Chapter 14
"Mr. Lancer's crazy if he thinks any of us are going to get all this crap done before break. I swear, we've got about a dozen worksheets, we're supposed to finish that book, then we've got a whole paper on that, eight to ten pages! Eight to ten pages. Ten!"
For a brief moment of what felt like perfect peace, it wasn't snowing. Sam and Tucker were clomping steadily down the lightly dusted sidewalks, enjoying the glow that came from finishing the second to last day of school before winter break as well as the break in precipitation.
"Well, no amount of ranting from you is going to change any of that, so get over it," Sam laughed tiredly, watching as her friend slouched slightly under the weight of his overflowing backpack. "I could've carried some of that, you know," she reminded him, "And I'm sure Danny wouldn't have minded having more time with less homework."
A heartbeat's worth of time passed before Tuck responded, but it felt like longer. Sam was actually making a valiant effort toward joking, which was an amazing thing for her to do any day, but today especially given the circumstances. "Yeah, left it there today and tomorrow, both! Then he'd just have to do it all in forty-eight hours in January." As if it felt possible to plan for such a far away time as January. "Or, even worse, somebody like Mr. Lancer would have to bring it to him!"
"I highly doubt the school would have a teacher drive out here to personally give him his work. It was us or his parents." Another heartbeat's moment. "And I really wouldn't mind carrying it. Don't feel bad, it's not your fault you have the body of a twig and the athleticism of an overweight baby mouse."
Tucker laughed then, emitting a sound that was so close to being genuine it broke Sam's heart even further. "Okay, the twig I'll give you, but an overweight baby mouse? That's just so specific."
"Well it's true. Plus, it's not like I said you had the body of one, just that your ability to perform basic tasks involving strength or agility might be pretty similar. But don't worry…." She paused for effect. "With just a bit of practice, you might catch up!"
They rounded a corner and suddenly the glowing sign declaring "Fenton Works" was in view. Neither friend looked at the other, but they both heard each other take a long, deep breath at the sight of it.
School had been long. School had been hard. All of the teachers were trying to cram in everything they'd had on their schedules to do before break, but a combination of poor time management and excellent distraction skills on behalf of their students had made that feat nearly impossible. The seniors had it even worse; one would think that they'd get a little slack because they were supposed to be working on their college apps and all that jazz, but no one at the institution was apparently smart enough to think of that. That, or they just didn't care.
College apps. Who had time to even remember that colleges existed right now?
Sam's parents had been on her about them for years. Since even before freshman year they'd been hoping and planning to send her to one of the most prestigious institutions, if not an Ivy League then close. But quarter after quarter, semester after semester, year after year, their hopes had slowly withered away right along with her GPA. While she'd managed to never fail a class, unlike Danny who had even less free-time than she did, the whole ghost hunting thing really took a lot of time and energy, time and energy which could (and according to her parents should) have been used on schoolwork. Now she felt like she would probably be safe getting into a state school, but she still hadn't ruled out the possibility of community college just yet.
Tucker had beaten them both; though he had just about as much time as Sam, he had more of a natural talent for school and seemed to care more, which made all the difference.
As they had approximately seven billion times before, Sam and Tucker let themselves into Fenton Works without so much as a knock.
It may have been Sam's imagination, but she could have sworn the house was eerily quiet. It had its usual level of lived-in style messiness, with various jackets and ecto-weapons strewn about on different surfaces, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. Then again, everything had felt quite a bit off lately.
A tiny, effervescent green splotch on the coffee table they passed reminded her all too well of this fact. It was a simple spill, likely the result of Mr. Fenton getting too excited about something and bumping the table while a beaker or something was on it. She'd seen similar evidence of the Fenton's liberal use of ectoplasm as both an experimental substance and a source of ammunition countless times, but recent events made the image more striking than ever.
Slippery vibrant green on clear plastic gloves, mingling with bright, terrible vermillion and unnatural tan glops as her stiff fingers struggled to manipulate clingy white gauze around her best friend's shoulder….
