Archive of Our Own ^beta

It's been a weird day.

A lot of days are weird for Valerie--ever since she started ghost hunting, weird has become something she just has to live with, she knows that, and she accepts that--but even by her standards, this day has been weird beyond the usual. 

Danielle. Dani. Dani Phantom, the half ghost girl.

The half human girl.

Valerie doesn't know what that means. She doesn't know how it could even be possible, but she's seen what she'd seen and she believes that it's true, even if she doesn't know how something like that could even happen. For now, it's enough to know that it had, and so of course she hadn't been able to let Danielle be killed, and so now she is here, standing on her board forty feet above the ground, watching the two Phantoms talk and needle each other.

They've forgotten her for the moment, so Valerie just watches them from behind her mask, at the way the two of them interact in a rare unguarded moment. Dani's almost giddy with relief, chattering to the older Phantom, hands flying as she gesticulates, eyes bright, and Valerie can almost read I'm not melting I'M NOT MELTING in every inch of her body language. Phantom's smile is softer, a little more guarded--he hasn't completely forgotten Valerie is there, maybe--but he's relieved too. His gaze sweeps over his cousin, checking her, reassuring himself that she's fine.

And then Dani says, "Well, I guess that's it. I'm off!"

Phantom says, "What?" at the exact same moment that Valerie says, "No."

They look at each other for a second. Valerie is not used to agreeing with a ghost. He looks just as surprised to hear her on the same page as him about anything. 

Then they both look back at Dani. 

"You can't just leave," Phantom says, crossing his arms and frowning at her. "You melted like five minutes ago."

"Yeah, but I got better," Dani says with a shrug.

"But you might not be permanently better," Phantom says. "The ecto-dejecto wasn't designed to stabilize half ghosts. It could wear off."

"Nuh uh," Dani says. "I feel fine."

"What if you don't feel fine tomorrow?" Valerie asks, tagging into the argument. "And even if this is going to permanently help you, where are you going to go? You're half human, and that means you need--you know. Normal human stuff. You were stealing fruit when I first found you."

"You were what?" Phantom asks.

"Gee, thanks," Dani mutters, glaring at Valerie.

She doesn't back down. "You can't just go flying off on your own," she says. "You need a place to stay, and you have to be close to someone that can actually do something if you start melting again."

"But--"

"Come on, Dani," Phantom says. "You can't just fly off like you did last time. It's been six months, and I've been worrying about you ever since." He jerks his head at Valerie. 

And he looks--when Valerie turns her head and scrutinizes his expression--he actually looks worried. She wouldn't have thought that a ghost could feel things like that. Or care about someone other than themselves, the way he cares about Dani.

And Dani sees it too. She must, because she sags in mid-air, and her stubborn expression fades away. "Fine," she says. "I'll stay in town, then." And then, as if to save a little bit of face, she adds, "But I don't know where you guys think I'm supposed to go."

There's a beat or two of silence, and then Phantom says, "The Fentons."

In a day that is already full of weird, this still manages to surprise Valerie. 

"The Fentons?" she repeats. "They're ghost hunters."

"I know," Phantom says. "But you said it yourself. If she starts melting again, she needs to be by someone that actually has a chance at helping her. And the people in Amity Park that know about ghosts are... well, you know. Hunters."

"I don't know," Valerie says slowly. "It still seems like a pretty big risk."

"I also don't know anyone else that would take in a stranger," Phantom adds sheepishly. "We keep her ghost half a secret until--unless--something goes wrong again." He shrugs. "And we tell them that Plasmius is after her."

Valerie has to admit that this is true. She doesn't know Mr. and Mrs. Fenton all that well, but they've always seemed like the kind of people that give 110% to anything they put their minds to, no matter how crazy it might seem to other people. Protecting an apparently normal human from an angry ghost is exactly the kind of thing they would do.

The fact that said apparently normal human is actually fifty percent ghost and close to zero percent normal, and that she'll need the Fentons if her ghost half ever starts her melting again is... a problem that Valerie can't quite see a solution for, yet. 

"Are you okay with that, Dani?" she asks, turning on her board so she's facing the half-ghost.

"Uh," Dani says. She's looking at Phantom rather than at Valerie, giving him a complicated series of expressions that he's mostly responding to with head shakes and hurried it's fine gestures. "Can we maybe talk for a second?"

The implication is without you around to listen, which might have offended Valerie in almost any other instance, except that her brain has just reminded her that oh shit Mayor Masters and she should have probably stopped to at least check on him. He had just been caught in the middle of a pretty intense ghost fight, after all, and unlike everyone else involved he hadn't had any real way of fighting back.

"I'll... be right back," she says, and tilts her board downward, back toward the scene of the earlier fight. It's weird to just be turning her back on the ghosts like this, but something tells her that they'll still be here when she gets back. 

Weird, she thinks to herself again, shaking her head as she passes through the still pristine sections of the building and down to where the fight had been. Today had just been so much weirder than usual.

She's still thinking on that when she hears a voice from up ahead. When the words hit her (for such a clever girl, she's so easily manipulated). When she stops, lowering herself off her board to hide, and take in the scene in front of her.

When she sees her second human to ghost transformation of the day, and realizes that Danielle is not the only half-ghost in the world.

-//-

"Is this actually a good idea?" Dani asks, the second Valerie is gone.

"Yeah," Danny says. "I think it's be safest place you could be. I'll be able to keep an eye on you, and..." He shrugs. "My parents really aren't that observant. At all."

"Would they actually let some kid they've never met just come stay with them?" Dani asks.

"Almost definitely, actually," Danny admits. That's the one part of this idea that doesn't worry him at all--his parents wouldn't bat an eye at doing all kinds of things that most people would think are insane, and taking in someone that needs help absolutely falls under that umbrella. "I mean, you'd have to get used to ducking most of their inventions, but it's not really that hard."

Dani scoffs, rolling her bright green eyes toward the sky. "Not really that hard," she echoes. "I've been to your house, it's full of weapons."

"Yeah," Danny says. "And I know how to dodge them all." It's been a little under two years since he walked into a hole in the wall in his parents' lab, and then back out of a portal to another dimension. He's spent his first two years of high school learning more about how to duck ectoguns and boomerangs than he has studying algebra or chemistry. "I'll show you."

There's a little hesitation on Dani's face, a flicker of uncertainty, and Danny flies a little closer. He's spent probably spent less than six hours with her, ever, but he can't help feeling protective and worried. He wants to make sure that she'll be okay, that she won't have to resort to stealing just to keep herself from starving. "Come on, Dani," he says. "Come home with me. I want you to."

"You do?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, and the shadows on her face slide away. She grins at him, and Danny smiles back. They don't have time to say anything else though, because that's when Valerie comes flying back up to them, expression a dark mix of anger and confusion.

Danny, who has been on the receiving end of Valerie's anger to know how dangerous it can be, instinctively moves to put himself between her and Dani. "You okay?" he asks.

"What?" She looks up at him like she's almost forgotten he's there. Then she looks away again. "Yeah," she says. "I'm fine."

Not fine, Danny interprets. Not fine, but also not going to talk about it. 

"You should probably get going, Phantom," she tells him. "It'll look better if it's I bring her to the Fentons than if you do."

"Probably," Danny agrees. And he'll be able to help more as Fenton than Phantom, in this case. "You know where to find me if you need me," he says, looking at Dani.

She stifles a laugh, and Danny takes that as his cue to shoot off in a random direction. As soon as he's pretty sure he's outside the range of Valerie's scanners, he changes course and heads home, shooting for Fentonworks as fast as he can fly.

He phases in through Jazz's window (something she hates, but this is an special circumstance), ignoring her outraged protest as he lands and changes back to human. "Jazz," he says urgently. "You remember I told how you Vlad cloned me?"

"--just because you can come flying in through my walls doesn't mean that you should--"

"Jazz!"

"Danny--" She pauses, one finger still raised in prime older-sister-lecture mode. Then she squints at him and asks, "He didn't clone you again, did he?"

"No," Danny says. "I mean, I don't think so. Anything's possible, but what I was going to tell you is that Danielle's back in town and Valerie's bringing her here." He lays out the whole story as quickly as possible, which it turns out is not very quickly because the whole thing is more complicated than it needs to be, and also because Jazz has a lot of questions.

"I guess it makes sense to bring her here," Jazz says thoughtfully, when he's finally given her enough of an explanation to satisfy her. "We have empirical evidence that Mom and Dad literally couldn't find a half-ghost living under their noses, so it actually might be less likely that she'll be found out here than she would be anywhere else."

Danny nods. "And if something happens or she starts melting again, we'll be right here to help. We probably know as much about their inventions as they do, at this point." How many late nights have the two of them spent holed up in the lab, bent over inventions that are just too dangerous to have in the same house as Danny? 

Too many.

But maybe this is when all that time spent investigating (or sometimes sabotaging) their parents inventions is going to pay off. Danny's not convinced that the ecto-dejecto is going to be enough to permanently keep Dani in one piece. But there are plenty of other inventions lying around in the lab that don't do what they're supposed to. If there's anything there that might help, anything that could be repurposed to help Dani, they'll find it.

Jazz's earlier annoyance is gone now--it had faded slowly as they've sat there talking, and now she puts her hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry," she says. "We'll help her."

And that's when the doorbell rings.

The two of them look at each other, and then almost in unison they stand up. Danny can hear his dad thundering up from the lab to answer the door, and then after a few more seconds he hears, "Maddie! Can you come up here?" 

"I guess that's them," he says. "We'd... better get downstairs."

-//-

Dani has been to the Fenton house before, but that time had been different because first of all she'd intentionally tried to stay hidden from everyone but Danny, and second of all because she'd been kind of focused on trying to trick him into a situation where Vlad could get a mid-morph sample and stabilize her.

She's hoping that Danny's wrong about how long the ecto-dejecto is going to last. She's really hoping that she's not going to have to stop herself from melting again, or take any kind of horribly painful sample from Danny. Or from anyone else, but especially not from Danny.

She's not sure that she wants to stay here, even if Danny and Valerie have managed to convince her not to leave for right now. But if she is going to stay, she'd... kind of like her time in Amity Park to not involve horrible pain for one of the few people she cares about.

Dani takes a deep breath and tries hard not to think about it. She's fine. She's fine, right? So she should stop worrying about melting and just... focus on what's going on right in front of her. On the surprisingly normal looking living room where she and Valerie are sitting with the two adult Fentons. On Valerie's (very, very abridged, and very, very she's-being-hunted-by-Plasmius) explanation for why Dani is here. She's being careful, Dani notices, to not just hide Dani's ghost half, but also Phantom's involvement and even herself--maybe even human ghost hunters can have secret identities.

