Chapter Twelve
CW: Depression, Brief References to Suicide and Bullying
Maddie wanted to believe, at first, that Danny was simply experiencing post-possession disorientation. They kept him out of school for a few days as they waited for the nausea and his strange sense of disconnection from his own body to fade. She and Jack scanned him daily and nightly, checking for any signs that the elusive Phantom had tried to repossess him or overshadow him, but so far there was nothing. Phantom also remained absent from Amity Park since the summoning, and as far as she knew, none of the ghosts had come and tried to see Danny since his possession ended. For the first few days back at school, things seemed better as his teachers reported he hadn't missed a single class or assignment, and his evenings were spent doing homework with Jazz before enjoying some time with his friends.
Tucker and Sam were coming over the house again, too. They would play Doomed, watch movies, tell jokes, and eat more junk food than Maddie felt comfortable with. But as much as there was an appearance of normalcy, that was all it was. Something was still terribly wrong with her son, and on his third day back at school, they received a frantic call from Mr. Lancer. There was a fight. Danny was mostly fine besides a bloody nose, but the other kid was seriously injured. Most of the students confirmed Dash provoked him. Tucker and Sam confessed that Danny had been bullied by Dash since he was a freshman, but not once did the teachers do anything to stop it.
She found herself intensely worried that afternoon when they picked him up. Danny was non-responsive, hand clutching his chest as he muttered something over and over to himself. She tried to listen, to figure out what he said, but Maddie couldn't make out the words. She and Jack brought him up to his room after a brief argument about whether or not to bring him to the hospital, and Jazz promised to keep an eye on Danny while they spoke with the administrators at Casper High. Despite Dash provoking him, Danny was suspended for two days. When she finally got him to talk to her about it the next morning, he said he just couldn't take it anymore and snapped. Danny promised not to do it again and then retreated to his room.
He spent the next two days quieter than usual, soft-spoken and uncertain. He flinched when anyone came too close, especially if it was her and Jack. When she told him about the suspension, he simply nodded, his hand going up to his chest as his fingers clutched his sweater uneasily. Danny insisted he was fine, that it was just a bad habit and that he wasn't in any actual pain. Maddie suspected otherwise. At least he had an appointment with the cardiologist again soon.
But that wasn't the only thing that frightened her. If they weren't actively engaging him, Danny did nothing. She found him more than once laying perfectly still on the bed in his room, staring vacantly at the star stickers on his ceiling in a way that remained unsettling no matter how often she saw him doing it. Once or twice she made an excuse to enter, worried he might be dead, only for him to shrug and for the strange atmosphere to fade.
Depression was Jazz's answer, and as she watched him she couldn't deny it. This went beyond mere possession, even past the kind of depression or anxiety she might expect after such a traumatic event. Her son seemed . . . done. Broken. A doll mindlessly moving through the motions of his life in a way that terrified her. He refused to talk to them about his possession, to the point where he wouldn't even speak the word. He would not answer any questions about Phantom, even though she would think that Danny of all people would want the ghost that did this to him caught so that it could never harm him or anyone else again.
It didn't make sense.
She did, then, what she always did at that point as she quietly washed the dishes after dinner. Start with the beginning, reexamine the evidence, and determine if it actually supported their conclusions. It was something she had been doing a lot in the last year. Many of their theories about ghosts were proving incorrect as they continued to study and interact with them. She didn't know if it was simply because what they studied in the past were closer to shades than the very physical, very present beings that emerged with the opening of the portal, if there were more types of ghosts than what she encountered during her first couple decades of research, or if most of their conclusions were depressingly incorrect, based on incomplete evidence. But she pushed those thoughts aside, trying to focus on her son instead.
The beginning, then. The portal was activated with Danny just outside the opening, exposing him to massive amounts of ectoplasmic radiation. He spent close to two weeks in the hospital, about three of those days comatose, and another two weeks recovering at home once he was finally released. Early symptoms included memory loss, cardiac arrhythmia, bradypnea, muscle spasms, headaches, confusion . . . There was also the odd Lichtenberg figure, which they suspected came from him being shocked while examining the wiring near the control panel, but thankfully it faded rapidly. The only scar he kept from the entire ordeal was the strange, perfectly round circle on the palm of his left hand. Danny claimed he didn't remember how he got it, and realistically, she had no reason to doubt him, but . . .