She held the railing for support and shuddered as she ascended the stairs. Never again.
"Dan-ny!" Tucker called out when they reached the top, huffing and puffing while he prayed that his overloaded backpack would stay on his shoulders for just another minute.
"What the hell, Tuck?"
"I'm just letting him know we're here, I don't wanna startle him…."
"What if he's asleep? Wouldn't you startle him even more if he's asleep?"
"Well, in my defense, it is the middle of the day. Plus, what better way to wake up than to my be-a-uutiful voice. Dan-ny!"
Sam rolled her eyes and took a deep breath as they approached the door to Danny's bedroom. Her legs felt like tightly coiled springs ready to bounce and her heart was palpitating to a tune her very favorite rock-metal band would've thought too intense. Tucker hasn't done anything wrong, she reminded herself silently, He doesn't deserve me lashing out at him just because I feel like a caged tiger.
Just as Sam was about to turn the doorknob and gain entrance into her best friend's room, a frazzled looking redhead seemed to appear quite instantaneously at her side.
"Woah!" she exclaimed automatically, leaping back quickly while her fingers twitched for where she kept her ectogun.
"Here to bring him his schoolwork?" Jazz asked.
The bags under her eyes made Sam cringe. It was off-putting to see Jazz—usually so put together—looking so, well, not. Her orange mane was frizzy and generally in disarray, as if in their idleness her hands had seen fit to comb through it over and over again until the action became counterproductive to its original purpose.
"Yeah," Tucker replied, letting the strain in his voice come through to make a show of how heavy his load was, "I've got it all in here. Every...single...book!"
"Oh, well that's good," Jazz replied absently. A beat of time passed. "I don't know if he'll want to see you."
It was Sam's turn to huff dramatically. "What do you mean he might not want to see us? Of course he'll want to see us, we're his best friends."
"I just mean, well, I'm not sure he really wants to see anyone. He's hardly said a word since he's been home. To anyone."
"Well if he's conscious he'd better start talking to me, because I want an explanation for what on Earth he was thinking going after Skulker, getting himself caught like that."
"I'm not sure that's what's…"
"And I'll go one further, I want a blood promise that the won't take his spectral ass a step out of this house until he's been given the okay from at least two of the three of us."
Tucker groaned. "Whatever you want to say or do to him, can we please just see him? At least go inside. This backpack is killing me."
Overweight baby mouse, Sam thought cantankerously, reminding herself to breathe and control her anger. "What he said." And with that she twisted the doorknob and stepped purposefully into the room.
Between the cluttered desk, piles of laundry strewn around the floor, and wall upon wall plus shelf upon shelf of space memorabilia, this room screamed Danny. Sam had always been a fan; her room screamed darkness and struggle, and, while she loved that and wouldn't dare change it, it was a pleasant reminder to her that her friend's soul and outlook weren't quite as bleak as hers.
The limp figure in the bed contrasted this reminder quite sharply.
He lay flat on his back with the covers pulled up to his chin. His head was slightly elevated by two fluffy pillows in star and moon pillow cases stacked on top of each other. While his dark hair should've been splayed out over the fabric in matted disarray from his extended resting, every strand of it was markedly absent. His scalp, which by general rules of baldness should've been a shiny dome, was rough and mottled, red and white. His eyes were shut too and only part of one eyebrow remained, and the roughness of his skin reminded her quaintly of a sleeping turtle.
His head tilted nearly imperceptibly toward the door when it opened, then tiredly returned to its original position. His lips pursed as he exhaled slowly, painfully, and his eyes scrunched more tightly shut, which caused a twinge of despair to ignite in the pit of Sam's stomach.
"Hey, Danny," she whispered softly from across the room, not bothering to turn on the light as she approached his bed. He didn't respond.
