To the guest who reviewed that this story makes them smile, you're welcome. :)

As time went on, I became faintly aware that I was not well.

This may have been obvious to other people, but my mind had been cloudy ever since I had "gotten over" the ecto-flu. I sat in my living room now, Kit and Cobalt talking to my friends. I had been tied to a chair so that I wouldn't attack anyone from the silent and undetectable rage the sickness caused me.

"See," Kit explained, looking over his shoulder every few moments as though he expected to get captured again, "the sickness disguises itself as ecto-flu but is much worse. For starters, it lasts about three days and causes the victim to cough up a lot of ectoplasm and blood. A regular ecto-flu would only cause you to cause up ectoplasm and only lasts one day, if that." Kit checked over his shoulder again, twitching impatiently. "The sickness feeds off of negative emotions and makes them worse. After a month or two, the sickness will kill them. This is very dangerous for halfas like Rose and you, Danny."

Danny looked surprised, but Kit held up a hand to stop him. Cobalt answered Danny's unsaid questions. "Kit has ways of knowing things. Don't ask about it, because the answer will really only bring on more questions."

Kit continued on his expert explanation of the sickness. I was slowly starting to realize more about the sickness myself, and I suddenly detected all the changes in my body the sickness had created. I got angry so easily... I went right to violence... I was almost always at my breaking point...

"The sickness can kill a halfa and make them a complete ghost. But the sickness doesn't go away if this happens. It latches onto the new ghost, and the new ghost will continue to be sick until they eventually wither away as well." Kit looked over his shoulder again. "There's only one way to beat the sickness."

Kit looked nervous now, and Sam hissed at him to tell them the cure. He flinched, looking like a scolded child, but he told them the cure anyway.

"It's not a cure. It takes a while... but you either have to keep his emotions positive, or you have to keep him emotionless. Without negative emotions to feed on, the sickness will die. How long has he had this sickness?"

"A week, not counting the ecto-flu disguise." Danny looked worried, far more worried than Sam or Tucker did.

"Then you have to keep him happy or emotionless for another week." Kit checked over his shoulder once more, sighing at the alarms of the insane asylum looking for him. "I've gotta go. Don't forget what I said!" And then he and Cobalt were gone, and my friends were the only ones there. They each looked worried, and Danny reached a hand out to touch my shoulder. I growled at him, but my growling ceased the moment he touched me. Instead, I felt calm.

"Danny... how are you calming him like that?" Tucker sounded amazed. Danny didn't seem to realize he was calming me, because a confused expression comes over his face and he pulls away, leaving me snarling again.

"I don't... I wasn't..." He takes in my angry expression, which was just peaceful a moment ago, and he slowly untied the ropes. He made sure to brush his hand over the back of my neck the moment I was free, which really complicated the plans that my foggy mind had created. It was hard to go from leaping up in anger to sudden calmness and I fell, hitting my head.

***line break***

It was Thursday. My friends had deduced that as long as Danny was nearby, I wouldn't go into fits of anger because his influence on me was far stronger than the influence of the sickness that tried to make my rage stronger. It was put to the ultimate test when Dash tried to pick on us for holding hands in the hall, though it wasn't really holding hands. Not that I would have minded. Danny had my jacket sleeve, and his hand was just barely touching me. But it was enough.

I wanted to snarl and leap for Dash's throat, I really did. But on the other hand. I also wanted to stay so close to Danny. In the end, Danny's influence won. Partially. As Dash snickered and walked past, I stuck my leg out and tripped him out of malevolence. I glared at him as I was dragged away to my last class of the day, baring my teeth before Danny's influence won out again and I focused my attention on him. After class, Dash tried to make another remark. That time, my sickness's influence won.

I snarled and, tearing myself away from Danny's grip, pounced on Dash's unsuspecting form. Anyone would have thought that he would have left me alone since all I did for the past week before we found out the cure for the sickness was growl at him and chase him around in a furious rage. But apparently not. I managed to give Dash a nosebleed before Danny pulled me off of Dash, and the effect of his touch was immediate. I panted and slumped down, suddenly exhausted and completely unable to fathom why. I'd felt so full of wrathful energy when I was attacking Dash. What happened?

