say that he'd forgotten to keep flying. He shook his head and pushed himself forwards once again, trying not to think about what he was about to do.

It worked for about a half-second. "Ah…" he growled into the sky as thoughts slipped through his head. He was stuck seventy years in the future. His eyes glowed brightly, even in the brilliant sunshine of the morning, frustrated and annoyed and depressed and furious and terrified. Very little was like what he remembered and he had no idea what to expect.

His entire life was gone. Not just his family, not just his friends… everything… and it was a very scary thought. The only thing he had left to hang on to was the image on an old and fail woman that was, supposedly, his best friend.

"So… Hi?" he tried out to himself, then shook his head at how stupid that sounded. "Hey," didn't work either. He narrowed his eyes as he flew, watching the line that extended towards Sam's house get shorter and shorter. There, just beyond those trees.

"Hey, Sam. I'm sorry for leaving you for seventy years. Think you can spare a room?"

Nothing sounded right. There just wasn't anything to say to someone after seventy years. "Remember me? I had a crush on you… like… three days ago… when you were my age…"

The house came into view. It was a huge thing with gothic spires and tall, pointed windows. Painted a muted purple, the neatly cut lawn was shaded with large trees and thick beds of beautiful flowers. It was a gorgeous home with just a hint of creepy to it.

Danny smiled. He could have picked out Sam's house without the computer-phone. He reached up to flick off the map, listening to it chirp, then started to descend through the air. Checking around, he flipped back to his human form when he was still a few feet from the ground and dropped soundlessly onto the sideway.

"Hi, Sam. It's me, Danny. I know you thought I died seventy years ago, but I didn't. I need your help."

Taking the steps up to the front door two at a time, Danny reached over and touched the doorbell, shuffling nervously on his feet. He studied the carefully penciled last name on the front door – Madel – and tried to image Sam being married to someone. The guy had to have been something special to have married Sam.

The door suddenly few open and Danny looked up, staring straight into his best friend's violet eyes. Her hand was over her heart, her eyes wide, her grey hair pulled back into the exact same pony tail she'd worn when she was sixteen. "Danny," she whispered as the smile on her face grew.

His mouth was dry. He couldn't think. All of the carefully prepared lines flew out of his head like a tornado had struck his brain. So Danny said the first thing that came to his mind – no doubt a product of two years of bad witty banter training. "What, seventy years and no flying cars?"

Deep in the forests of Colorado, a man flinched when a strange alarm started to blare. When none of his computers reacted to the alarm, he pushed his hand through his short white hair and glanced around, struggling to remember what the sound went with. It belonged to one of the older things, that much he could figure out, but his memory was failing him as to what exactly he was looking for.

Moving boxes around in his retrofitted laboratory, the alarm continued to shriek. "Shut up," the man snapped. "I know already."

The alarm ignored him. His newest computer program, however, did not. A hologram appeared beside him, the smile on the woman's face a perfect simulacrum of the human it was modeled after. "Having trouble, Honey?" she soothed.

"Where's the blasted alarm coming from?" he asked sourly.

The hologram pointed helpfully towards one of the far corners of the lab. "I think it's one of your oldest experiments – the one that detects half-ghosts." It blinked a few times with an unfocused look on its face, then grinned. "Data suggests that the alarm means a half-ghost has been detected in Amity Park."

Stalking across the room, the man located the ancient-looking panel and finally silenced the noise. "Unlikely," the man sneered. "It's probably just malfunctioned, just like all the other sensors have. This equipment is ancient." He glared down at the computer with an odd look in his eye. "There are no more half-ghosts. Daniel died seventy years ago and Danielle vanished without a trace not long after." He clenched his hands. "Even Vlad is gone."

"So that's it?" the hologram asked softly, a strange not-quite-real emotion flickering in her eyes. "You're just going to give up? You've been looking for someone else like you for decades."

"I'm done," he whispered. "No more crazy goose chases around the country."

The hologram tried to pat its master on the shoulder, a digital flare of frustration thrumming through its circuits when its hand went right through his shoulder. "I think," it said slowly, "that you're giving up too easily, Matthew."

Blue eyes turned to look at the hologram. The face that held the eyes was old and wrinkled – showing maybe sixty years of wear and tear – but the eyes and the mind behind it were much older. "Matthew doesn't leave his home in Colorado," the man said sadly. "Matthew is done with all of this."

"Then maybe," the hologram said, "it's time to resurrect the dead." It clapped its hands, sending the appropriate hand-clapping sound out of the speakers, and set its most purposeful smile on its face. "I want to go on one last trip before you lock yourself away." The hologram shimmered a little, replacing its 'lounging' outfit with its 'travelling' outfit. The blue jumpsuit fit perfectly, modern black accents at the waist, hands, and feet, and a pair of sunglasses perched on its head. "Please, Honey?" it begged.

The man rubbed his wrinkled hands over his face and groaned, already knowing that he'd give in. Even though the hologram was just a copy of someone he'd fallen in love with over a century earlier, he'd give her anything.

"To Amity Park," he whispered.

To be continued...