Tucker followed a few steps behind her and swung his backpack off his shoulders and onto his friend's desk chair first thing before announcing, "We brought you your homework. By we I mostly mean I—after all, I did all of the heavy lifting."
Sam forced a slight smirk to spread across her face. "He was just being an idiot. You know him, won't let the girl help with anything."
No response. Still. Her shoulders slumped as her concern deepened.
Jazz lingered in the doorway, dragging her shaking hand through her hair while she observed the conversation.
If you could even call it a conversation, that is. The word conversation usually implies more of an exchange. Danny didn't even look at Sam and Tucker, let alone respond to them.
"Are you alright, Danny?" Sam asked, kneeling beside the bed so that she'd be at eye level with im. A different brand of panic than usual began bubbling in her stomach; they knew very little about the nature of the Fenton parents' weapon and it's blast. Flashes of Danny on a table in Vlad's lab, bleeding out, red and green, flashed before her mind's eye again, and she wondered if it was possible that there had been some sort of damage to his brain.
When he didn't respond, Sam and Tuck turned to Jazz, silently re-asking the question.
She jerked her head toward the hallway, and they got up to meet her there immediately. "Be right back, Danny," Tucker muttered, adjusting his overflowing backpack for more stability on the desk chair as he left.
The moment Jazz closed the door, Sam deemed it safe to whisper. "What's going on with him? Is he alright? Has he talked at all?"
"Yeah, he's fine. Well, I mean, physically as well as can be expected—as far as I know. He won't say anything to me anymore—he did talk though. I'm convinced he's all there, he's just closed off, uninterested. I imagine, you know, after everything that's happened, that he'd be depressed for sure, traumatized even. I keep trying to tell him that he needs to talk, that he can talk to me. I offered to call you guys so he could talk to you, and that was the only time I actually got a response out of him."
"Why didn't you call us then?" Sam snapped hushedly.
Jazz blushed. "Well, that's the thing, you see." She paused and shifted her gaze between the two of them before continuing. "He didn't want to see you."
"Didn't want to see us? Why not?" Tuck whispered, shocked.
Jazz shrugged. "I don't know. It's not as if I could get him to elaborate very much. I suggested it and he shook his head. I tried to ask why, and said I was going to do it, then he grabbed my arm—not really hard, just, you know, to show he was serious—and told me no."
Sam's chest constricted, and for a moment it seemed that all air had left her lungs. Then anger flew in to replace it.
Tuck gained the strength to speak first. "He didn't want to see us?"
Jazz shook her head. "Apparently not," she clarified, bereft, "But if it makes you feel any better, he doesn't want to see me either. He just wants to lie there, alone."
"He's okay, though, right?," Tuck breathed, "So he can talk, and he knows we're there, he's just being…."
"An asshole," Sam finished for him, crossing her arms over her chest. "After everything we've done for him, he doesn't want to see us? That inconsiderate, mopey…." Her sentence blurred into oblivion as she shook off the urge to shriek.
"I don't know if calling him names is gonna help, Sam."
"Well, I don't know, Tuck, maybe it will? Maybe instead of lying there all day like he's comatose he'd snap out of it and actually interact with somebody!"
"I really don't think that's the best idea," Jazz cautioned her, obviously making a great effort to keep her voice soft and sweet, "In all the things I've read about helping people heal from trauma like this, I've never seen anything about shouting at the person until they 'snap out of it.' At least, not under the reccomended column."
"Maybe it's time for us to conduct a new study. You think we'd get extra credit for that?"
Tucker leaned his face into his hands and shook his head as if he had a headache. "Assuming that shouting is off the table, what do you recommend we do? You are the psych major after all."
Jazz blushed. "Well, I'm really no expert...I mean, I've only taken a few classes, haven't even signed yet, but...I have read a lot of books. My best advice would usually be to do exactly what I've been doing. Talk to him every so often, let him know you're there, but give him space. But, God, I wish it worked much faster. Mom and Dad are getting really worried."
