Chapter 12

The crunch of snow beneath boots at the end of a long, cold day was mind numbing. After hauling the hunk of ice that encapsulated the hunter ghost back to a containment unit in their lab, Maddie and Jack Fenton had spent the rest of the early morning and the entire day scouring the city for what should have been a very incapacitated ecto-entity. No luck.

Maybe Phantom was hiding somewhere. Maybe he'd had help, maybe someone was hiding him. Then again, maybe he'd just disintegrated. There should have been a mess somewhere, a splatter of ectoplasm indicating the location of his demise. The weapon was unpredictable; it could have destabilized his core all together, then it was possible he could have just splashed into nothingness.

None of their sensors could find him. In fact, there had been no ghost attacks that day, not even by sub-sentients, leaving them with plenty of time to focus on their task of locating the ghost boy they'd taken down just hours ago.

Nothing to show for it.

The warmth of home enveloped husband and wife like well-worn gloves the moment they crossed the threshold into their home. It was a pure, wholesome sensation. The feeling of being belonging, of being in the right place.

It was past dinner time, and the kitchen showed no evidence of having been used, for neither cooking purposes nor pizza box purposes.

"Will you see if Jazz and Danny are in their rooms while I make some hot cocoa?" Maddie asked her husband, who perked up considerably at the idea of what in his mind equated to melted fudge in a cup. "Ask them what they want for dinner."

She felt a bit bad about how the situation had gone down with them and Jazz. She'd been so irrationally against them doing what they had to do to contain the menace and protect the town, and she'd been so unreasonably distraught when she'd realized what they'd done.

The morning after the morning after the initial incident, Maddie and Jazz had had a conversation. Her daughter had been deeply entrenched in denial of the situation with Phantom, shaken to her core by the prospect of what had actually happened and committed to the necessity of an explanation that would banish the moral quandary.

It's our fault, Maddie thought as she began prepping the hot cocoa, We sheltered them too much, both of them. Now they don't understand the danger that ghosts really pose, and they could get hurt.

Jazz had been in bed last night when Maddie and Jack finished containing the hunter ghost. Not asleep, definitely pretending, but she'd been safe in the house. Danny wasn't in his room; she assumed he'd stayed with Tucker again, and hadn't had the heart to wake the Foleys to ask.

She was worried about him; he'd been under the weather. If he was still at Tucker's, maybe that meant he was feeling better.

No one had been hurt last night, and that in itself was no small miracle. Phantom's little tirade was like nothing they'd ever seen. The way witnesses described what they had seen painted a picture of a very powerful and very, very volatile entity, who had not displayed any deliberate care in his rampage through cars. Many people were out motor vehicles, and even more apartments had lost windows. Some buildings had even suffered structural damage, and the list of property damage went on.

Something had changed in Phantom before that night. A shift had occurred, and she and Jack could only speculate on the nature of that shift without actually finding the entity and testing their hypotheses.

"They're not in their rooms." Jack's announcement interrupted Maddie's train of thought. "Didn't see them anywhere."

"Did you check the bathrooms?"

"Yes."

"The lab?"

"Yes?"

"The observatory?"

"Yes, Maddie, yes, I looked everywhere. Jazz's car is gone; maybe she went to the library or something, and Danny's probably with his friends."

Danny spent more time with his friends than he did at home, it felt like. Definitely if you didn't count time spent sleeping, and even if you counted time spent sleeping the balance was skewed away from home. Still, it made Maddie uncomfortable. And Jazz...Jazz had never really had a lot of friends, and among those she had had in high school she had kept very few. The library, the grocery store, yes those were possibilities, but it didn't feel right.

The cocoa was ready, but Maddie was no longer interested.

Out of her utility belt she took her cell phone, a basic, outdated thing her kids had talked her into getting a few years ago. While Jack descended on the steaming beverage she'd prepared for him, she found Jazz in her contacts and placed a call.

The phone rang. And rang. Just when Maddie was about to give up and try Danny, a tired voice replaced the beeps.

"Hello?"

Maddie's concerns for her daughter were immediately cemented the moment she heard her daughter's voice.

"Are you okay, sweetie? Where are you? Do you need your father and I to come get you?"