Unable to help herself, she glanced at her son over her shoulder. He was currently slouching on the couch in the living room, watching TV with his sister, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie, for all intents and purposes a perfectly ordinary teenager on a Saturday evening. She sighed, wondering if she should be prodding this at all, but she couldn't help herself as she added another clean plate to the drying rack.
On the surface, the kids' conclusion was solid if upsetting, and a not-so-small part of her wondered if she was desperately reaching for alternatives to excuse her own inability to see that Danny had been suffering for so long and she missed it. But there were little things that didn't quite add up right. She and Jack considered possession when he first arrived home. How could they not? The symptoms matched. But they performed several scans as part of their decontamination process with Danny. Every scan came back negative, and while there was a chance their equipment was flawed or ill-equipped to identify an ecto-entity as unusual as Phantom, she found herself doubting the story about Danny being possessed more and more as she considered it.
Because Phantom was a huge part of the problem, wasn't he? The kids described him as strangely helpful. He willingly offered up Desiree, the key to his true name and his own downfall. There was no way for Phantom to know that the kids wouldn't get the wish quite right, and despite not getting Phantom's real name, the kids confirmed that he still answered the summoning, going so far as to point out the things they did wrong and how dangerous their attempt was in the first place. Phantom still allowed himself to be expelled, too, and Maddie struggled to believe that any ghost would willingly surrender its host, not when possession was so difficult in the first place. If he had been possessing Danny, then either Phantom was an even more atypical ecto entity than they thought, or perhaps his relationship with Danny wasn't what they thought, more symbiotic than parasitic.
Or perhaps their early scans were right, and Phantom never possessed Danny at all.
She dropped the fork she was holding with a small clatter, and she saw Danny glance at her from the living room, blue eyes looking almost green in the light from the TV. "Do you need any help?"
"Thanks, honey, but I'm just about done," she said as she picked it up off the floor and scrubbed it again briefly under the soapy water before pulling the drain plug out and drying her hands. "I'm going to go down into the lab and do some work for a bit."
"Tell Danny that he can't keep hogging the remote all night," insisted Jazz as Maddie walked into the living room. They were watching some home renovation show again. Lately, Danny rarely watched anything else.
"You could just ask, Jazz. I'm about to head up to my room, anyway," he grumbled as he stood up and tossed it onto the couch next to her. "Kind of feeling tired."
Jazz let out a quick thanks, but watched Danny uneasily as he trudged up the stairs. As soon as he was out of sight, she looked back at Maddie, biting her lip. "Therapy?"
Maddie nodded. "He has an appointment in a week. Earliest I could get." She tried to call and see if they could get him in sooner after what happened at school, but they couldn't. They suggested keeping a close watch on Danny and bringing him to an emergency room if things got any worse, but she knew Danny loathed the hospital at this point. She worried that the threat of bringing him there would only make him do something drastic, something irreversible.
"It'll help, Mom. The thing with Dash . . . If we didn't know Phantom was possessing him, then I would've expected something like it to happen sooner or later," said Jazz. "At least based on what Tucker and Sam said about him bullying Danny."
"You're probably right. Don't stay up too late, okay?"
"It's Saturday, Mom," she said, rolling her eyes. "But don't worry, I won't."
"Goodnight, Jazz." Heading downstairs, she found Jack sitting at one of the workstations, a cold cup of coffee sitting on a stack of hastily scribbled notes. She walked up behind him and gave him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek.
"What are you working on?"
"It's Danny's decontamination scans," he said as she sat down on the stool beside him. "From after the accident. There's definitely no sign of possession, and I've been double checking the scanner to make sure it's functioning right. As far as I can tell, it's working perfectly." He frowned as he handed her the stack of readouts, and scanning it quickly she came to the same conclusion.
"Half a step ahead of me, then?"
"Great minds think alike, eh?" he grinned, but his smile faded quickly. "There were too many things about what the kids told us that didn't make sense. That still don't make sense, and I've been looking into it for a while now."