"They should be worried. They shot their son with a mega-death-ray and would've fried him if we hadn't been there." At this point Sam could no longer stand standing still and began to pace in the general area of the hall.
Jazz tilted her head downard and closed her eyes tight, curtains of unkempt red hair falling around her face. "They don't know they did that, though. They have no idea that was Danny that they….that they…" Gunned down and nearly executed in the middle of a cowed street.
"I get him not wanting to talk to his parents," Tucker said, "But why wouldn't he want to talk to us? We're his best friends, we've stood by him this whole time. When have we ever not helped him? When have we ever tried to hurt him? We've worked so hard…." Sam knew from the haunted look in her friend's eyes that he was remembering the basement of Vlad's mansion, how desperately they all had fought to save his life when his skin seemed to be melting off his very bones. Throwing up in the Packers-themed bathroom in reaction to it all.
"I'm sure it's not anything you two did; you're model friends and confidants," Jazz assured them hurriedly, "I think it has more to do with himself, or, how he sees himself to be more accurate. He's obviously very depressed, very traumatized. I think that he doesn't think he's very deserving of happiness right now, and you two make him happy. Maybe he thinks you guys shouldn't be around him, maybe he doesn't think he deserves the pleasure of your company. That's just my theory."
Sam scoffed. "Well, the world doesn't revolve around him, does it? I'm going in there, and I'm going to make him talk to me."
Jazz immediately launched into a rant about why that was a bad idea, and Tucker reached out a hand as if to stop her, but she had opened the door to Danny's room and stormed in before either of the others could fully register what had happened.
Danny was lying stiffly on his bed, under the covers just as he had been before. His eyes were shut, but his furrowed brow and rigid body were dead-giveaways to the fact that he was not sleeping. He seemed to tense even further as Sam approached, proof that he was either quite aware of his surroundings or that Sam's emotional aura was just very strong, but he neither opened his eyes nor spoke.
Sam opened her mouth to shout at him, but she stopped herself as she got a better look at him. He looked so different from the friend she'd always known. An entire side of his face was reddened and mottled, raised and textured like an enormous scab. She wondered fleetingly if he was lucky he still had eyelids to close.
"Hey," she whispered, freezing as she stood by his bed. "I'm glad to see you're awake." His expression changed only infinitesimally, but she would have sworn he was confused. "You're a terrible actor. Always have been." She cracked a smile and tilted his head, but she couldn't detect any change in his demeanor in response to that statement. "Jazz told Tuck and I you didn't want to see us." A gasp from near the doorway told her that Jazz had heard and was less than pleased. "But we came anyway, of course, and we're still here. We're here because we care about you and we want to help you. You know that, right?"
No response. Sam felt her agitation returning.
"You know, since we are here, it'd be nice if you were too. I—I mean we—didn't come to admire your decor or ask Jazz how her break was going. We came to see you, to talk to you."
"And to bring you your homework," Tucker chimed in, trying to lighten the mood as he approached, "Not that I 100% recommend you do it—you know how crazy teachers get right before Christmas break. This week's a doozy!"
Sam cast an admonishing glare at him through the corner of her eye. The pair waited a good thirty seconds for Danny to say something, do something. Anything. But he didn't. He just lay there, stiff as a board and silent as the grave.
"You're being a huge jerk, you know," she told him, fighting with every moment to keep her voice steady. "We care about you, and all you want to do is be a stubborn idiot. Fine, do it your way. Who needs supportive friends, huh?" She turned to leave and hoped to hear a shift behind her, maybe an abnormal exhale, any sign that Danny didn't really want her to go. She paused in the doorway, and, without looking back, uttered through barred teeth, "See you tomorrow."
She shoved past Jazz and took the stairs two at a time as she fled, wiping stupid, angry tears from her eyes. This hurts. God, this really hurts.
As she rounded a corner to head towards the front door, she found her path suddenly obstructed by a wall of orange.