"...and so I thought you two might be willing to take her in," Valerie is saying. There's an edge of nervousness in her tone that definitely hadn't been there when she was shouting about ghosts earlier. "I know it's a lot to ask, but--"

Maddie Fenton holds up a hand, and Valerie stops talking immediately. "Even if there wasn't a ghost after her," she says. "What kind of people would we be if we weren't willing to help someone that doesn't have anywhere else to go?"

Dani has been on her own for six months, and the first answer that springs to mind is normal. The kind of people they would be if they weren't willing to drop everything and take in some stranger is normal. Most people just won't do that. Most people would turn the other way, or they would call child services if she was lucky and the cops if she wasn't. As Maddie gives her a smile and Jack adds an enthusiastic double thumbs up from next to his wife, Dani finds herself absolutely at a loss for words to respond to this with.

"Thank you," Valerie says pointedly, elbowing Dani semi-subtly in the ribs.

She jumps. "Th-thank you!" she says, and then (more genuinely), "Thank you."

Because maybe she's still not sure if she wants to stay here, not when there's an entire world full of places she very badly wants to fly off and see, but she thinks she could maybe get used to being wanted somewhere. For a while.

"This means I have someone new to blather on about ghosts with!" Jack says, then bounds to his feet and shouts upstairs. "Jazz! Danny! Can you come down here?"

"I should be going," Valerie says, standing up. "I have a patrol to finish up, and I'm sure you can handle--"

The conversation changes, from deciding Dani's future to a just-this-side-of-polite argument about whether Valerie should stay. Dani's a little surprised at how intently interested Maddie is in Valerie--she obviously doesn't know who she is, calling her Huntress instead of using her name. And she very obviously does not like the fact that she does not know, dropping hints and asking questions that seem like traps even to Dani. But Valerie avoids or ignores them all, politely but firmly, and when she leaves the house it's without giving Maddie any information whatsoever about herself.

Dani listens and watches, and it starts to sink in that she's going to have to learn to do this too. 

When she lived with Vlad, there was no point in keeping secrets. He'd created her, he knew perfectly well what she was. And now Danny knows, and Valerie, and... and those are really the only people that Dani has let get close to her. She's stayed on the move, and away from people, and until now she's never had to worry about keeping what she is a secret.

Jack is talking to Danny and--what's her name, Jazz? Danny's sister that Dani has never met. Both of them seem confused, which is probably fair on Jazz's side, but is kind of impressive acting considering coming from Danny, since it had been his idea for Dani to come here in the first place..

More secrets, Dani thinks, and watches him too. Where Valerie had been firm in avoiding Maddie's questions (or refusing to acknowledge them in the first place), Danny sort of... slides around them, wide eyed and confused and so obviously clueless about everything that's going on that no one could possibly think he knows anything. It's different from what Valerie had done, but apparently just as effective. Even with Dani right there in the same room, looking pretty much exactly the same, neither of his parents seem even slightly suspicious.

Secret keeping, Dani thinks (watching him project an aura of such thorough everything here is normal that no one even thinks to question it) is harder than she'd thought.

But between Danny and Valerie, at least she has two very good examples to follow. 

-//-

Valerie sleeps badly, and for once it's not because any of her equipment is waking her up in the middle of the night with ghost alerts. This time it's just--worry. Confusion. Her entire worldview being turned upside down, no big deal, sure.

For close to two years, she's been working for a ghost. A half-ghost, maybe, but Valerie is under no illusions that this somehow makes him better. She'd heard the way he talked about her, the things he'd said. As much as she wants to believe that being a ghost, or part ghost, or whatever he is had corrupted him, she can't quite convince herself of it. If a ghost half was really that corrupting, Dani would be just as bad, and she's not. She's just a scared kid who... happens to only be half human. Valerie had watched her melt. She'd seen the fear in her eyes. She does not believe that there's any malice hiding behind that.

They're both half-human. Dani and Masters. Maybe Valerie has been fighting ghosts for so long that she's forgotten--or allowed herself to forget--that there are all kinds of horrible humans in the world, too. That it's not just ghosts that do terrible things.

She stares at the ceiling all night, and in the morning she hides the bags under her eyes behind a layer of makeup. It takes her less than five minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, quick, practiced movements that she's perfected after countless nights of ghost hunting. She doesn't want anyone to know what she does in her free time. She doesn't want them to guess what her life has been like in the time since her dad lost his job.

"Rough night?" her dad asks when she joins him for breakfast.

"A little bit," Valerie admits, but she doesn't say anything else. She doesn't know what to think about everything that had happened yesterday, much less how to talk about it. "I'll be fine."

He raises his eyebrows.

"Really."

He still doesn't look completely convinced, but this is normal. He hasn't been completely convinced that she's fine since the day he found out she's been moonlighting as the Red Huntress. Things have gotten a little less tense, since he agreed to let her keep hunting. Mostly, this is because she'd never stopped, just kept hunting behind his back whether she's allowed to or not. Doing it with his permission (if not his blessing) had layered a thin layer of peace between the two of them, and kept him from worrying as much as he used to.

Sometimes he asks questions about what she's doing when she goes out on hunts, but more often he does not. It feels like he's pretending that as long as he doesn't know exactly how much danger she's putting herself in, it can't possibly be that bad. He knows she's hunting. That's all he wants to know.

So when Valerie changes the subject to school, he lets her. Valerie talks about how stir crazy the seniors are getting with graduation coming up, and he reminds her to keep her mind on her schoolwork.

"As much as I can," Valerie says, and he hmms but doesn't push.

Valerie doesn't meet his eyes, because she knows that's where she'd see his worry.

She smiles at him and pretends everything is normal, and escapes outside as soon as she possibly can. The schoolhouse is crowded and loud and generally terrible, but that actually gives her something to think about other than yesterday's weirdness, so for once it's actually a relief. Valerie is not normal, and feels even less normal now than she usually does, and the uncomfortably bus ride is pretty awful but is at least normal, and that's weirdly nice right now.

She's lost in her own thoughts as she trudges to her locker and trades in her jacket for an armful of textbooks. She's just about to leave and head for her first period class when she catches a glimpse of Danny Fenton heading past her down the hall. 

Valerie's hand stills on her locker door, freezing in the middle of slamming it shut. She hasn't really talked to Danny since she broke up with him close to the beginning of the school year--it's awkward. It's weird that she hadn't been able to tell him why she's breaking up with him, and that even all these months later he still doesn't know her reasons.

But she wants to know how Dani's doing, and Danny would be able to tell her, if he's not just pissed at her for breaking the months long silence between them. And--

And, actually, isn't the mayor a friend of the Fentons? Valerie's pretty sure that she'd heard somewhere once that he'd gone to school with Danny's parents. She's not sure if he'd know about anything... off, with Masters, but it'd be a good place to start. Hopefully a low key place too, since the odds of her questions to Danny getting back to Masters are probably pretty low.

Definitely a good place to start. Valerie slams her locker shut and turns, mouth already open to call to Danny, and damn the post-breakup awkwardness (she has no idea what she's going to say, but she'll figure it out).

And then Danny's friends come around the corner, and Danny calls out for them to wait, and goes running after them.

Valerie shuts her still open mouth and sighs. Maybe she'll try and catch him at lunch instead. Assuming there are no ghost attacks before then. And that he's not still upset with her for dumping him without a more solid explanation. It's not a great plan, but who else is she supposed to talk to about any of this? Phantom?

Valerie makes a face and trudges off toward her first period classroom. Her life is much too complicated.

-//-

Danny almost manages to make it all the way to lunch without a ghost attack, but his ghost sense goes off during the passing period, and he's forced to duck into a bathroom and transform. 

It's a giant green octopus, which on the one hand is good because it's not going to be intelligent or scheming or intentionally malicious. On the other hand, the thing is enormous, and is probably going to take the entire lunch period to take down.

Danny groans, and gets to work.

He's barely made a dent when someone else starts firing at the octo-ghost. Danny ducks out of sheer instinct, and swivels around to see who's firing. He isn't actually surprised when he sees Valerie's red suit on the other side of the school. Great. So he'll be fighting a ghost and dodging a human at the same time. 

They lock eyes for a second, Danny bracing for an attack, and then to his surprise her gaze flicks away from him, to the octo-ghost, and she starts attacking it. So... okay then. That's a thing that's happening now. 

Better not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Danny rushes forward and attacks at the same time as Valerie's blast lands, and it is so much better working with her than it is working alone. He might actually have time to eat after today after all.

They finish the ghost off--it disappears into Danny's thermos before Valerie has time to destroy it--with a solid twenty minutes of lunch left. Danny cups his hands around his mouth and calls, "Hey thanks!" in Valerie's direction. They might have gotten along... fine yesterday, and she hasn't attacked him yet today, but they've had temporary alliances before and she's never had trouble attacking him after. Danny's not going to get any closer to her than he has to.

But Valerie continues to surprise. "I didn't do it for you," she says, which is unnecessarily aggressive but also isn't an actual attack. "That thing was going to hurt people."

"Yeah," Danny says, allowing himself to drift a little bit closer. "Well, I appreciate it anyway."

She sort of shrugs, and fiddles with some of her equipment to avoid looking at him. "Hey," she says. "I thought you might like to know that Dani's with the Fentons. They actually were okay with taking her in."

Danny nods. "Yeah," he says. "I know."

"You do?" she asks, with so much surprise that Danny winces. 

"Yeah," he says, a little feebly. "I... stopped by and saw her this morning. She looks like she's doing okay." 

"That's good," Valerie says. "I feel bad for her."

"Me too," Danny admits. "Things haven't been easy for her, but she has somewhere safe to stay now."

"Safe as long as Plasmius doesn't get her," Valerie mutters.

"She's staying with ghost hunters," Danny says. "He's not going to be able to get at her." Not that his parents would actually do anything to keep Vlad out of the house, but he and Jazz will do everything they can to keep Dani safe.

"Even you can get in there," Valerie points out. "It's obviously not as well protected against ghosts as it should be."

"Well," Danny admits. "Yeah."

"And Plasmius is..." Valerie's face twists up in distaste. "Did you know that he's like her?"

She can't mean what he thinks she means, but in the split second before he manages to remind himself that Valerie doesn't know Vlad's a halfa, he feels the surprise forming on his face--and Valerie sees it.

"Yeah," she says bitterly, half turning away. "Figured you did. Figured... that might be why you had such a hard time buying everything that went down yesterday. The ghost taking the mayor hostage, and everything." She sort of half shrugs, like she's gathering herself back up, and her face is set like stone when she finally turns to face him again. "How many half-ghosts are there, anyway?"