"Mostly related to Phantom?"
"That, but also Danny," he said, and she blinked. The only thing that made sense to her with respect to the kids' conclusion about the possession was Danny. They were right to think his symptoms fit, that the classic signs were all there. "I don't think he was ever possessed, but the only thing that I keep getting caught up on is the kids saying he had a death echo. That shouldn't be possible unless he's been possessed or a ghost, and we know he's not a ghost, but . . . "
She saw him staring at the portal as he drifted off, the metal doors sealed shut to keep ghosts from entering their lab. After Danny's accident, they considered abandoning their work so they wouldn't put their kids at risk again, but then the ghosts started coming through the portal. As the only people in town back then with any ghost hunting experience, they knew they were the only ones that could keep everyone in Amity Park, including their children, safe. Eventually they tried to shut it down to see if the ghost attacks would start to dwindle, but the damage was already done. Opening their portal caused a weakening between their world and the Ghost Zone that would last for centuries in Amity Park, and the ghosts continued to come through natural portals that now popped up regularly throughout the town.
So they reactivated the device, knowing that it at least provided them with a way to safely remove the ghosts rather than storing them in a thermos or other containment device. Although the thermos was powerful, they were still skeptical that any device or field could hold a ghost permanently, especially in the case of some of the much more powerful ones like Phantom.
"He's not dead," she said. There was absolutely no way he could be a ghost. "He's been to too many doctor's appointments. Even Spectra couldn't fool an echocardiogram." Probably. If she were being honest, she responded more confidently to Jack than she felt. It seemed unlikely that any mask a ghost could wear would penetrate so deep. She frowned, glancing at the readouts again. Even after a half-dozen decontaminations, Danny continued to maintain low-levels of ectoplasmic radiation. They stopped after the first couple of days when he complained about being nauseous and refused to eat much, realizing there wasn't much point if all the decontamination processes were harming Danny. "A side-effect from the accident and ectoplasmic exposure, then? We've only met a handful of people with permanent ecto contamination."
"And Danny's is worse than all of theirs. It's possible that . . . well. It's ridiculous."
Maddie reached over and squeezed his hand. "You're here to present the theories I wouldn't dream of. What are you thinking?"
"This." Picking up another print-out, Maddie frowned as she read it.
"Liminals? They're a myth, aren't they?" At the very least, they never found evidence that they were real. There were lots of folks who made claims to be something similar - spiritual mediums and the like - but the ones they encountered failed even the most basic tests when forced to prove their claims.
"Not so sure, Mads. Phantom mentioned it to the kids, remember?" He was right, but Maddie gave it little weight given the uncertainty surrounding Phantom's intentions. The kids did mention that Phantom talked about needing a liminal to make the summoning work. "It makes sense. Similar symptoms to possession. Near-death experience while exposed to a weak spot between the ghost zone and our world or to sufficient ecto radiation from the Ghost Zone. And Jazz and Valerie both mentioned Danny attempting to form friendships and having a strange affinity with some of the ghosts - that rocker ghost, the lunch lady."
"And Phantom, I'd bet," said Maddie as she read the information more closely, and her eyes widened slightly as she read another possible symptom. "A death mark?"
"The scar on his palm - the one he's told us he can't explain but seems hyper fixated on?" said Jack. "It fits."
"This doesn't explain his sickness for a few days following the summoning, or even how different he's been the last two weeks, though."
"Unless he and Phantom realized the kids thought he was possessed and made a plan together. Think about it, Mads. Obviously something odd is going on, and Danny doesn't want us to know. He may have just been happy to use this as a way to get us and the kids and everyone else to stop looking too closely, and there are lots of ways he could fake being sick," said Jack, and she realized he'd been considering this for far longer than she had. Although they both reached the same conclusion about Danny's possession, it took her husband to make the last, strange leap to something so fantastical that Maddie struggled to believe it was the truth. "I'm guessing, though, that this was all probably a lot further than Danny wanted to take this. Might explain why he's so much more depressed now than he was before the kids intervened."
"But why wouldn't Danny tell us?"