"No, Mom, I'm fine," Jazz assured her hastily, a familiar nervous laugh bubbling up her throat. "Don't worry about me, I'm just….out."

"Have you seen Danny? Is he with you?"

"What? No, of course not. You know Danny, always out with those friends of his, no time for his sister….I wouldn't be surprised if they were out of reach though. Teenagers and their phones these days, leaving 'em everywhere, forgetting to charge them, you know how it is. He'll turn up soon, I'm sure he's fine, of course he's fine."

A stone dropped in Maddie's stomach, and she rearranged her face into a stoic mask. This was weird, this was beyond weird. Jazz only rambled like this when she was in crisis, and this crisis had something to do with Danny. No matter how immersed she was in her job, her kids came first. That was what the whole thing was about, right? Keeping the town safe, keeping her kids safe. From the ghostly menace.

"Jasmine, tell me where your brother is."

"With his friends, Mom! Sam, Tucker maybe….or Sam or Tucker. Fifty-fifty each way, maybe both! They're probably all three together, right now. With their phones on silent because they're having a movie marathon or something. They do love that one franchise about massacred authority figures. It's horror, you know, and when a phone rings during a horror movie, it's like urrgh, you know?" The panic was hyping Jazz up now, and Maddie was starting to regret not microchipping her as an infant.

Jack was watching with concern now, a chocolate mustache fresh on his face.

"Well, where are you then?"

"Nowhere," she squeaks, "Nowhere. Went for a drive, that's it, that's all. Driving around. Pulled over to talk to you of course, since, you know, phones….safe driving….you know."

Then it all made sense to Maddie. Maybe this didn't have anything to do with Danny at all. She sighed and picked up a mug of hot cocoa after all. Her daughter was so empathetic; it was sad, really, since the object of her fixation was so undeserving.

"We couldn't find Phantom either, hon. You should come home; we've got cocoa." She waved the mug in the air for effect, knowing her daughter couldn't see it but putting on a show for herself and Jack. Her strange devotion to this thing, this killer, was unnerving. She wanted her daughter home and safe, now.

When met with silence on the other end, she decided to turn on the guilt factor. "We never see you since you've been at college; we get so little time together….it would mean so much if we could just have a little Christmas bonding time. You, me, your father, Danny, all together as a family during the holidays."

"You know what would be great?" Jazz asked, clearly faking enthusiasm, voice still on edge. "Some mother-daughter bonding time! Or, you know, Dad too! I'd love to spend time with you guys, you know, and we really should let Danny be with his friends. I mean, he's with you guys all the time. I'd like to spend time with you too."

Maddie felt warmth glow inside her despite niggling doubts about her daughters sincerity. Though she didn't have a lot of time to spend with her offspring, they rarely wanted to spend it with her, so this was kind of special. "Oh, that sounds—"

"Jazz!" A voice on the other end of the line. "Jazz!" Was that….Sam? "Vlad says he's gonna wake up soon, come on, we have to…."

There was a mumble that sounded a lot like, "I'm on the phone," then a "With who?" then a lot of indiscernible bickering. All of that glowing warmth disappeared pretty quickly.

"Jasmine Fenton, where exactly are you and where is your brother?"

…..

The first thing Danny was aware of was a soft mewing. A soft mewing, then an ache. A bearable ache, but an ache he was afraid of. Didn't know why; couldn't remember.

Though it felt as if his eyes had been glued shut, he pried them open and locked gazes with the fluffy white creature that Vlad had named after his mother.

His mother.

A vision seized him, a quick, two second glimpse, an image of a scene he couldn't place but like the ache feared, feared deeply.

Mama mia, mama mia, let me go!

Shadowy faces, dark silhouettes. Towering over him in a backdrop of dark and a shimmering white. Fear, cold, a bright light, pain….

The cat plopped itself down next to Danny's right knee, and just stared at him. Normally, Danny wouldn't associate with the creature, but a feeling desperation was constricting his throat and he needed something. He felt like he was floating, like his limbs were dead weight if they even existed. He felt away, apart, ethereal, and he needed an anchor so badly. If he could move, if he could reach out, pet the cat, maybe he'd feel like a real, solid person again.