"There's--" 

And here he stops, because he doesn't know what to say. A Valerie that knows halfas exist, who seems to be willing to differentiate between good-kid-Danielle-who-had-revealed-herself-to-save-Valerie and bad-guy-Plasmius-who-schemes-and-manipulates-her, is someone that Danny can kind of almost see himself telling the truth to. She has all the pieces now, it's just a matter of time until she puts them together. 

But he's not sure which side of her mental equation he's going to come down on. He's tried to do his best to protect people, always, but he's not sure if Valerie will ever see Phantom as anything more than the ghost that destroyed her life.

"There's more of them," Valerie says, as the silence stretches out. "Of course there are, there's probably a ton of them--"

"There's three," Danny says, before she can work herself into a complete panic. "Just three." 

She stops mid-sentence, and frowns. Then she says, "And two days ago I didn't even think something like that was possible."

"Yeah," Danny says. "Most people don't." 

"Most humans, it sounds like," Valerie says. "I mean, you knew about all this. I'm guessing you're not the only ghost that does."

She's right, but the last thing Danny wants is her beating up the Box Ghost to find out who the mysterious third halfa is. "I'm more involved with Dani than other ghosts, remember," he says, which is both true and a way to completely avoid the question. "She's my cousin."

"Guess so," Valerie says.

They've already used up at least five more minutes of the lunch period, and Danny is starting to wonder if there's a way he can get out of here and get back to his abandoned sandwich without Valerie thinking he's blowing her off. "Listen," he says. "Not that I mind talking about Dani and everything with you, but maybe we could pick this up later."

She's going to say no, obviously, but he's hoping that at least they can trade a few quips about what else does a ghost have to do all day and then he can duck out of sight without her trying to chase him down. 

"Sure," Valerie says instead. 

"What?"

"I have a lot of questions," Valerie says, with that hard edge creeping back into her voice. "About Dani, and about--about the mayor, and I don't know where else I'm supposed to go for answers." 

She's really, really bothered by all this, Danny realizes. She must be, if she's willing to come to him of all people for information.

"Meet me after school," Valerie says--demands, really. And then she zooms off, leaving Danny to gape after her in total confusion.

By the time he's shaken himself out of his surprised paralysis, there's only ten minutes left before the end of lunch.

-//-

Dani's head is still spinning by how quickly Danny's parents had accepted her as someone that's just going to be living in their house from now on. Part of her is still kind of convinced that all this is a trap of some kind, but she can't figure out what the trap would be or why they'd even bother. They don't know she's half-ghost, so it's not like they're trying to lure her into their lab for horrible experiments.

And anyway, she's already been dragged down for a tour of the lab. A couple of the inventions had immediately targeted her, of course, but Jack had just waved that off as glitches. "It happens to Danny all the time!" he'd told her. "We'll get the kinks worked out one of these days!" 

It hadn't even occurred to him that maybe all the ghost hunting equipment going off around her and Danny might mean there's something ghostly about the two of them. Dani is simultaneously grateful and confused. How can people hunt ghosts and ignore signs as obvious as this?

But it's good. It's nice that they look at her and see someone worth caring about. That's something Dani hasn't had very much in her short life so far, and not at all since she'd left Amity Park for the first time. Before that, she'd thought that Vlad genuinely cared (she knows that's a lie, now that he's literally melted her into goop). She knows that Danny cares about her too, but she's a clone of him. He pretty much has to care.

His parents don't. They just choose to anyway.

For Dani, that's kind of mind blowing.

She's still a little bit wary. It's been less than twenty four hours since Valerie brought her here, and all of this feels too easy, but it's easy in a good way. It's easy and right in a way that she wants to believe in.

She's upstairs in the guest bedroom with Maddie, helping her to make up the bed there, listening to an explanation of what their next steps will have to be, to make sure Dani can stay with them long term, when Dani hears the distant sound of a doorbell ringing.

"I wonder who that could be," Maddie says, pausing with a pillow halfway stuffed into a case. 

Dani isn't really paying attention--she's halfway under the bed, dragging out a box of junk that's being moved out to the shed--but she freezes in place when she hears Jack's voice from downstairs.

"Vladdy!"

He can't know she's here. Not already. He--he can't.

It takes every ounce of willpower Dani has in her to fight the instinct to turn invisible and hide under the bed until he goes away. That's not going to help, she reminds herself sternly. Using ghost powers right in front of Maddie is just going to get her shot, which means she'll be in even worse shape when Vlad comes after her. Instead of going intangible and hiding, Dani lets go of the box and slowly pulls herself into a sitting position, knees tucked under her, whole body tense as she strains her ears to listen. She can hear voices, Jack's louder and Vlad's a more normal volume, both identifiable but too muffled for her to make out the details.

She tries anyway, and is so intensely focused on her unsuccessful eavesdropping that she doesn't realize Maddie is standing right over her until the woman puts her hand on Dani's shoulder.

Dani jumps.

"Are you alright?" Maddie asks.

Downstairs, Vlad says something sharp to Jack, and Dani takes a deep breath. "I'm fine," she lies.

"Hmm," Maddie says. "I know that Vlad isn't always the most..." She seems to be trying out several words in her mind before finally saying, "Sensitive when it comes to relating to women."

There's an unspoken question that Dani doesn't exactly understand. Then she thinks about the computer program that Vlad had made that looks just like Maddie, and the things he's programmed it to say, and her mouth falls open into a little oh as she realizes what she's being asked. Before she can figure out a way to say no he's not creepy with me like he is with you, he just wants to melt me down and analyze my DNA, Jack calls for the two of them to come down.

"You don't have to come down if you don't want to," Maddie tells Dani, but she shakes her head and stands up.

"No," she says. "I'll--I can go." She doesn't know what Vlad's going to say, but she knows he's a liar, and she doesn't trust him to say anything to Jack and Maddie without her there to defend herself. So she trails Maddie downstairs, to where Vlad is sitting at the kitchen table with Jack, and glares at him when all she wants to do is avert her gaze.

"Danielle!" he says at once, and she knows enough by now to recognize how fake the affection in his voice is. Once it would have had her lighting up to hear the person she thought of as her dad paying attention to her, and being so happy to see her. Now all she can think about is how ready he'd been to kill her.

"Stay away from me," she says, taking a step backward, toward the door.

"Now, now," he says, standing and smiling at her. "Is that any way to talk to your father?"

"You're not--"

"I was so worried when she ran off," Vlad says loudly, completely cutting Dani off as he turns to the other two adults. "But you know how children are."

"I wasn't aware that you had any children," Maddie says, crossing her arms and frowning at him. Dani clenches her hands into fists and rages at how he can make her feel invisible without her having to use any powers at all. It's like she's not even a part of this conversation.

"There has been an unfortunate estrangement," Vlad lies smoothly. "And we've only recently reconnected."

"It's not true!" Dani insists.

"I'm sure you understand how worried I've been," Vlad says, still ignoring Dani. "And how relieved I was when I heard a rumor that she'd been seen here.  Of course I'll be taking her back with me."

Dani has no idea how he'd heard she was here. A rogue ghost coming out of the portal, maybe. Or just a good guess that she'd have stayed close to Danny. Either way, here he is, and he's trying to take her back with him. And what is she supposed to do? He's stronger than her as both a human and a ghost. If she tries to fight back, he'll win, and if she doesn't fight back... 

He'll probably kill her. 

He'll definitely kill her. 

And Dani doesn't think there's anything she can do to stop--

"I'm afraid not," Maddie says, and her voice is friendly but so firm that it snaps Dani out of her spiraling thoughts. Her eyes fly up to the woman's face and she stares. 

"I think it's fairly clear that Dani isn't comfortable going with you, Vlad," she says. 

He actually hesitates--if it had been anyone else standing in his way, Dani doesn't think he would have--but she knows for a fact that this is someone he has an unhealthy obsession with. And probably that's why he doesn't bluster past her objection and instead goes actually quiet for a second or two as he figures out what to say.

The second or two is enough to for Maddie to start actually ushering him out the door. Dani watches in surprise and growing admiration as she actually pushes him out of the house, never once letting up on a stream of of course we'll watch out for her until she's calmed down and sometimes children need their space.

He stops on the doorstep, though, apparently unwilling to actually leave without getting the final word. "Danielle," he says, turning and looking down at her. "You know you won't... last, on your own."

The way he says last sends a strange chill up her spine, which chills her all the way through before it hardens into anger. She's not going to melt again. She's not.

"You know where to find me," he tells her. "And if anything happens, I know where to find you."

And then Maddie closes the door in his face, the movement just this side of being too sudden and too loud to be polite, and gives Dani a sympathetic look that does not actually make her feel much better. Not when she's still so aware that Vlad is here, in this town, that he knows where she is, and that he could come after her at any time.

"Does anyone else think he was acting a little weird?" Jack asks.

Dani kind of laughs awkwardly. She doesn't want to talk about this. She doesn't know how to talk about this, and mostly what she wants to do is get out of here and spill everything to Danny. Or maybe just punch something. Punching Vlad sounds great, for example. "Do you know what time the high school gets out?" she asks. "I want to go meet up with him."

"Dani--"

"Please?" It feels weird to ask for permission to go where she wants after spending most of her short life on her own, and Dani doesn't like the way that feels right now. Vlad coming here, when she is supposed to be safe here, makes her feel trapped and scared and like she wants to bolt and go anywhere else.

"Alright," Maddie says at last, glancing at the clock. "He should be getting out in about fifteen minutes. Do you know how to get to--"

"Yes!" Dani says, and dashes out before anyone has a chance to say anything else. She runs out the door, and barely waits until she's out of sight before switching to ghost form.

She doesn't see any sign of Vlad as she flies, which is good because she doesn't know what she'd have done if he was out there waiting for her.

-//-

Valerie is amazed that she manages to get anything at all out of her afternoon classes that day, but somehow she does. Maybe, she thinks as she scribbles notes through her eighth period geometry class, she's just gotten so used to all the weirdness that not even the idea of meeting up with Phantom after school is enough to phase her anymore. It should be, but on the other hand she has a test coming up in a week and a half, and maybe this is just her life now.

When the bell finally rings, and the class explodes from bored silence into enthusiastic, end-of-the-school-day conversation, Valerie stands up slowly, gathers her things together, and heads for her locker.

She hasn't decided yet if she's going to meet Phantom as herself or as the Red Huntress. On the one hand, it feels like kind of a jerk move to go to a prearranged meeting in full hunter gear. On the other hand, this is Phantom. He could be planning anything, and maybe it would be safer if she's ready and already in her suit. After taking her time putting her things away, waiting for the halls to clear out a little as most of her classmates rush for the buses, Valerie makes up her mind. 