"Who knows? We don't see ghosts the same way he does. Maybe he worried we wouldn't understand it or what he's going through?" Jack shrugged. "The only one who can answer that is Danny."
"And maybe Phantom," said Maddie. "But if we're right, then the fact that he is–well, was doing better in school for a few days until the incident with Dash, reconnecting with his friends, and all of the other changes probably won't last, will they?"
"I don't know, Mads. If he's going to be as depressed as he is right now, I'd rather he go back to skipping classes and failing, because there's something else about liminals I found, too, that's got me concerned." He handed her another paperclipped article, this one written by a name she recognized. Dr. Alyce Winter. Maddie and Jack both went to school with her. She had a lot of respect for Alyce since she was one of only a handful of students seriously interested in paranormal science, a niche field that so many thought was a joke until their portal succeeded in opening a pathway to the Ghost Zone two years ago. "Alyce researched liminals for a few years after she graduated. She's found a couple of genuine ones, I think, based on what she's written."
"And?"
"Most of them die young," said Jack as he shifted a bit in his chair. "Twenties, maybe thirties at best. The handful of historical records she's found suggest the same, but the data is a bit patchy and it's hard to confirm who was or wasn't a legitimate liminal from the past based on the sources she had. It does seem like it's gotten worse in recent years, but that could be a flaw with the data sets. Ecto science is still too new a field to have much historical research to pull from."
"Were they killed by ghosts? Long-term exposure to ectoplasm?"
"It's unclear what the specific cause is," he said. "A couple have met pretty violent ends at the hands of someone or something, but others died of illness and there are quite a few suicides. The causes aren't consistent, but statistically? It's unlikely it's all a coincidence. Something about their existence draws death to them, at least according to Alyce's research, and if she's right, then Danny . . ." He trailed off, shaking his head. "I don't know what to do, Mads. If we're right about this, then how do we keep Danny safe?"
As a paranormal scientist, Maddie did not believe in the supernatural in the way that others did. Ghosts, the ghost zone itself–all of it had a scientific basis. All of it could be explained, and that included this, even if she didn't personally understand it yet. The idea of death being attracted to her son, as if it were a near-sentient force, was too hard for her to swallow, which meant there had to be something else happening here. "Have you reached out to Alyce?"
"Not yet. I was debating whether to mention anything specific or not. Most of what I was hoping to ask her was if she knew whether or not liminals could have something similar to a death echo, like Danny did," said Jack. "I haven't found anything in the research about it, and ectoplasmic manipulation seems like a stretch for a human, but I can't find anything else that remotely fits since the kids' theory about possession seems too flawed. It's possible this still isn't correct, but unless Danny is somehow, actually dead, I can't see another thing that fits."
"She'll want to run tests on him, if she can," said Maddie, squeezing his hand tightly as she refused to entertain the thought that Danny might have died for a second time that night. "But Danny would probably hate that. Let's reach out and keep it short on details for now."
"Should we talk to Danny? Jazz?" That was the real question, wasn't it? Her son deserved to know, to have an explanation for what he was and what might happen to him if he was never actually possessed. But they still had so little information. Most of this was based on a hunch and a couple of pieces of data that didn't quite line up with the hypothesis the kids developed.
"I think we need to figure out a way to confirm our suspicions as much as we can first," said Maddie. "I don't want to frighten either of them needlessly, especially when Danny's already clearly struggling so much."
Jack winced as he took a sip of his cold coffee. "I don't want to wait too long, Mads. I'm worried about him."
"Why don't we tell him at least the first part of what we suspect? About him being a liminal and then leave out the rest about his lifespan potentially being shorter because of it?" she suggested. "It's possible Danny already knows something, especially if Phantom did have some kind of connection with him, and at the very least we might be able to get him to admit that he wasn't possessed." She couldn't bring herself to use the word friendship to describe her son's relationship with Phantom. Friendship implied something more than what was truly possible, even if Danny's connection to Phantom may have felt stronger to Danny than it actually was.