I, too, had a nosebleed. I was lucky that Danny managed to notice it before anyone else and he held a tissue to my nose to hide the ectoplasm that was leaking out with the blood. Dash was given three detentions for instigating the fight, as Danny had an invisible duplicate overshadow the two people who were called in to testify that our story was true. In a way, it was. Dash had been the one to provoke me. But I had been to first one to attack.

Danny ended up having to carry me home. My leg had been badly injured in the fight, and I hadn't noticed it before my energy had vanished. Of course, we couldn't have a peaceful walk home. No, Skulker decided to show his face again. The mere moment I saw his face, the calmness that Danny had been influencing onto me disappeared. Not because I was angry at Skulker, but because Danny had put me down to turn into Phantom. I watched through blurry vision, not really feeling any emotion in particular until Skulker hurt Danny by smashing him into the concrete. Then I saw red.

Literally. Some of Danny's blood splashed onto my face, and I was momentarily blinded. But that didn't matter. Filled with savagery, I turned into Shadow and attacked Skulker. I didn't remember most of what happened. One moment, I was seeing Danny hit the ground. The next, I was sucking a badly destroyed Skulker into the Fenton Thermos. I was fuming over Danny's injuries, though he reassured me that he was going to be okay, that he'd taken worse. He decided that turning back to human was a much worse alternative to flying me home, so he did just that. Someone asked what was wrong with me. Danny answered that I was sick and shouldn't have been fighting Skulker.

Maybe I shouldn't have been. But I stood by my decision, because in the split second between Danny hitting the ground and me going to attack Skulker I had realized something. In that split moment, I hadn't waited for the sickness to make a decision for me. I had made my own decision. I had decided to be furious rather than horrified. I had decided to attack Skulker because I was the one to decide my emotions, not the sickness.

In the split second before the sickness could decide on my emotion, I had decided for it.

***line break***

When I woke up, I was feeling so much better than I recently had. The undetected pain that the sickness had been causing me, the silent rage that made me attack, was gone. Danny wasn't next to me, and I knew this for a fact because I got up and searched for him frantically. I fell out of bed and Danny came running, having been talking to Sam and Tucker in the living room. Tucker was tolerating his allergies only because he knew that I needed him, however much the sickness insisted that I didn't.

Danny soothed me and tried to make me sleep again but I refused and painstakingly stood up, getting changed and stumbling downstairs. Sam and Tucker stopped talking the moment they saw me, and their faces lit up with relief. Did they think that I wouldn't have been able to get up again? What time was it?

I checked my clock and narrowed my eyes.

"You should all be in bed," I rasped, "it's 11:30 on a school night."

"No, Rose," Sam said gently. "It's Friday night. You slept completely through today."

I froze, horror and dread filling my body. I'd slept. For an entire day. How had I been so tired? I shivered, a little cold, and Danny wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.

"Sorry," Danny said, rubbing his neck awkwardly like he did when he was nervous or apologizing, "but you seemed to be calmer when we kept the temperature down."

I nodded slowly, trying to process what he was saying.

"You did wake up a few times during the day, but you mostly babbled with fever. Your fever broke pretty quick, but we all stayed here to take care of you. You... you didn't act like yourself." Tucker looked away, embarrassed. I only nodded again, settling down on the couch. Danny sat down between me and Sam, and I stared distantly at the wall.

"Your friend came by today, the pink-haired one and his twin ghost." I looked at Sam, not really interested. "He said that you're getting better a lot faster than you should be, what with how long you've had this sickness." I blinked, and realized that it had to be Danny's influence on me before she even spoke the sentence. "Kit says that it's Danny. Since Danny's a halfa too, he naturally has a stronger influence on you that anyone else would, even a full ghost. Of course, then he had to run to make sure that he didn't get caught by the asylum."

I smiled, a genuine smile, for the first time in a week. Maybe everything wouldn't be so bad. I was getting better quickly. I felt more in control of my emotions than I had recently. And the way Danny acted around me... did Danny like me the way I liked him?