Phantom's a ghost. She's not going to let her guard down, and she'll meet with him fully suited up.

They hadn't set an exact meeting location, so Valerie sets her suit to sweep for nearby ghosts, and waits. For a few minutes, nothing happens. There's no sign of ghost activity anywhere near the school, and Valerie actually starts to think that maybe she's actually been stood up, by a ghost. Then suddenly her radar beeps, flashes, and there's Phantom's ectosignature appearing out of nowhere. He does that, sometimes--Valerie still has no idea how. But she kicks up  the speed on her board now, heading for the back of the school by the cafeteria. 

There's a few tables out here, where they're allowed to eat lunch outside during the warmer months. A few people heading out the cafeteria doors and meandering toward the student parking lot glance up at her as she passes, but ghosts and ghost hunters aren't anything unusual anymore. Apart from those few looks, there's no reaction to her at all.

There's a few more people showing an interest in Phantom as he sits cross legged on one of the outdoor tables, but not many. There's none of the screaming and running away that Valerie feels there definitely should be. A group of freshman girls actually wave at him as they walk past. He doesn't seem to notice them, expression distant like he's lost in thought, but when Valerie gets close he hears her coming and straightens up.

"Hey," he says. "I didn't really think you were coming."

"I didn't think you'd be here," Valerie admits.

He shrugs, and looks away, and there's a kind of awkward silence between the two of them for a few seconds. They've never really met like this before. On... semi-friendly terms, on purpose, without some ghost emergency forcing them into a temporary truce. 

And actually, this isn't even a truce. There's no actual agreement, it's just Valerie having a lot of questions and Phantom maybe having some answers. They're both nervous, she realizes, that the situation is going to go from zero to sixty at the drop of a hat.

"So--" she starts.

"I was thinking--" he says, at the same time.

They both stop and look at each other. The awkwardness increases.

And then suddenly Dani comes barreling out of nowhere (Valerie's ghost alarm blares briefly and she tenses for a second, before she sees who it is and relaxes). She spots both of them and her bright green eyes go wide before zooming right for Phantom.

"Hey," he says, switching his attention immediately from Valerie to Dani. "What happened? Are you okay?"

Dani says something, too quietly for Valerie to hear, but Phantom listens attentively, nods, and then shifts so that he can address both of them. "Val knows about Vlad," he tells Dani. "You don't have to worry about keeping quiet in front of her."

"You know?" Dani demands.

"That he's half-ghost?" Vlaerie asks. "Yeah. I saw him... change. Yesterday."

"Oh," Dani says.

"So what happened?" Valerie asks. Dani looks upset, and now that she's mentioned Vlad, Valerie is definitely interested.

"Vlad showed up at the Fentons," Dani says. She turns, the way that Phantom had, so that she's talking to both of them at once. This leaves the two of them sitting on top of the table, Phantom's feet on the bench, Dani's dangling out over the edge, and Valerie just kind of hovering on her board looking down at them. It's awkward and weird, so she gives it up and sits on the next closest table, facing them.

"What did he want?" she asks.

Dani frowns and glowers at her boots. "He claimed he was my dad," she tells them. "And wanted to take me back with him."

"He what?" Phantom demands.

"And for some reason you sound surprised," Dani mutters. 

"Fair point," Phantom says. "But he didn't--"

"He didn't really do anything," Dani says. "Maddie thought he was being creepy and I don't think she believed him, so she sort of pushed him out. But he definitely sounded like he was going to come back and try something else."

Phantom makes a face. "Well," he says. "I mean, the good thing is that he can't exactly try a DNA test or anything to prove he's related to you wen he's not. Especially since both of you would show up as, uh..."

"Not completely human?" Valerie provides.

"Well, Yeah," Phantom says. "Although he's rich, has connections, and doesn't mind overshadowing people sometimes. I guess he could fake his results or something. Maybe even yours, too."

"So we have to make sure he's not doing any tests in the first place," Valerie says. She's not exactly sure how anyone would go about stopping that--it almost seems like it would be a job for a lawyer, not the three of them. DNA tests aren't something you can just... punch until they stop being a problem.

"I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Phantom says. "The good news is that he can't exactly do that without us knowing about it. He'd have to actually take a sample from Dani to test it, right?"

"Probably," says Valerie, who had failed Freshman year biology and has no idea how a DNA test would actually work. If Phantom's right, at least they'll have time to come up with a plan later instead of trying to do it right now. And if it comes up, hopefully the Fentons will be able to actually get a lawyer or something. "I'm sure it'll be fine."

Dani looks surprisingly reassured by this, enough so that she actually changes the subject. "So why are you two hanging out together, anyway?"

"We're not hanging--"

"I wouldn't exactly call it--"

Again, both of them try to explain at the same time, and again both of them go quiet and just kind of look at each other for a couple seconds.

"Valerie had questions," Phantom says at last. "About you and Vlad and everything that happened yesterday."

"If you wanted to stick around, you might be able to answer some of them better than Phantom can," Valerie says, jerking her thumb at him. "I kind of have a lot of questions about half-ghosts." And even if he does, somehow, seem to know plenty about them, she's probably going to get better information off Dani.

"Gee, thanks," Phantom mutters. Dani hides a laugh, but not very well. "What did you want to know?"

"How does something like being half-ghost even happen?" Valerie asks. "I mean, do you just... half die, or something?"

"I got cloned from another halfa," Dani says, like this is the most obvious explanation in the world, as if cloning is something that everyone just deals with every single day of their life. 

"But what about Vlad?" Valerie presses. "Or--Phantom mentioned there's a third half-ghost out there somewhere. How does anyone get to be half-ghost?"

"Do you know how a normal ghost is formed?" Phantom asks.

It seems like too obvious a question somehow, and Valerie squints suspiciously at him as she answers. "By dying," she says.

"By dying somewhere with a lot of ectoplasm around," Phantom corrects. "If you want all the details you'd really have to go talk to a scientist--the Fentons, something like that."

Valerie wonders how he knows so much about the Fentons' research, then reminds herself that they'd broken into the lab together just yesterday, and it obviously hadn't been his first time doing so. He might spend plenty of time hanging out in their basement.

"A ghost is a combination of ectoplasm and consciousness," Phantom continues. "When a person dies, their... I don't know what you'd call it. Their personality or whatever. It imprints onto the ectoplasm, and creates something new." He makes a face. "Or also, some ghosts will just have kids the, uh, natural way, which is how you get Box Lunch."

"Who?"

"Never mind." His tone and his face say very clearly that he doesn't want to think about this. "Point is, the consciousness that... forms a ghost, I guess, it's only an imprint. So the person that died forms a strong basis for what the new ghost is going to be like, but they're not the same person. They don't have exactly the same thoughts, and a lot of the time they only get scattered memories." He shrugs. "There was even a case the Fentons investigated from about ten, fifteen years ago, where the person that died was resuscitated after--I think he drowned and they were able to bring him back after he stopped breathing, something like that. He lived another forty years, completely separately from the ghost that imprinted from him after he died."

"Weird," Valerie says. 

"I know," Phantom says, and she laughs at how weirded out he sounds.

Then she remembers who she's talking to, and the laughter dies completely.

"Not that I don't appreciate the ghost biology lesson," Valerie says carefully (because actually, does she appreciate it? She's not going to be able to get the mental image of ghosts making babies 'the natural way' out of her head for a long time). "But I don't understand what that has to do with half-ghosts."

"I'm getting there," Phantom says. "Although this part's kind of just me guessing."

"It'd have to be," Valerie says. "Wouldn't it? You couldn't exactly steal this part out of the Fentons' notes."

"It's not stealing, if they'll talk about ghosts to anyone that stands still long enough," Phantom protests.

"What, even ghosts?" Valerie asks skeptically.

"Jack lectured me about ghosts for like two hours this morning," Dani says cheerfully.

"You're only half-ghost," Valerie points out. "And he doesn't even know it. I doubt he'd just start lecturing Phantom about ghosts."

"You might just be surprised," Phantom mutters. "But anyway--halfas." He's quiet for a few seconds, frowning to himself, and when he goes on it's a lot slower, like he's thinking. "In both cases, other than with Dani, there was... a lot of ectoplasmic energy around. A lot more than you would find naturally."

There's a pause there, and Valerie can't help thinking that Phantom seems... nervous, almost. He rubs at his left hand with the fingers of his right, apparently unaware he's doing it. "So lots of ectoplasm," he says. "Plus some pretty intense almost-dying, and you have the right conditions to make a ghost. Only instead of the person's consciousness being imprinted onto the ectoplasm, it was the ectoplasm that bonded with the person. Sort of like a hybrid--ghost and human at the same time. One mind, two forms..." He shrugs. "Half-human, half-ghost."

"That sounds crazy," Valerie says flatly.

"And I could be totally wrong about how it actually works," Phantom says. "Like I said, that's just my theory. But I think it makes a lot of sense."

"None of this makes sense," Valerie says.

"Ghosts don't make sense," Phantom says. "You go anywhere outside Amity Park and try to explain ghosts to them, they one hundred percent will not believe you. Halfas aren't really that much weirder than regular ghosts, to most of the world."

They definitely are weirder, though, and Valerie hides an eye roll, grateful for her mask. It doesn't obscure her face completely, not like the old one did, but it hides enough to keep her identity a secret, and most of her features out of sight. But she doesn't say that out loud for Dani's sake. Instead, she asks, "So do most ghosts know about... halfas?" Both of them keep using that word, and Phantom nods when Valerie says it now. 

"A lot do," he says. "Word gets around, I guess."

"But I've never even heard the word," Valerie says. "Do humans just not even know it's possible at all?"

"The ghosts keep it pretty secret," Dani says.

"Why?"

She shrugs. "Dunno."

"Phantom?" Valerie asks, looking to the only full ghost present in the conversation. For the first time, though, he doesn't seem to have a good answer. He mumbles something noncommittal, then stands up. "I should probably get Dani back to the Fentons before they worry."

"But--"

"I told them I was meeting with Danny to walk home with him," Dani says, getting up too. 

Valerie might have argued, except that it'll probably get her into trouble if she's supposed to be with Danny and he beats her home. "Okay," she says. "But stay safe, Dani. And if you need my help with anything, just let me know."

"Thanks!" Dani says, flashing her a smile. "I will!"

"Come on," Phantom says, floating upward and giving her a little come on tug on her shoulder. "Let's get going already."

"Alright, alright..."

Valerie watches them go until they're nearly out of sight, then stands and calls her board back out, glancing down at her scanner at the same time. As long as she's already out here and suited up, she might as well do a patrol for ghosts.