So he commanded himself to sit up. Ordered his muscles to get a move on, strained himself just to move a little bit in her direction.

Come on, you stupid cat, stupid hand. One of you has to move.

Still stationary, he exhaled frustratedly in exhaustion.

For an indefinite amount of time he lay there and stared at the cat, who apparently didn't have anything better to do in her life than stare back at him. He wondered what it was like to be a cat, especially a rich cat like this one. No responsibilities, just luxury and laziness. And having to put up with a crazy old person.

He remembered a movie he'd watched as a child. Didn't know the name, only remembered that an old lady had suddenly died and left her entire inheritance to her cats. Or something like that, he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything any more.

When he finally regained some control over his fingers and toes, moving them was like manipulating stiff, burnt sausages. He tore his eyes away from the cat long enough to try to find his own hands, but all he could see was a light, white sheet that obscured his entire body below the neck.

In the confusing whirl that was his mind, he pictured himself with a white sheet enshrouding his entire self, head and all. In this image he was dead, just plain dead under a sheet, and he wanted to throw up.

By some miracle his elbows worked to prop him up a few meager inches, but they collapsed almost immediately, leaving him retching, part on his side and burning.

The burning, yes the burning. It was coming back, no, the burning….

"It isn't fair," he wanted to mumble. But he couldn't mumble, and he wasn't sure what wasn't fair. Was it unfair that he had to suffer like this, that he had to burn, or was it unfair that he wasn't dead, that he still lived at all? Were those the same? His head spun. That question enough would have been enough to make him empty his stomach again, if there had been anything in it.

A vision of the white sheet that covered him from shoulder to toe shifted to conceal his entire face hit him. A vision of himself still, frozen stiff, on the examination table under the sheet.

He supposed that he liked the sheet where it was, sliding off of him because he was real, he could move, rather than placed reverently over a form that wasn't him and would never could never ever move ever again. Yes, this was probably better.

But he wasn't sure.

Pain meds. Maybe they'd given him pain meds. He remembered Sam, Tuck, Jazz, Vlad; maybe they'd given him pain meds after he passed out, maybe that was why he couldn't concentrate, why he didn't make any sense. But they were wearing off, and coherency wouldn't be worth it. Wouldn't be worth the burning.

He hated Vlad's lab. The colors, the beeping, the light. He hated how the table felt on his skin, he hated how his skin felt on his skin…. The dull, all-over sort of ache was becoming sharper, hotter, tighter, awful. His hands on metal didn't feel like his hands, the sheet scratched at his gauzed torso like sandpaper or worse.

His eyes squeezed shut, and he clenched his teeth to hold off a gasp of pain. He remembered the last time he'd been awake on this table, and this pain wasn't anything in comparison to what he'd felt then.

Oh God….what if it gets that bad? I can't handle it if it gets that bad, not again!

Though moving his joints was like scraping two shards of pure rust together, he propelled himself upward in whatever way he could, searching frantically for something in the lab that could bring him relief, that could stave off the onslaught of horrible, mind-shattering pain that he knew was probably coming.

A rush of air; he was falling. When he hit the ground he didn't care that his side exploded. He used whatever strength he could muster to haul himself into a half-sitting position again, using the other hand to drag himself toward the closest cabinet.

Chemistry had kicked his butt once already, and had no idea what he was looking for short of a box labeled, 'Pain Meds for Danny.' Considering where he was, finding such a box was not completely impossible, but he needed something, anything, so bad.

He'd made it maybe three feet when he noticed the trail of blood he was leaving behind him. The sheet barely covered his bottom half now, but he couldn't find it in himself to care about his nudity. His skin, God, his skin was no longer his skin as he had known it. It was slimy and crusty at the same time, a mottled, reddened mess. He wanted to scream in horror at himself, but he couldn't find the air.

The pain was still escalating; any moment his elbows would collapse and he'd be stuck where he was on the floor. This was an awful plan, but he wasn't even disappointed in himself; he always made the worst plans.

Without his permission a shaky hand raised itself to his head as if to absent-mindedly run itself through his hair, only to meet with a tender, assumedly burnt as the rest of him, scalp, and nothing else.

My hair.