Standing up, she took a long, steadying breath. She didn't know how Danny would react to this conversation, because as much as she hated to admit it, she didn't know much of anything about her son at this point, the distance between them greater than it ever had been before. She never imagined her son being severely depressed, getting into fights, or trying to befriend ghosts. "I'll talk to Danny now if he's still awake. Can you talk to Jazz, too? I don't want to leave her out of this, and after everything she and the kids did for Danny, I think she deserves to know what we're thinking."
Jack nodded as he scooped up most of his research and put it back inside the drawer before walking over to the lab sink and dumping the remains of his coffee. The two of them went upstairs, and Jack gave Maddie a quick squeeze on the shoulder as she walked past the living room.
"You're out of the lab way earlier than I would've expected," said Jazz, seeing the two of them, and then she frowned. "Everything okay?"
"Sort of. Your father's going to fill you in, okay?" said Maddie, giving her a quick hug. "I need to go talk to Danny."
Jazz sat up quickly, putting the TV on mute as she glanced between the two of them. "Not all of us together?"
"Not yet," said Maddie, and heading upstairs she walked to her son's room, knowing there was a chance he was still asleep, but as she peeked inside the bed was clearly empty. She felt her heart begin to race a bit, but Maddie forced herself to stay calm. A few weeks ago, this would have been normal, even if it made her worry endlessly. She'd gotten used to Danny staying home already, though, and the sight unsettled her, especially given Jack's revelation about liminals not living long and Danny's current depression. She couldn't imagine her son hurting himself that way, but much as she hated to admit it, that didn't mean he wouldn't.
Biting her lip, she headed upstairs to the Ops Center. Danny used to go and sit up on the roof to look at the stars. It was still hard to see more than a few given the light pollution, but it was the best view of the sky around, and as she quietly opened the door Maddie saw that he was indeed sitting there, but he was not alone.
A small, ghostly, green dog she spotted a few times around town before sat beside him, and as she walked out onto the roof it turned and growled a warning. Danny turned, eyes wide as he saw her, and glancing rapidly between her and the dog, she saw his shoulders drop. "Cujo, it's okay," he said carefully, gently picking up the dog and putting it in his lap. He gave it a quick scratch behind the ears, smiling at it before glancing back at her. "I–Listen, Mom, please don't do anything to him, okay? I know he's a ghost, but he's just . . . he's a dog. He won't hurt anyone. I promise."
She opened her mouth to argue but stopped herself. That wasn't what she needed to do right now, not if she wanted to help her son, and she could keep a close watch. She had a blaster on her belt, and could easily activate the anti-ghost defense system if necessary. "Okay, Danny. I trust you. Do you mind if I sit down?"
He glanced back down at the dog, considering, and then finally said, "Sure. The view is terrible tonight, though. It's too cloudy."
"That's a shame." Sitting down carefully beside him, she saw the dog give a half-growl at her as he continued to pet it.
"Hey, come on, I just vouched for you," scolded Danny, and Cujo relaxed as Danny scratched under his chin. "She won't hurt you, promise. Right?"
"Right," she agreed as the dog continued to eye her distrustfully. It was then that she noticed the symbol on the dog tag. "Isn't that the logo for Axion labs?"
"He was a guard dog there when he was still alive. Most of the havoc he caused the first couple of times he came to Amity was because he was looking for his favorite squeaky toy." Danny slowly stopped petting Cujo, letting his hand simply rest on the dog's side. "A lot of the ghosts aren't as bad as you think."
It was as good an invitation as any. "You were never possessed, were you, Danny?" His shoulders tensed, and she saw his fingers grip Cujo a little tighter. "The only time it could have happened was after your accident. Your father and I checked back then. We wanted to believe the story, at first, since it was an easy explanation for why you were struggling, but both of us realized that wasn't it, especially after how you've been the last two weeks."
"Because I haven't been much better, right? Being possessed was supposed to be the magical cure-all that led to me hanging out with my friends again, passing my classes, and no longer skipping school." She started, surprised by the bitterness in his voice enough that she barely registered him saying the word 'possession' for once. "I wanted to do better. I really did. But I just couldn't. I–realizing that everyone hated me and thought I was a disappointment, I just–I . . ." The words died, his fingers gripping Cujo tightly, and she could see tears brimming in the corners of his eyes. "I'm sorry. That me being possessed was a better alternative than me just being, well, me."