"Woah!" the wall exclaimed, "Oh, hey Sam. I didn't know Danny had you and Tucker over. I assume Tucker's here, anyway. You three—always inseparable."
Jack Fenton was not a man she wanted to see right then. Just looking at him, standing there, a smile on his face, brought back flashes of that horrible night when he stood, grim as a ghost, armed and dangerous, over the tortured, nearly-destroyed body of his dying son.
"I was just leaving, she mumbled," pushing past him towards the door.
She'd intended to wait for Tuck in the foyer, since she couldn't imagine him spending much more time telling jokes no one but him would laugh at to a person who didn't want to hear them. Now, though, all she could think of doing was escaping.
The stark whiteness of the outdoors burned her eyes, and she cursed the snow for showing itself, making the bright white brighter. She stumbled down the slippery steps onto the sidewalk and spun around to observe her familiar surroundings. How many times had she and Tuck walked to this house, how many times with Danny in tow? How many days in the summer had they spent lounging around in this vicinity, how many nights more recently had they met here before dispersing for patrol? How many times had she laughed with her friends on these steps, opened the door to the pleasing smell of Mrs. Fenton's freshly baked cookies?
Will it ever be the same?
This was the question Sam couldn't avoid, the one that swirled around in her brain, endlessly, endlessly, until the very fragments of sound which composed it were sharply magnified and grossly distorted, taking up every inch of thought-space she had.
She told herself to slow down, slow down and breathe. Tears were evil things, sick things that betrayed her every time they fell, and she willed them to stay back. Rather than internally yelling at them, she decided to focus simply on breathing deeply, which over the years was slowly proving more effective.
When Tuck did emerge from the Fenton household a couple minutes later, she was composed and ready for a sullen, abnormally silent walk home.
…..
Jazz couldn't sleep that night. She hadn't slept very well the night before, nor had she the night before that. Theoretically the exhaustion would build until she could finally get a peaceful eight hours in, but for her it seemed to come in bursts. One second she'd be so tired she felt like she could just fall over, the next she'd be too hyped up to sit. That's how she ended up, at two in the morning, lurking outside her little brother's bedroom door.
A weak smile formed briefly on her face as she thought about her little brother, specifically that not-so-long-ago time when he was actually little. Sometimes, on nights fraught with thunder or nights after he'd watched a too-scary movie, he used to show up at her door, clutching his favorite blanket, eyes teary, asking if he could stay with her for the night because he was scared but didn't want to wake their parents.
The smile faded away when she remembered all the times she'd turned him away. Not every time. But sometimes, when she was feeling particularly irritable with the excitable child she often saw as a nuisancef, she'd snapped at him and told him to let her sleep. She would have done anything to go back in time, to every moment she ever refused to offer him emotional support, and do it right. But it was too late.
Now he didn't want her emotional support. He might need it, sure, but he refused it, rejected it. Rather than seeking help, he acted as if he simply had no emotions at all, when she knew he was actually drowning.
You're drowning too, she reminded herself, her internal voice haunted and echoing. Usually she'd take solace in her books, and if those didn't work then her parents, but both were useless in the current situation. None of the books had the answers she wanted, since their favorite one was to wait, and she knew her mother at least was still furious over the whole hiding her gravely injured son at Vlad Masters' house thing.
She couldn't exactly blame her; if she were her mother and knew only the things her mother knew, she'd be furious too. But she knew things her mother didn't know, things her mother couldn't know….
A low, raspy sound came from beyond the other side of the door. Heart racing, hands shaking, Jazz slowly twisted the doorknob and prodded open the door.
The sight she was met with broke a piece inside her. Her little brother, not so little anymore, was curled into a tight ball under his covers, shaking gently. Light from nearby street lamps flowed in through the window, casting a pale glow on the boy and illuminating the wetness of his face.
Her first instinct was to freeze, maybe call their parents. But a more powerful, intelligent yet still automatic urge overcame that one, and she swept toward him with a level of sureness she hadn't felt in a long time.