Not exactly surprisingly, the first thing her scanner picks up are the twin blips of Phantom and Dani, heading in the general direction of Fentonworks. Valerie half-watches them getting farther away as she looks for any other ectosignatures in the area. The pair aren't completely out of range of her scanner yet when both of them abruptly disappear.

Valerie pauses her search for other ghosts, frowning at the space where the two of them had been. She's seen Phantom do that before, but kind of assumed it was some kind of special power he has, since--as far as she knows--being ignored by scanners isn't something any other ghost can do. But here's Dani, vanishing off the radar in the same way.

Of course, Dani is half-ghost. Maybe that's what it looks like to a scanner when she goes from ghost to human? Except it had happened with such perfect timing, Dani disappearing at the same second Phantom ha--

Valerie feels her breath catch in her throat, mind juddering to a stop before she can complete the thought.

There are three halfas.

Phantom hadn't wanted to tell her who the third one is.

Dani calls him her cousin, even though she'd been cloned, from another half-ghost, and therefore shouldn't have any full ghost relatives. Especially not if ghost families are as rare as he'd made it sound earlier. If she technically has any family at all, it would be from the human side of whoever she'd been cloned from.

Phantom. She'd been cloned from Phantom.

Valerie swallows, and jumps up onto her board, fingers already flying over her scanner. She has to be absolutely, definitely sure. And yesterday, when Vlad had given her Dani's ectosignature to track, it had been able to pick up on Dani even while she was in human form--Valerie had seen her stealing fruit, and assumed her suit was glitching because it had picked up on someone that was so clearly not a ghost.

Maybe, she thinks, Vlad had given her data that could pick up on human Dani on purpose. He's half-ghost too, after all. He'd know what to look out for.

And if Dani really is Phantom's clone (God, they look identical, don't they? If Dani hadn't been a girl, Valerie might even have picked up on it earlier), if she's his clone, they should have more than just the same DNA. They should have the same ectosignature, and if Valerie scans for that specifically, it should pick up both of them. She calls up the file Vlad had given her yesterday, sets her suit to look for that instead of for all ghosts, and holds her breath.

Waits.

Closes her eyes when she sees two dots show up, moving toward Fentonworks.

She's been hunting him for close to two years, and all that time, he's been human.

By the time Valerie unfreezes enough for the thought of following them and finding out who Phantom is even occurs to her, they've already vanished out of range of her scanner.

-//-

Danny only lets them keep flying until they're about three streets out, then points Dani down to the ground.

"We can fly all the way there if you want," Dani says. "I'm seriously not going to melt again."

Sure. Just because she's gone twenty four whole hours without turning into goop doesn't mean that it's never going to happen, or that Danny's ready to stop worrying about it. Someone has to, and since Dani's in denial and Vlad's a dick, that job seems to be falling to him. And, weirdly, maybe also Valerie?

He's very much not ready to unpack how he feels about Valerie being so supportive of half-ghosts when she's spent such a long time being so ridiculously unsupportive of full ghosts. Probably good? Maybe?

"Doesn't matter if you're going to melt or not," he tells her, landing in an alley and changing to human. "I just figure that if you told Mom and Dad you were going to walk home with human me, you should probably actually be seen walking home with human me."

They could have still flown most of the way and changed back around the corner--that's what Danny does most days, actually. But he doesn't volunteer this information now, and Dani only grumbles a little bit more during the walk back.

"Anything else you want to tell me about Vlad's visit now that it's just the two of us?" he asks.

"No," Dani says. "That's actually everything that happened. Hey, Danny?"

"Yeah?"

"Why don't the ghosts tell anyone about halfas?"

"I'm... honestly not sure," Danny admits. "I know they like messing with me, so I guess that's part of it?"

"They could still mess with you if they stopped keeping your secret," Dani points out.

"Not if I get locked up by the GIW or something," Danny points out. "Or dissected, or--"

He looks down at her face, and sees an all too familiar fear looking back up at him. He hadn't ever worried about what would happen to Vlad if he got caught as half-ghost. Vlad, he's always figured, can take care of himself. But Dani?

"So it'd be harder for them to mess with me if the world ever finds out about halfas," Danny goes on quickly. "Not impossible, but way harder. And it's not the only reason I think that they don't say anything, anyway."

"What's the other reason?" Dani asks.

He sighs, and rubs his hand over his face. "It's... kind of hard to put into words," he admits.

"Try," Dani says, and he half smiles.

"So it's... when you're half-ghost, people don't ever really see you as half and half," he explains. "Even if they know what you are, you're either a human with ghost powers or a ghost that lives in the human world." Which, to be fair, is how he'd seen himself for a long time after the accident--as a human with ghost powers. Not as someone that's as much ghost as human.

It's only really been in the past few months that he's started to realize that this is who he is. That he wouldn't be himself anymore if he lost either half. He has a ghost's core. He feels comfortable in the Ghost Zone, when even Sam and Tucker still get creeped out when they visit. He's ghostly enough to count when the Christmas Truce comes around.

And stupid as it sounds, that's what had really ended up being what got through to him. Hearing his enemies accept him as one of them for that one day a year that ghosts won't attack each other, no matter what happens.

"But that's stupid," Dani says. "That's not how being a halfa works--you're both."

She's probably the first person that's ever really gotten that. Well, the first person other than Vlad, and he's crazy so he really doesn't count. "I know," Danny says. "You get it. But you're a halfa too. You would get it. Other people don't." Actually, it's probably easier for her to see than it ever had been for him. She was made to be a halfa, and there was never a point in her life where she was only ghost or only human.

That's a little too much to wrap his brain around today, so Danny just goes on with his explanation.

"The point is that I think the ghosts see us--all the half-ghosts, me and you and probably even Vlad--as one of them. Sure, we fight them when they make it to the human world, but we're still ghosts. We're more similar to them than humans are."

"So basically," Dani says. "They want to mess up our lives, but not mess them up that bad."

He shrugs. "Just a theory. I could be completely off-base, but that's kind of the feeling I get."

"Huh," Dani says, and then they turn onto their street, and the shadow of Fentonworks looms up over them, and Danny very quickly turns the conversation onto more normal subjects. Dani lets it happen, even though she doesn't have much to contribute to his here's what I did at school today conversation. By the time they get in through the front door, he's telling her about how Dash and Paulina had gotten in an argument during chemistry and interrupted the entire lesson for ten minutes before their teacher managed to get it under control, and she's laughing hysterically at how dumb the whole thing sounds.

It's the first time she's really smiled since she came running to him fresh from the encounter with Vlad, so Danny's relieved. He sees his mom watching them closely from the kitchen table, sees the way the tense line of her shoulders eases at the sight of them, and knows that she's relieved too. There would have been a time when she wouldn't have believed Vlad could do anything wrong, but lately she's definitely figured out that yes, actually, he is a total creep who wants her to leave her husband for him. So at least he's pretty sure that she'll be on their side, with keeping Dani away from Vlad.

She might actually have some idea of what they should do if Vlad tries to come at her with a DNA test too, something better than their current plan of wait and hope for the best. "Hey," Danny says. "Mo--"

"Danny!"

The interruption comes from his dad, who comes bounding up from the lab at a speed that is somehow always surprising, no matter how often Danny sees it.

"Uh, Dad," he says. "I was just hoping to talk to Mom--"

"That's great! I wanted to talk to you too." His hand comes down on Danny's shoulders, so suddenly and with so much force, that he has to fight the urge to go instinctively intangible.

"O--okay, yeah. Sure."

His conversation with his mom is going to have to wait until later, apparently.

So down they go to the lab--Danny does a quick sweep for any horrible new inventions his parents might have been working on since the last time he was down here, but doesn't see anything--and then to a workbench that's been mostly cleared of random scraps and tools.

"Hold this," his dad tells him, and thrusts something metal into Danny's hands. It stings slightly, but otherwise does nothing, so after a tentative few seconds of waiting to see if his hands will break out in boils, Danny asks, "Is... this what you wanted me down here for?"

"What?" His dad has already started working on something, squinting down at what Danny really hopes won't turn out to be a weapon, and tightening something with a bright green screwdriver. "No! No, not at all. Danny, I wanted to talk to you about--well, about Dani."

"What about Dani, specifica--"

"Hey, that's funny," his dad says, pausing in his work with the screwdriver. "Danny, Dani--that's going to get confusing. Do you think she'd use a different nickname?"

"I... don't think it's fair to ask her just because I was here first," Danny says, carefully. Which is true--it's not Dani's fault that the crazy guy that named her was to unoriginal to come up with something different. That's her name, and they're just going to have to deal with some occasional confusion.

"You're probably right," his dad says. "But what I wanted to talk to you about was Dani. And Vlad!"

"Yeah?" Danny says hesitantly.

"I don't know why, exactly," his dad says. "But when he came by to see her today, she did not seem to like him much."

Danny keeps his expression carefully blank--the same as his usual my parents are saying terrible things about ghosts and I don't want them to know it hurts expression--and just listens.

"He says she's his kid," his dad goes on. "And I don't know if that's true or not--she says it isn't--but she was definitely upset."

"She's not," Danny says.

"Not upset? No, Danny, I'm afraid to say that she most certainly was."

"Not his kid, I meant," Danny says. "I... can't tell you how I know, but... trust me. She's not."

"Well, we're going to figure all that out," his dad says. "Your mother's already looking for a lawyer."

Probably a good thing. Someone's just going to have to tell the lawyer that a DNA test is not at all a good idea.

"And I thought," his dad goes on. "Well, I don't know anything about this law stuff. But I do know family." He puts down the screwdriver, takes the whatever-it-is that Danny has been holding, and slots it neatly inside. It starts to glow, and Danny's teeth itch.

...that's a new one. He's definitely going to have to figure out what this is supposed to do.

"I know family," his dad says again, putting his hand on Danny's shoulders. "And as long as she wants to stay here, that's what she is! And she's younger than you, Danny, which means it's your job to protect her. Like you would if she was your little sister. You keep her safe, and happy, no matter what. Because that's what Fentons do."

Danny's buckling a little under the weight of his dad's hand on his shoulder. But he smiles as he ducks out from under it, because... yeah, pretty much. She's his clone instead of his sister, but that's basically exactly what he was planning to do for Dani anyway. And yes, that means his dad has found his way to being on their side instead of Vlad's, even if it sounds like he's not completely sure why. He'll take it. "Thanks, Dad," he says.

"No problem, Danny boy," his dad tells him. "It's the same thing I told your sister when you were born."

"Really?"