"Danny, none of us hate you," she said quickly, and then she paused, considering her next words carefully. "We want you to do well in school and to see you spending time with your friends, but more than that, we want you to be happy. That's all your friends and sister and father want, too, and you weren't happy before and you aren't now. I think that you're trying, incredibly hard, to be a good son and friend and brother, and I appreciate how much you're trying and how much you've always tried. I don't think you're a disappointment, either. We've all just always been worried about you, and your friends and sister thought that if this was the answer, then maybe you could find a way to be happy again, hon."
She was rambling, but she pushed on as he kept his eyes locked on Cujo, his expression still so guarded. "But I think you were always trying, and I'm worried that by pushing all these feelings and thoughts down like this . . . I don't think you can keep doing it because I don't think anything's fixed or changed. Not really. And knowing that you've been feeling worse these two weeks than you were before because you feel like your friends and your father and I were rejecting who you were when we assumed you were possessed, that's–I'm–I'm so, so sorry, Danny. I never wanted you to feel that way. We're all just worried, and even if it's hard, I want to help you however I can. We all do."
She put a hand on his knee, giving it a small squeeze as she suppressed a shiver. Danny was still so cold now, and although she wasn't touching Cujo, she could feel the icy air radiating from the dog as well. Even knowing what her son probably was, intuitively she could not grasp how Danny could hold the ghost so easily in his lap and seem so comfortable. "Your father has a theory," she said eventually, when Danny remained stubbornly silent. "About you."
The world around them felt as if it came to a complete standstill, and although Danny didn't show any obvious reactions, the dog looked up at her son, its eyes intensely focused on him. "Oh?" Danny didn't look at her, staring off across the roof at seemingly nothing.
"Have you ever heard of liminals?" He gave the barest fraction of a nod. "Did Phantom explain what they are?"
"You mean what I am?" he said, finally looking at her as he wiped the tears away. "Yeah. Most of the other ghosts, I don't think they've realized it. Or maybe they did and were too polite to mention it."
Polite was not a word she would ever associate with a ghost, but that was hardly an argument worth having with Danny right now. "What did he tell you about it?"
"Liminals are created when they have a near-death experience, usually near a natural portal or other weak spot between the Infinite Realms and Earth," he said, and although she hadn't heard the term 'Infinite Realms' before, she assumed he was referring to the Ghost Zone. Perhaps it was the term used by ghosts for it. "They say it's like we have a foot in both worlds, I guess. Ghosts tend to like us because we kind of understand them better than normal people do. And I guess there are things we can do that other people can't, like summonings and stuff. And I can sense when ghosts are nearby."
So his teacher was right. Mr. Lancer mentioned that Danny had an uncanny knack for predicting ghost attacks when they met with him a few weeks ago to discuss his academic performance, a meeting that now felt like an eon ago in light of everything that happened recently. "Did he tell you anything else?"
"Not really, no. I don't think it's super common," said Danny.
"Why didn't you tell us?" she asked, and he gave her an indignant look.
"Seriously, Mom? You two are all about tearing ghosts apart molecule by molecule, while I felt a compulsion to try to talk to them and reach them and help them find some kind of peace," said Danny. "Not to mention that the death echo and stuff makes me kind of weird and kind of, well, kind of like a ghost sometimes. I was scared how you'd both react, that you might not–that you'd try to experiment on me or that you'd–" He shook his head, rubbing away what looked suspiciously like a few more tears, and this time she threw an arm around him as Cujo growled a warning. She didn't care. The dog could bite her if he wanted, but she was going to hug her son.
"I'm so sorry, Danny, that we made you feel that way," she said, and she felt tears burning in her own eyes. "I never wanted you to feel like you couldn't trust us. I hope your father and I can prove to you that we're ready to help you with this, however we can."
"Help?" He pulled away from her, an eyebrow raised. "You know this isn't a thing you can fix, right?"