The broken, weeping figure didn't appear to notice her approach, but when she sat down beside him he jumped and whirled around to look at her, hands outstretched as if they should have been preparing ecto-blasts. The contortion of his remaining half of an eyebrow, the wideness of his almost childlike blue eyes, and the grimace that was his mouth melted away the moment he saw her.
His eyes squeezed shut as tears fell from them and his entire face was distorted into the very portrait of a sob. She expected him to shout at her to get out and push her away, but instead he merely bent over himself and covered his face with his hands.
"I'm sorry," he lamented, "Sorry—" He cut himself off with a choking cry.
At a loss for what else to do, she reached out and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, taking great care to be gentle of his still-tender skin.
"Sh, it's okay…." she told him, keeping her voice as quiet and as calm as she could. Given the circumstances, this should have been a nearly insurmountable task, but she attributed the ease with which she did it to the fact that Danny was freaking out. Somehow, when one person is distraught, it makes it easier for the other to keep their head.
"No, 's never gonna be okay!" he protested. She patted his back gently and continued to shush him, but he wasn't done. "How could it ever be okay? Can never be okay…."
"We'll get through this, you'll see. Look how far we've come already, after all this you came through. You're still here, we're still here with you. It'll be okay."
He shook his head vigorously. "How? Even if I weren't….if I weren't…." He moved his hands away from his face and looked at himself, examined his scarred arms and neck, ran his fingers over his newly bald scalp. "Even….if I were fine…I'd still have….still have…." A powerful shudder overcame him and he launched himself into a new outburst.
Jazz's heart clenched tight, and she tightened her grip on him. "Sh, it'll be okay, you're okay, it's all okay…." Danny flinched a bit, and she pulled away to look at him.
He took a deep, shaky breath and tried to compose himself enough to speak clearly. "I'm not okay, though, Jazz. Look at me, I'm broken, a—monster." His voice dropped at the last word and he took another breath before continuing. "Before I was it but you couldn't always see—now, you can see it, everybody can see it. And it's right, they should see it. It's right, but I hate it."
"Danny, I'm sure this'll all clear up, you'll heal. You've always healed fast."
Bereft, he shook his head. "As if that matters—but that's another thing." He extended a trembling hand outward and flexed his fingers as if to conjure an ecto-blast or an ice shard, but again nothing happened. "My powers—it's like they're gone. I don't know if they're really gone or if they're there and I just can't get to them. But, I've got nothing either way." He wiped his nose on his sleeve and collapsed onto his back. "Maybe that's for the best too. It's what I deserve, and it's safer this way."
Jazz was getting more and more confused, feeling more and helpless. She held desperately to the psychologist persona she'd built up in her head and tried to think of a way to lead the conversation in a helpful direction. Or maybe it was just to help her understand.
"Does that make you feel better?" she asked, composed with only a hint of apprehension.
He thought for just a beat before answering. "No. No, my powers may have been what I used to—to do what I did. But the real, the real reason, the real cause, that was me. All me. I did that. No matter what I look like, no matter what I can do now….that never won't be true."
"That doesn't make you a bad person, though," she whispered, staring into his eyes with as much love and faith as she could muster, "You aren't a bad person, you try so hard, do so much good, and you've sacrificed so much to do it. One mistake doesn't change that."
He laughed a hollow, bitter laugh. "Doesn't it, though? I tried hard, I worked hard, and I messed up hard. What I did—there's no fix. No way back, it's just it, it's just done. And I'm done too." He convulsed in a half-laugh, half-sob episode after he barely managed to finish his sentence. And she couldn't get a coherent word out of him for the rest of the night.
All she could do was be there, hug him. Truly, she had no words.
Author's Note: Hey, guys, I know it's been like forever. I've got the rest of the story outlined, and there will be at least four more chapters. We're getting back to a spot with action soon, so hold on. Let me know what you're thinking in a review if the urge strikes, I'd appreciate it.