"Sure is! And I would have had this talk with you years ago if we'd ever had any more kids, but--well, there was the accident with the ecto-underwear when you were two, and let's just say there won't be any mo--"

"Leaving!" Danny announces, backing up so quickly he almost trips up the stairs. It was bad enough that his explanation of this is how ghosts are made for Valerie earlier made him remember that oh yeah, Box Lunch is a thing, but he is not also going to spend part of today thinking about his parents doing it.

"Leaving, leaving, leaving!" he announces again, and turns around to go running upstairs.

-//-

The rest of the evening is a little bit calmer. Jack and Maddie have work to finish up in the lab, and Danny has homework, so Dani finds herself upstairs with Jazz. She asks Jazz if she doesn't also have homework, but apparently that's something that takes up a lot less time when you don't have to worry about being interrupted by your ghost sense going off.

"Danny's probably going to have to run out to stop a ghost from attacking at some point," Jazz explains. "So, I thought I could spend some time with you while he gets his homework done."

"You don't have to babysit me," Dani says. "I'm fine." And also, she forces herself not to add out loud, not a baby. This is the kind of thing you get to be way too aware of when you are a technically-less-than-one-year-old clone in a twelve year old's body.

"It's not babysitting," Jazz says. "I just want to get to know you a little better."

Dani frowns at her for a few seconds, but Jazz's face is so completely open that it's impossible to doubt.

"Okay," Dani says. "So what did you wanna do?"

"I thought we could just talk, if that's okay," Jazz says. "That's the number one best way to get to know someone."

"Or we could play video games," Dani says.

Jazz raises her eyebrows.

"Or we could talk," Dani agrees. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Anything you want," Jazz tells her, which is actually not a really great prompt for starting a conversation? But after a few faltering starts, when Dani realizes that actually Jazz really is okay with talking about anything, Dani finds herself opening up more than she'd expected, and an hour flies by. Dani tells her about where she's been since the last time she came through town, and asks questions about all the different inventions in the house that she should watch out for (there are a lot of them, it turns out). They're drifting slightly onto the topic of hos to tell if food has been too contaminated by ectoplasm to eat, when Danny sticks his head through the wall.

"Will you stop that already?" Jazz demands.

He sticks his tongue out, then walks the rest of the way through the wall as Jazz glowers. Then she turns on Dani and points a finger at her brother. "Do not," she says. "Learn his bad habits."

Dani bites back a giggle. "No promises," she says, an it's at that point that Jazz kicks them both out of her room.

Danny does, in fact, have to go running off to fight a ghost about half an hour after that, just like Jazz had predicted. Dani tries to go with him, obviously, but he points out that since she's still new here, his parents will definitely notice her sneaking out, and then says that he wants to show her around town a little bit before asking her to actually chase down and fight ghosts in it. Dani is almost completely sure that he's only using these as excuses because he still thinks she's going to melt if she pushes herself too far with her powers.

Unfortunately, just because they're excuses doesn't mean they're not also good points. So Dani swallows her objections, makes him promise to take her out soon, like tomorrow soon, and resigns herself to a quiet night in while Danny fights ghosts and Jazz does homework.

There's still plenty to do to get the guest room cleaned up, at least, so Dani steals a bunch of old CDs from Danny's room, turns the music up to just shy of being annoying to everyone else in the house, and works on sweeping dust out of corners. She's been at it for a little while, moving on from sweeping to dusting and then to carrying down boxes of junk that need to be moved outside, when Maddie stops her on the stairs.

"Have you been down in the lab?" she asks.

"No," Dani says. "Just up and down between the guest room and the kitchen, why?"

"You have something green on your socks," Maddie says. "I thought maybe you might have tracked it up from the lab."

Dani looks down, but the sinking feeling in her stomach knows what's happening even before she sees the telltale stain of ectoplasm starting to leak through her socks. It turns out that Danny had been right to be worried. She is melting again.

She mumbles something about how she'll just go get cleaned up, and runs upstairs to the guest room, where she sits on the bed and squeezes her hands together so tightly they turn white. This isn't--it's not as bad as it's been in the past. A few seconds of concentration is all it takes to solidify herself again. She still has some time. It had taken her six months to get to the point where she needed to come to Danny for help. She's not going to just spontaneously fall apart tonight.

Which doesn't stop the fear from coming, or the tears. Dani does not like to cry, usually. It doesn't help, and no one cares. But she cries now, alone with the door closed, because she had been so sure that all this was over, and now she's terrified all over again that she's not going to survive this.

She cries herself to sleep without really meaning to. Exhausted from the unexpected tears at the end of what had turned out to be a terrible day, and angry about how much had gone wrong, she doesn't even manage to stay awake long enough to see Danny come back.

-//-

Valerie expects another sleepless night, but after tossing and turning most of the night before, she actually manages to drop off early and get a full six hours.

Which is still not great, but it's better than what she usually manages.

And once she wakes up--well before her alarm goes off--there's no chance of just turning over and going back to sleep. Phantom is human. Part human. Human enough for Valerie's stomach to turn at the thought of everything she's tried to do to him.

But on the other hand, he's done some pretty awful things too. Ghosts are terrible. They do terrible things because they are terrible and they can't help themselves. The things that Phantom has done--holding the previous mayor hostage, robbing jewelry stores, even ruining her dad's job--make sense if he's just another ghost. They would still be awful but they would make sense, the way the destruction caused by a tornado or a blizzard makes sense. Just the destruction from a force of nature, nothing that needs to be questioned, not something with a motivation to ruin your life.

If he's only half-ghost, though? Then Valerie has no idea why he's done any of those things. She has no idea what kind of motivation would make someone hold a mayor hostage, and then turn around and claim they're protecting the city. She doesn't know why someone would choose to ruin her life the way Phantom has. If it's not just the baked in, malevolent cruelty that all ghosts carry with them, if she has to give him actual, human motivations behind those actions, then she has no idea what to think.

She goes through her morning routine in something of a daze, and is less aware than usual of her dad's attempts at small talk. Her thoughts are so distracted and mixed up that she's barely aware of her surroundings on her way to school--it feels like it only takes the time between one blink and the next to go from the bus stop outside their apartment complex to her locker. And even then, it's only the quiet beep beep beep of her ghost scanner going off that pulls her out of her own thoughts. She tenses, forcing herself to focus, and looks down at the read-out.

Which is when she remembers that last night she'd set it to scan for Dani-and-Phantom's signature, and that she'd never reset it after. One of them is in the school, and between the two of them only Phantom looks high school aged. There's still a possibility that it could be Dani, flying in to visit the way she had yesterday, it seems more likely that it would be Phantom, probably Phantom in human form, and Valerie is slamming her locker closed and hurrying in the direction of that little beeping dot before she has time to even finish the thought.

Her scanner takes her halfway across school, leading her toward the math hallway and then into a classroom on the very end. Valerie pauses in the doorway, looking in at the half dozen people that are already there waiting for class to start. The scanner isn't specific enough to tell her who in the room, exactly, is Phantom, so Valerie's left to figure it out herself.

Two boys in the corner that Valerie vaguely recognizes as honor roll kids, both of them bent over a textbook and talking about what sounds like an upcoming group project. A jock by the window asleep with his head on his desk. Danny Fenton and Sam Manson huddled together at adjacent desks, whispering intensely about something. Valerie's mentally crossing Sam off her list because Phantom is definitely male (for all that his clone is a girl, weird as that is) when Danny looks up and notices her standing in the doorway.

And in that second, as she imagines white hair in place of black, and green eyes instead of blue, she knows. With as much certainty as if he'd told her himself, she knows that Danny is Phantom.

Sam looks up then and sees Valerie too. "Were you looking for something?" she asks, not bothering to hide her hostility. She never really has, when she's around people she doesn't like.

"I was..." Valerie says, and then stops. She doesn't know what she's getting into here. Danny as Phantom shakes her more than yesterdays' revelation of Phantom as a halfa. Danny is none of the things that she has attributed to Phantom. He is not malicious or violent or cruel. He'd been her friend. If things were different, he might still have been her boyfriend. She doesn't know what to think right now, except that she wants to talk to him, and she's not going to do it while anyone else is around.

Do his friends know? They have to, right? Sam and Tucker have always spent a lot of time around Phantom, but like most of the rest of the school, Valerie had kind of assumed that it was just because they like dangerous hobbies and hanging out with ghosts. But maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe they've just known all along that he's Danny Fenton, their friend.

"Nothing," Valerie says. "Sorry. I was just--I had the wrong classroom."

She'll talk to him later, she decides as she stumbles away in the general direction of her first period class. They have a study hall together after lunch. She can talk to him then.

-//-

Danny makes it to sixth period without a single ghost attack (awesome), and pulls out a textbook to get a head start on his homework (too much of a risk to procrastinate and leave it for later when he never knows when ghost attacks will hit). He's rifling through his backpack for his chemistry notes when someone behind him says--

"We need to talk, Phantom."

He freezes, just for a second, then turns around with a laugh and an excuse already ready on his tongue--and then stops when he recognizes Valerie. She looks dead serious and completely unamused.

"Yeah," Danny mutters, shoulders slumping. "I was kind of wondering when this was going to happen." She knows about half-ghosts, she's talked to Dani, and she really is a good ghost hunter. On his list of things to worry about it's not exactly at the top, but it's crossed his mind more than once in the past couple of days.

She lets out a breath, and Danny sees a little--just a little--bit of tension goes out of her shoulders. "I was wondering if you'd lie," she says.

"I don't think it'd be worth it at this point," Danny admits. "You wouldn't believe me if I said you had it wrong, would you?"

"No," Valerie says. She points at the empty desk next to him--this study hall is only half full, and since Sam and Tucker have English this period, no one ever sits anywhere near Danny. "Mind if I sit? I think... we need to talk."

"Sure."

The bell rings as she's sitting down, and the last couple people hurry in along with the teacher. She takes a perfunctory attendance, then turns her attention to a stack of tests to grade. Danny taps a pencil against his chemistry notes, barely aware of them as he listens for the rest of the class to start their usual conversation about... whatever people talk about when their lives don't revolve around ghosts.

(Weekend plans? Movies? He has no idea anymore)

When the general classroom volume has gotten loud enough to cover his and Valerie's conversation, he puts down his pencil and looks over at Valerie. She's looking back at him.

"Okay," he says. "So..."

So he doesn't really know how to start this conversation. He hasn't had to do this yet. Talk to someone about what he is, explain himself to them. Sam and Tucker had been there from the beginning, Vlad had known (still knows) more about halfas than he does, and Jazz had made a point of not flooding him with questions when she finally came clean about knowing his secret.

