Author's Note: Thanks for the reviews and constructive criticism! It's all very much appreciated. The last chapter strayed from canon, but we're back in familiar territory now. I am, however, moving away from romance for the moment – this chapter takes a look at Danny's big sister.

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Jazz Fenton

I love him to the Moon and back. I've loved him since I first laid eyes on him.

There's a family video of the moment my universe shifted. When you first play it, you see a two-year-old me in my bedroom, throwing teddies around and bouncing on the bed and cackling like a witch, completely ignoring Dad when he calls my name. After he finally gets my attention and asks if I want to see my new brother, I shriek and run outside and slide down the banisters. The camera shakes because Dad can't keep up with me. He's huffing and puffing and warning me to be careful because babies are precious and need to be handled with care.

I stop suddenly. Dad nearly runs into me. I stand and stare at Mom, who's sitting on the couch with dark circles under her eyes. There's a tiny baby in her arms, dwarfed by a bundle of blue blankets. I approach with cautious steps, the camera zooming in as I do so. I stroke the tufts of black hair on his head. The baby's eyes slowly open, long enough for me to see that their colour matches that of the fleece, and then they close again.

The realisation that I was now a big sister must have flipped a switch in my mind. In that moment, I went from a two-year-old tearaway to a quiet and responsible "little woman."

Of course, I don't really remember the first meeting. I was too young. My earliest proper memory is of pulling Danny behind me while being chased by a prototype of the Fenton Weasel that had started moving of its own accord and sucking up everything it could reach. With parents as crazy as mine, oblivious to any person that couldn't walk through walls, disappear and fly, someone had to be in charge and keep an eye on Danny. I haven't forgotten the face he made when the Fenton Weasel latched onto the leg of his dungarees and nearly ate him.

Who knew that this little boy, terrified of his own parents' inventions, would grow up to be a world-famous superhero?

Even after all this time, it hasn't sunk in. In my mind, Danny's still about eight years old, blathering on about space and crying when he doesn't get any dessert. Now he's appearing on talk shows and showing excited schoolchildren what it feels like to go intangible. And he does it all so easily. He used to be wimpy and tongue-tied around new people, but I've seen him tackle Tiffany Snow's questions as if he was born for it. I never dared to hope he could become so confident, especially not in the early days that followed the Accident.

Keeping my mouth shut after the Spectra incident was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Whenever Danny's got himself in trouble, usually egged on by Sam, my first instinct has been to jump in and try to sort him out. Waiting on the side-lines did not come naturally at all. There were so many little things I couldn't help noticing. The chill in the air as he breezed past. The green glow in his eyes when something irritated him. The gashes stretching from his chest to his cheeks, which he tried to hide under a turtleneck. I wanted to point them out, but I knew the only reaction I would get would be a gruff insistence that everything was fine.

Poor Danny. He must have been terrified. And I was terrified because he was terrified. It didn't take much for me to catch him at the wrong time; what if he slipped up again? How would Mom and Dad react? Would they try to cure him or try to separate his human and ghost halves? Would they tie him down and slice him open out of scientific curiosity? Would they think he was an imposter and plunge their weapons into him?

There were two broad paths they could go down, each of which seemed equally likely. Would they reject him, abuse him, treat him like dirt? Or would they look past the freaky powers and love him just the same? I mean, their love for their son surely outweighed their hatred of ghosts, right? Right?

Well, I needn't have worried. They wouldn't have figured out that Danny Fenton was Danny Phantom if he floated right in front of them yelling, "I am a ghost! Fear me!" Which he did, once, as a test. Mom just asked, "How was school, sweetie?" without looking up from her copy of Ghostbusters' Magazine.

Once oblivious parents, always oblivious parents.

I've lost count of the number of times I've woken up to the sound of wailing and thrashing from the room next to mine while Mom and Dad slept through it. If I got out of bed and tiptoed to his door, I could hear him talking back to invisible enemies and telling Sam and Tucker to get away from invisible threats. One time he blurted out, "I'm going to rip you apart molecule by molecule!" and I could have sworn it was Dad himself in there.

Danny usually woke himself up with a yelp, but the silence afterwards got to me the most. I wanted to come in and hug him and comfort him, stroking his hair as I did when he was a baby. But I knew he would never want to explain what had happened, so having me there would probably make things worse. And yet just loitering outside, waiting for him to pull himself together, felt too cold and hurt my heart too much. So I would stand there, paralysed by indecision, while he presumably shed countless silent tears wishing he could talk to somebody, anybody, about what he was going through – without the fear of being destroyed and dissected.

It got worse, not better, after he knew that I knew, because by then he'd seen what the future could be like if he lost his humanity. It was just one more thing to worry about. I was allowed to run into his bedroom and shake him to wake him up and hold him as he wept. But that didn't compensate for the louder screams or the wilder sobs – or for the new routine he developed afterwards.

As soon as he'd dried his eyes, Danny had to go to the bathroom, turn the light on, take off his pyjamas and search his entire body for patches of blue-green skin. Then he had to measure his nails in case they'd grown into claws. Next, he had to brush his hair about a hundred times to reassure himself that it wasn't white and flaming. After that, he needed to stare at his eyes in the mirror to make sure they hadn't turned red, and then fiddle with his ears to make sure they weren't pointed, and then stick out his tongue to make sure it wasn't forked, and then bare his teeth to make sure he hadn't grown any fangs. And it wasn't enough to give himself a single check-up. He had to repeat it at least ten times, once for every year he was evil.

As you can imagine, it was all very time-consuming.

At first he only did it after a nightmare, but soon it became an essential part of the bedtime routine. Every single evening was spent imploring him to hurry up in the bathroom because some of us had tests the next day. Once, he was convinced that his nails had grown by an eighth of an inch over the week when the average rate was supposed to be only a tenth of an inch in a week. He convinced himself that it was the beginning of the end and that any second now he'd be killing everybody in the world.

This madness carried on through Christmas and the New Year, and he got less and less sleep each night. I don't know how he kept going to school and pretending to be normal. I would have given up my powers long before he did. I wouldn't have been able to trust myself with them. (I guess he thought he didn't really have that option in case the ghost half went rogue and merged with Plasmius, however unlikely that scenario was.)

The turning point was summer vacation. Danny didn't say exactly what happened on his road trip with Tucker and Sam. Maybe he was finally plucking up the courage to tell his parents. Maybe he'd had a good run of victories over those malevolent ghosts. Maybe he'd talked things over with Clockwork. Whatever it was, it must have been good. He reduced the number of pre-bedtime inspections to five, and within the month it was down again to one.

I'm definitely not so concerned about my brother now. The night after the Disasteroid phased through the planet, he brushed his teeth and went straight to bed. I didn't realise how remarkable that was until the next day. He hadn't spent half an hour searching for signs of a monster. He hadn't hidden in the bathroom to mentally torture himself. He knew now that the people by his side would always be there for him, no matter what. He'd accepted who he was and what he was capable of. He could call himself a hero.

He's come so far and I couldn't be prouder of him.