He used his last scrap of energy to curl himself into the tightest ball he could, which wasn't much, dragging the sheet with him as much as possible to preserve his modesty, though every square inch of skin it touched it sawed.

I'm a monster, he deplored internally, A burning, wallowing, hideous monster.

"I'm sorry," he rasped, "Sorry, sorry, sorry…."

He wasn't apologizing to anyone in particular. A zillion faces flashed by his mind's eye, not the least being his parents. Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad, Sam, Tuck, Mom, Dad, Jazz…. Kristina Baker. David Baker. Baker Mom, Baker Dad, people he'd never seen but people he'd certainly, certainly wronged in the deepest, most irreversible way possible.

"I'm sorry!" It was meant to be a shout, a shout to the heavens and any cruel, capricious god that could be watching. This was his punishment for so many things, and he deserved it. He deserved it, he knew he did, but he was sorry. Couldn't they see that he was sorry? That he hadn't meant to? That none of his many, many mistakes had had malicious intent, that none of them could have possibly lead to this in his most brutal nightmares!

Not exactly. Not exactly….

The burning, the burning. In a sort of vague, last-ditch effort to stop that horrible hellfire, he attempted to conjure up some ice in his hand. He'd been working on using his ghostly powers in human form, and he'd gotten pretty good. He envisioned a blue layer of cold encompassing him, encasing him, providing a cool reprieve for just a few moments.

But nothing happened.

Alarmed at his inability to even produce a snowflake, he flexed his hand as if to produce an ecto-blast. Nothing. He tried to float, which would have been a bright idea in the first place. Nothing. He tried invisibility, intangibility, he reached to where he knew his core was, but….nothing.

Maybe the universe didn't know, didn't know how sorry he was. But how else could he suffer? What else could he do, what else did he have to give?

What did parents tell children when they'd done something wrong?

Think about what you've done.

It was about the only thing still within his power. The only things he could control were his thoughts, and even those weren't completely his own, partially consumed by the agony that was residing in his own skin. But maybe, just maybe, he could convert some of that physical pain into emotional pain, and maybe that was more just. Maybe that would prove how sorry he was.

He knew he wasn't making any sense. He knew that, he knew it. But he had to do something.

It was late. Sam and I were just about to go home; I'd have been home on time, if we'd just left, but….a blip, on the monitor. Went to check it out.

The images. The sounds. The feelings. He played them in his head as vividly as he could recall them, over and over again, faster and faster.

Until voices in the real world brought him back to reality.

"Our son, Vlad, he's our son—"

"Come on, Vladdie, let us through, we can help—"

"You don't understand, just wait—"

His parents. They were coming. Panic bubbled up inside him, giving him a burst of energy significant enough to allow him to scuttle away a foot or more. His burnt hands slipped on the viscous blood that had accumulated on the ground, putting him flat on the floor again before his parents came into view.

"Danny!"

He was ashamed, he was afraid. He was sorry, and he wanted them to go away.

In moments, a pair of arms had lifted him back onto the table, but he could hardly think to place them through the all-consuming agony that gripped his entire body.

Someone or perhaps several someones were trying to assist him; logically he could put that together, but every neuron in his brain screamed at him to fight, to get away. Feebly he flailed and cried out, incessantly begging whoever it was to stop, to pretty, pretty please not hurt him anymore. Hardly able to comprehend the words that spilled out of his mouth, he gargled out desperate apologies until his throat ceased to function.

The world got spinnier and his mind less focused. Soon he couldn't remember what the mouthed apologies were for; as he drifted away all he knew without reason was that they weren't enough.

…..

"We're taking him home, Vlad, that's all there is to it," Maddie announced as she marched up the stairs out of the mayor's lab. Jack may have wanted to stay with Danny, but she had some words to give to a few people.

"Maddie, darling, please, you have to understand—"

That was too much. Heart seething with vitriol, she whirled around to stare down her once-friend from the top of the staircase.

"I'm not your darling. I'm not your old college chum. I'm not even your associate. You implore me to listen, to try to understand whatever bizarre series of awful decisions led to you storing my gravely injured teenage son alone in some secret laboratory under your stupid atrocity of a mansion?"