Valerie, he has a feeling, is going to ask a lot of them.

"Why?" she says.

"Why what?" he asks.

"Why..." She doesn't look at him, instead letting her eyes slide away and to the side. "Why everything. Why did you do the things you did? Why kidnap the mayor, why steal all that jewelry, why let your dog ruin my dad's job?"

"Mayor was overshadowed by a ghost that wanted to frame me as a bad guy, under the influence of a scepter that could mind control ghosts, and he's not my dog, he's just really good at getting out of the Ghost Zone and really hard to catch before he starts causing damage."

He rattles this off without missing a beat. They're the obvious questions, the ones that of course she'd want to ask, and are easy to answer.

"That simple, huh?" Valerie asks.

"I don't want to hurt anyone," Danny says. "I never did." He clears his throat, and suddenly it's hard for him to look at her. "I'm really sorry about what happened to you and your dad, though. Cujo's a lot to deal with, and that was the first time he'd ever gotten out so I didn't really know what I was doing." These days he knows how to handle him, and Cujo's actually gotten to be one of the least troublesome ghosts. He'll show up, play fetch for a while or beg for a walk, then most of the time he'll head back on his own.

"I never thought I'd be getting an apology from you for that," Valerie says. "I mean, I really never thought I'd begetting it from--from you."

He knows by the way she says it that she means she'd never expected to hear it from Danny Fenton.

"I'm the same person," he says. "Whichever form I'm in."

He forces himself to look back up at her, and sees her considering expression. "That's just--going to take some getting used to," she admits.

"Sure," Danny says.

"You didn't say anything," Valerie says. "Even after I found out about halfas and Dani and Vlad. You kept acting like you were a normal ghost."

"It's... complicated," Danny says. "You've always hated me as Phantom. I wasn't sure what you were going to do if you found out about..." He gestures to his human-for-the-moment self. "I was really glad you didn't have a problem with Dani, but I mean... Dani's never done anything to hurt you."

"It--sounds like none of the things you did were on purpose," Valerie says. "And it's not like I never tried to hurt you."

"I wasn't sure you'd want to listen," Danny says.

The rest of the classroom--which has been getting progressively louder as an argument about some movie that has just come out heats up--is suddenly quiet as the supervisor shushes them, and reminds them that this is technically a quiet study hall.

It's too quiet in the room during the next few minutes for Danny and Valerie to risk continuing their conversation, and the tension while they wait for the classroom volume to creep back upward is almost unbearable. When it finally does, Valerie says, "I should... probably apologize to you, too."

"For what?" Danny asks.

"For all the times I've tried to waste you, mostly," she says. "I never would have--it would have been murder if I'd killed you."

Danny pauses. There are a whole lot to unpack there (not least, the fact that it's probably murder to waste any ghost, and that releasing them back into the Ghost Zone is a perfectly reasonable alternative). But it's still an apology, which is something he wouldn't have thought Valerie was capable of a few weeks ago. He'll take it.

"Thanks," he says, and then doesn't know what to say after that. They've talked, they've both apologized, and he doesn't know where they go from here.

"So Vlad cloned you," Valerie says, solving that problem for him in possibly the worst possible way.

"Uh," Danny says, wincing and rubbing at the back of his neck. "Yeah, that... I did not ask him to do that."

"I bet," Valerie says, making a face. "That is--"

"I'm still not sure if he's looking for an evil apprentice or a son," Danny says. "But either way--"

"Yuck," Valerie finishes.

"Yeah," Danny agrees. "Exactly, yuck. But he also has this whole weird thing about how he wants to kill my dad and hook up with my mom, so he's just kind of... always like that."

Her face tells him everything he needs to know about how she feels about these revelations, and gives him a weird amount of hope for Valerie maybe being more on his side in the future.

He's definitely going to have to tell Sam and Tucker about this.

Sam is for sure going to be upset.

Things actually get quiet after that, which surprises Danny. He would have expected at least another week of study halls full of Valerie's questions, but she doesn't ask any more. Maybe they'll come later, but for right now she looks like she's digesting everything. Danny keeps half an eye on her as he turns the rest of his attention to his chemistry notes.

And then with five minutes left before the end of the period, his ghost sense goes off. Danny kicks the leg of Valerie's desk, mouths ghost at her when she looks up, and then immediately raises his hand to be excused for the bathroom.

He presses himself against the wall next to the classroom door to change, and less than thirty seconds later Valerie comes rushing out too. She's visibly startled for a second to see Phantom and not Fenton, then nods as if to reassure herself and says, "Thanks for the warning."

What he really, really wants is to be able to fight with Valerie instead of against her. She's a really good ghost hunter, he knows from all too personal experience, and there are so many ghosts around that are not him that she can fight.

He never thought they'd get here because she found out about the existence of halfas through meeting his clone, but he'll take what he can get.

-//-

Everything goes wrong for Dani during lunch.

It starts off fine, sure. Maddie is down in the lab (finishing something up, apparently, she says she'll be up in a minute), but Jack is in the kitchen with Dani, the two of them trying to figure out how to get a meal put together. Dani is more used to scrounging food off the street or stealing from people whenever she can, and Jack is apparently only interested in having fudge for lunch.

"I think you're supposed to have more than just dessert for lunch," Dani says. She's perched on one of the kitchen counters, legs swinging slightly as she watches his enthusiastic quest for fudge.

"Nonsense!" Jack says. "There's nothing better than fudge for lunch."

Dani's stomach growls, and she kind of shrugs. She's gone without a decent meal too many times to be happy about passing up a good sandwich, for example. "You could have fudge and something else," she says.

Behind her, Maddie's footsteps announce that she's on her way up from the lab. "That's absolutely right, Dani," she says approvingly.

Jack not-so-subtly pulls a package of fudge out of the fridge and hides it behind his back. Maddie sighs, and Dani hides a laugh behind her hand.

Something goes plop onto the floor.

"Jack," Maddie says sternly.

He hands the package over, and a complex negotiation begins over what exactly they will be having for lunch. Dani watches and listens without really contributing.

Plop. Plop, plop.

This whole conversation has the worn in feeling of having happened many times before. After about two or three minutes, they settle on warmed up leftovers from last night's dinner, with fudge to follow.

Maddie rummages in the fridge, then turns around to warm it up.

She sees Dani, opens her mouth to say something, and then--something changes on her face.

"Dani," she says. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Fine," Dani says cheerfully. "Why?"

Jack glances in her direction, looking only mildly interested, but then stops and looks at her with more interest, and more surprise.

The weight of both of them staring at her makes Dani feel suddenly very small and very nervous, and she glances reflexively down at herself to see if there's something obviously wrong.

And there is. The melting--which still isn't as bad as it had been before she came back to Amity Park, but is getting worse--has started up again.

Plop, plop, plop--

Ectoplasm drips in a bright green current from her toes, dripping slowly into a puddle on the kitchen tile.

"Oh," Dani says, quietly. "I--um. I can explain?"

Except that she can't, because she has no idea what could possibly explain oh look my feet are melting other than the truth. I can explain is just the kind of thing you say when you're trying to play for more time, and give your brain time to hopefully come up with something better. She slips off the counter, landing in the pool of her ectoplasm, and concentrating on absorbing it back into herself.

She's gotten way too used to having to do this--she'd destabilized, started to melt, and forced herself to reform so many times over the past six months that it's practically second nature.

She keeps forgetting that it's a lot creepier to people that aren't used to seeing it. Jack and Maddie both look horrified at the sight, which... hurts, actually. More than she would have expected it to.

"I can explain," she says again, more quietly.

Her brain still hasn't come up with a good explanation, and she continues to not be able to come up with a good explanation during the long, horrible silence that follows.

"Dani..." Maddie takes a couple of steps toward her, and Dani reacts on instinct, stumbling backwards to keep space between them. She's afraid. She can feel ectoplasm squishing between her toes, and even worse she can feel their eyes on her. Right here in this second, nothing matters except that a pair of ghost hunters are this close to figuring her out. She knows that she's freaking out, she can feel it--

"It's okay, Dani," Maddie says. Her voice is tense, and Dani is not reassured, not even when Maddie follows this up with, "You don't have to be scared."

Which is when Dani--still backing up--manages to trip over something that's been left on the floor, and falls backwards into the table. Or through the table, more accurately, because she's already on high alert from the realization that oh shit they saw and there's nothing I can do to explain it, and adrenaline triggers her intangibility before her brain has a chance to say anything about it.

And at that point, with both of them staring at her, and Dani laid flat out on the ground, she knows that it's over. Being normal here had lasted all of about two days, and now she's outed herself as a halfa in probably the stupidest way possible. The only question is what she's supposed to do now--run? Fly off as far as she can go, leave Danny to clean up her mess? Cut herself off from what might actually be the best chance she ever has to get herself permanently stabilized?

Or stay, and try and explain?

She's terrified of what they're going to do if they don't like her explanation. She's more terrified of dying.

Dani pulls herself up off the floor, and faces the dead silence in front of her.

She hates being afraid. She doesn't like the way it makes her want to curl up and hide, instead of being able to charge in and take her problems head on. If she tells the truth, maybe she'll find something to really be afraid of (Vlad's recent attempts to melt her spring unavoidably to mind), but if she runs--

If she runs, she'll never be able to stop being afraid.

So much for secret keeping--she's starting to get the idea that she's not as good at is as Danny and Valerie are.

So screw it! Right?

"I'm half ghost," she says. "And I'm melting, and I think I need some help."

She curls her toes against the floor, remembering how it feels when they start to fizzle out into ectoplasm.

"I definitely need some help," she corrects herself.

-//-

Danny spends an hour or two on patrol with Sam and Tucker after school, then heads back to the parking lot to meet Jazz after. She tutors three days a week after school with some of the other upperclassmen, and when they can manage it they try to take advantage of that to cover for the fact that Danny's out hunting ghosts for that hour and a half.

As long as their parents never actually follow up with the school, they won't know that Danny isn't taking advantage of the library's free tutoring.

Jazz is waiting in the car when Danny flies--invisible and intangible--through the door.

"Hey," he says as he morphs from ghost to human. "Thanks for waiting--I know, I know, I'm running late, but there was this--"

He stops when he sees the look on her face. "Did... something happen?"

It's not a worried face, not exactly. It's... curious. Concerned, but Danny knows the difference by now between 'something sort of bad happened' and 'something has gone terribly wrong.' This seems like it's leaning more toward the first.

"Did Mom and Dad try to call you?" Jazz asks.

Danny has no idea--he doesn't usually pay that much attention to his phone while he's out flying. But he pulls it out now, and sees three missed calls and a voicemail. "What's going on?" he asks. By the look on Jazz's face, it's probably ghost related, and he trusts her account more than whatever message from their parents is waiting on his phone.