She blinked, surprised by the hostility from him, but perhaps she shouldn't have been. "That's not what I meant, Danny. I just meant maybe we could help you find more about what it means, or find others like you that you could talk to and get some answers from if you were interested. Maybe we–maybe you could tell us about the ghosts, too. Phantom alone has caused dozens of our theories to fall apart."
"I won't help you hurt them, Mom," he said, and for a brief moment she would almost swear his eyes flashed green. Trick of the light, most likely. Or perhaps there were more side effects than Danny had let on or even knew about himself, her mind drifting to the moment he sat in the living room an hour or so ago now when his eyes appeared to reflect a strange, green light. How many little signs and symptoms had she missed over the years or simply dismissed?
"I'm not asking you to. Jazz said you've been forming friendships with some of them, right?" She loathed using the word - friendship wasn't a concept ghosts understood - but it was the one Danny would probably use. "And ones like Cujo are, well, not harmless, but not looking to cause harm. Maybe you could help us know which ghosts those are, and we can try to work with you to handle them differently. And maybe you don't need to hide when you're meeting with them. We can all just try to adapt. To do better."
It was not a promise she intended to make, especially not without talking to Jack, but this moment on the roof convinced her that it was the only way to even begin to regain Danny's trust. Jack would understand, and, while she didn't trust the ghosts, she did trust her son. He could be naive, of course, but he probably wasn't entirely wrong. She really hadn't seen Cujo attack anyone or anything in a long time, not since his first few weeks in Amity Park. Fewer ghost attacks would be better for everyone, not least of all her and Jack. Ever since Phantom retreated to the Ghost Zone two weeks ago, they found themselves shouldering a much bigger burden than they were used to.
She wondered, still, what her son's relationship with Phantom was, what connection the two held. It had to be something powerful for Phantom to risk himself in the summoning just to try to protect Danny's secret, but she doubted Danny would tell her yet.
"Okay," he agreed at last. "But you and Dad have to keep an open mind about it. You have to trust me. I know a lot more about them than you think." She didn't miss what he really meant - that he believed he knew more about the ghosts than she or Jack. It was incredibly unlikely, but what Danny needed here was a little trust from her and Jack, a willingness to at least reconsider what they knew.
And since they were already doing that, anyway, and since nothing Danny said would stop her from watching his back with a blaster in her pocket, she agreed. "I trust you. And I'll get your father onboard, don't you worry. He'll just be excited that you're actually interested in ghosts."
"He probably will be, huh? Well, let him know I'm not going to wear a jumpsuit. Pretty sure it's a little too late for me to be worrying about ectoplasmic radiation." He grinned at her, the first real one she'd seen outside of the small one he'd given to Cujo, in weeks.
"They're stylish and functional, son, and I'd urge you to reconsider," she said, smiling back at him as she gave him another quick hug before standing up. "Oh, and Danny?"
"Yeah?"
"I assume Phantom is on the friends list for you?" He nodded. "If you see him, then tell him he's got a truce with me and your father. I can't do anything about the Red Huntress, but the two of us are willing to work with him as long as he's not hurting you or anyone else."
Danny's eyes widened. "I–I'll tell him," he stuttered. "I don't know if he'll come back, though."
"We've given him a lot of reasons not to," she said. She still didn't really trust Phantom, but she and Jack could keep an eye on it, and if Danny met with the ghost while under their careful watch, it was still a much better situation than him sneaking off to do it instead. "And Danny?"
"What, Mom?" he groaned, flopping onto his back, and Cujo excitedly jumped onto his chest and began licking his face while he protested and pushed the puppy away.
"You should tell your friends the truth, too. Your father's talking to your sister right now since we didn't know if you knew or not, but they deserve to know, too. They care a lot about you, enough to risk summoning a potentially angry ghost with no way to keep themselves safe except a couple of blasters. Friends like that are pretty rare, hon," she said, and she was a little surprised he hadn't confessed the truth to them sooner. She suspected there was still a lot more they didn't know about this, but hopefully, at least, they'd taken the first step towards Danny trusting all of them again. She expected him to argue, but instead he sighed as he stared at his hand for a minute and rubbed the spot on his palm. "Yeah. Okay."
A/N: Happy New Year! Thanks again for reviews, follows, etc.