"Madeline, please, you were so busy—"

"No pleases either, buster. You had no right! You should've called us, hell even come in person to drag us here, no matter what we were doing. He's our son, Vlad, he's our son, and he's hurt. Nothing comes before that."

She flung open the metallic door leading to the main part of the house and stalked angrily in the direction of the room where they'd left the children. "Instead you conspire with a set of teenagers to willfully conceal him from us when we could have helped him. As if that wasn't enough you left him alone, with neither sufficient anesthesia nor restraints—we're all lucky he didn't kill himself falling off that damned table of yours in his condition."

The moment she and the billionaire stepped into his ornate sitting room, parlor thing, the three adolescents in question stood. "And you three! Why didn't you call us, why? Sam, Tucker, what on Earth did you even tell your parents? They must be worried out of their minds for you two, and if they knew this was how you treated your friends, what do you think they'd say? Would they be proud? And, Jasmine, don't you even get me started on why your behavior was particularly atrocious. Of all the people in the world, I never would've pegged a capacity for such horrible irresponsibility on you. Do you know how much this could have hurt your brother? Your brother, Jasmine!"

Sam and Tucker were staring stoically at the floor, but Jazz was in tears. "Mom, I'm so sorry….I-I just didn't, just wasn't….It didn't seem like a good—"

"What would have been so bad about it, hm? What could your father and I possibly have done to make the situation worse than it already is? We're the foremost ghost experts in the world, whatever that robo-ghost did, we're hands down the most qualified to fix it."

"Mom, I'm—" Jazz blubbered, her sniffs morphing into fully-fledged sobs in front of everyone. Maddie couldn't remember ever in her entire life yelling at Jazz like that; there'd been that time she had that awful, motorcycle-riding boyfriend, then that time with that pop star, but overall Jazz had been a successful and obedient teenager. She'd been stubborn, she'd been irresponsible, but not like this. Never like this.

Reflexively, she wanted to comfort the girl. She wanted to wrap her arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be okay; anyone would be shaken up after a day like this, but she was an adult now. An adult who lived on her own most of the time and should have been capable of basic reasoning. Basic reasoning!

"It's because of that ghost boy, isn't it? You didn't want us to help your brother because we're bad people, is that it? Bad people for shooting the ghostly menace you worship so much."

Her daughter's tear-laden aqua eyes stared at her in a mix of horror and pain. It was the only connection, the only thing that made sense, that could explain this variation in her daughter's behavior. "What? No—"

"Don't lie to me, Jasmine. You've been making no sense ever since the whole debacle happened this weekend. Are you trying to hurt us for hurting that ecto-menace? Are you actively trying to sabotage your family for protecting the town, for protecting you, from an uncontrollable monster who has proved time and time again to be malicious, untrustworthy? Where in your idealist's head did the idea come from that—"

"Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Jazz shrieked suddenly, "You don't know anything! You think you do, but you don't, you just don't…." Her words trailed off into a mess of tears and erratic breathing; Sam and Tucker coaxed her to sit, each of them pale, shaking too, but certainly determined not to intervene.

Maddie froze, froze and evaluated her daughter, a shaking, bawling mess. Maybe she needed help, maybe college wasn't good for her. Maybe the stress of living away from home—no, Jazz was forty on the inside. That wouldn't make any sense.

The Ghost Boy, though. This had something to do with the Ghost Boy.

"Did he hurt you, Jazz?"

"What?" she sniffled, wiping her nose on her sweater sleeve.

"The Ghost Boy, Jazz, did he hurt you? Did he do something to you, to Danny?" Too tired to be very angry at her daughter, she crossed the room and knelt down on her knees in front of her. Taking her free hand in hers, she begged her softly for an answer. "Please, honey, I'm your mother. I want to help you, both of you, so badly, but I can't if no one tells me what's going on. You understand that don't you?"

Her daughter nodded, still weeping, but said not a word.

"I need to know what's going on, sweetheart. Please. Please help me help you."

"You can't, Mom. You just can't."

Author's note: Here you are, an update. Thanks for reading and let me know what you're thinking in your reviews! I expect to hit 50k words next chapter, and it'd be cool to do it on a good note.