"I don't know," Jazz said. "Mom wouldn't give me any of the details over the phone. She just said that... something had happened to Dani, and--don't freak out." She says this last part all in a rush, leaning over to grab Danny's wrist even as he makes the immediate, instinctive change back to ghost form. "And don't go flying off back to the house, please? Whatever's going on, if Mom and Dad have noticed anything suspicious, Danny Phantom showing up is not going to deescalate things."

Danny wants to rush home right now. He can't imagine that there could have been anything happening with Dani that isn't related to her being a halfa, but--but maybe Jazz is right. Maybe if their parents are at home right now getting ready to dissect her, he's going to be able to do more good as Fenton than Phantom.

"Okay," he says, changing back. "Okay, I'm--I'm listening. And I won't fly off on my own."

Jazz relaxes and lets go of his wrist. "Okay," she says. "So I'm going to drive us home, and we're going to talk to Mom and Dad, and find out what happened, and we'll figure out how we can help from there. Okay?"

"Yeah," Danny says. He sinks back into his seat, trying not to fidget too much. "Sorry, Jazz."

"It's okay," she says, as she starts driving. "I know you're freaking out, and you have every reason to. You're not the only one worried about her."

He knows he's not, but he seriously doubts that Jazz is worried about Dani in the same way that he's worried. Danny hadn't asked for Vlad to clone him, he hadn't asked for Dani to exist, but she's here now, she exists because he exists, and he feels--responsible for her. He'd have felt worried if it was any ghost, really, but the fact that it's Dani makes it hard. And personal.

"Do you think you could maybe drive a little bit faster?" he asks Jazz.

She actually does, even breaking the speed limit a couple of times, which is a thing that never happens, ever, because 'if we get pulled over, it's just going to make us even more late. But she does today, and that makes Danny feel a little bit better about not flying.

(Not because Jazz speeding through a couple yellow lights is even close to getting them home as fast as he could have managed alone, but because it shows that she cares about Dani too)

It's not a long drive home, even if it feels like it takes forever. Danny goes for the door, but Jazz grabs his wrist for a second time, holding him back. "I know that you know what you're doing," she tells him. "But this is supposed to be someone that a random ghost hunter just brought into our house yesterday. If you're this upset, Mom and Dad are going to know that something's up."

"Get off, Jazz."

"Danny."

They look at each other. Danny doesn't (always) think ahead but Jazz does. If he'd walked in there alone, he would have gone in burning hot and said too much. And he probably would have been able to cover it up, because their parents can be kind of oblivious, but he takes a deep breath and goes in slower. 

There's no sign of their parents or of Dani when the two of them get through the front door, but Danny can hear sounds from downstairs in the lab. "Not good," Danny mutters.

"Mom!" Jazz calls. "Dad?"

There are a couple of bangs and a muffled thump that might have worried Danny if that type of noise wasn't basically the background soundtrack of their family, so he just waits where he is with Jazz until their mom finally makes it upstairs. 

She looks nervous.

Danny's own nerves ramp up, because there's something about seeing either of his parents worried that makes him tense as well. 

"There's something I need to tell the two of you," she says. "About Dani."

"What happened to her?" Danny asks.

(What did you do to her?)

"It's a little bit of a story," she says. "Come into the kitchen and sit down."

"Mom, can't you just tell--"

She's already halfway to the kitchen, so Danny and Jazz trail after her and sit, and listen as she starts to explain.

"First of all," she says. "What you need to know is that Dani's not completely human. This is going to be a little hard to hear--I know that I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around it myself. But Dani's... part ghost."

"Part..." Danny's mind races, trying to guess what had happened, how they'd figured it out. "Ghost?"

Luckily, his confusion about the how and why must have read as confusion over what a half-ghost even is, because his mom reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. "I know it's hard," she says. "And we don't completely understand what it means yet. But it seems like she somehow has the ability to trigger a change of form between human and ghost."

"And..." Jazz seems to be choosing her words carefully, slowing down and thinking about what she's saying even as the words come out. "Where is Dani now?"

"Down in the lab," their mom says.

"The lab?" Danny demands, standing so abruptly he half knocks the table over. "But--"

"She's unstable," his mom explains quickly. "Something about being part ghost is causing her to... well, basically to melt into ectoplasm. We're trying to figure out a way to stop that before anything else happens."

Danny stops, heart still pounding. "So you're not... tearing her apart?" he asks. 

His mom looks shocked. "Of course not," she says. "Why would you think that?"

"Because she's half-ghost," Danny says. "Because that's what you do to ghosts, isn't it? Tear them apart molecule by molecule?"

"She's half human, Danny," his mom says, with a note of disapproval in her voice. "You shouldn't say things like that."

Danny sinks back down into his seat. There is something unbelievably surreal about sitting at the kitchen table, listening to his mom lecture him about the human rights of half-ghosts. "Uh," he says, as his brain short circuits.

"How did it happen?" Jazz asks, with a quick, sideways glance at Danny. "Did she say how she... got to be half-ghost. Were her... parents a human and a ghost?"

Danny can see from her face that Jazz really, really hates asking this question, sounding like she knows less than she actually does. Fighting the urge to laugh at his sister actually snaps him out of his shock a little bit. 

(She recognizes his expression and kicks him under the table)

(He turns his foot intangible, so she gets one of the table legs instead)

"No," their mom says. "She's been telling us a little bit about her past. Apparently Vlad has been experimenting on her."

Good cover, Danny thinks, as his heartbeat slows down a little. It explains why she's afraid of Vlad, and is actually a more plausible explanation for ending up half-ghost than the whole clone thing is. If Danny hadn't known better, he thinks he would have believed that story over the truth.

"Is she going to be okay?" he asks. "The melting, did you get that under control?"

"We're working on it," his mom says. "So far nothing we've tried has helped, but she says she's been a lot worse before."

"You could try the ecto-dejecto Dad was showing us the other day," Danny murmurs. "That, uh, didn't seem like it did exactly what he wanted it to do. It might help." Not for very long, apparently, but it had at least stopped her from melting into goop for a while. It's better than nothing.

"It might work," his mom says. "Good idea, Danny." 

"Yeah," he says. "Can we see her?"

"Of course," she says, standing up. "We're doing some tests on her ghost form right now, so I just want both of you to be ready for that. It might look pretty strange at first."

While their mom isn't looking, Danny and Jazz exchange a look.

And then it's down to the lab, where Dani is sitting in her ghost form on top of one of the counters with an IV of something hooked into her arm. Danny's dad is practically jumping around the lab, doing... well, he's doing something very enthusiastically.

Danny catches Dani's eye, and mouths you okay? at her.

She nods, then shrugs.

Melting? Danny asks.

While I'm human, she mouths back, and Danny frowns. As far as he knows, up until now Dani has only ever started to melt while she's in ghost form.

She'd told his parents that the melting's been worse for her in the past, but Danny suddenly isn't sure that's true.

-//-

Valerie is out on patrol when she gets a call, unexpectedly. Her dad doesn't like to call while she's out, because he's concerned about distracting her and putting her in danger. And it's not like she has a whole collection of friends bursting to talk to her.

When she sees that it's Danny calling, it at least makes a little bit more sense. It could be something ghost related. It could be about Dani.

This is weird. She's still not used to the idea that the boy she'd briefly dated once is the same person as the ghost she's been hunting. But she's seen Dani, she's seen Vlad, she's heard Danny's explanations for the things he's done.

She picks up the phone. "What do you want?" she asks.

"Geeze," Danny says. "Is that how you always answer the phone?"

He sounds so affronted it makes Valerie laugh. "Sorry," she says. "I didn't know why you were calling. I thought it might be ghost related."

"It is," he says. "But it's about Dani, and--uh, me."

"So it's half-ghost related," Valerie says.

"No," Danny says. "There's two of us, we're both halfas, that equals one full ghost."

"Ha ha," Valerie says. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Is it okay if we meet up?" Danny says. "You're out on patrol, right? Up by the school?"

"Yeah," Valerie says. "How'd you know that?"

"You have a pretty regular schedule," Danny says. "Usually I try to stay away from the parts of town I know you're going to be in for, uh, obvious reasons."

"Oh," Valerie says. "Right."

Silence passes. Eventually, Danny gives an awkward little cough. "So is it okay if I...?"

"Yeah," Valerie says. "Yeah, I'll meet you over the school?"

"Be there in a couple minutes."

And sure enough, less than five minutes later, there he is. Valerie tenses as she sees Phantom speeding toward her, and has to consciously remind her tense muscles to relax. 

"So what did you want to talk about?" she asks, when he's close enough for them to hear each other without shouting.

"Dani's melting again," he says, without preamble. "Even while she's human now. And... it started earlier today while she was with my parents, so now they know. About her."

"Huh," Valerie says. "Okay?"

"That's your only reaction?" Danny asks. "Huh, okay?"

Valerie shrugs. "I mean... they know about you, right? So what's the big deal about knowing she's the same?"

Danny looks away from her. "They don't know about me," he says.

"I thought that was why you suggested having her stay with you in the first place," Valerie says. "They seriously don't know about you?"

"My parents hunt ghosts," Danny says. "Why would I tell them I'm one of them?" Then he sighs and reluctantly looks back at her. "Except now they know about Dani. And they're fine with it. They're trying to help her."

"How bad is it?" Valerie asks. "The melting?"

"Pretty bad, I think," Danny says. "It's happening even while she's human now."

"And it was just while she was a ghost before," Valerie says. "Right?"

"Yeah. So I don't know..."

Danny floats downward until he's sitting on the school roof, and Valerie goes down to join him. "The thing is," he says. "The first time she showed up, Vlad was using her to get a sample from me mid-morph. It was the last thing he needed to stabilize some of his other clones. The ones he actually wanted to save."

"Other clones?" Valerie "What other clones?"

"Dani wasn't his first try and she wasn't the last," Danny says. "She's just the only one that survived."

There's a long pause, as Valerie tries to figure out how she's even supposed to react to that.

"But the thing is," Danny continues. "There were all these other clones, and he was honestly trying to get some of them stable enough to stabilize permanently. He was convinced the mid-morph sample would do it. And I didn't give it to him, because... I mean, like I said, he's a fruit loop. But if I could give a sample to my parents, I'm sure they could use it to figure out how to save Dani. I mean, if Vlad could, I know that they could. But--"

"But then you'd have to tell them you're half-ghost?" Valerie asks.

"Right," Danny says. "And I've already talked to Dani, and Jazz, and Sam and Tucker. Everyone else that knows."

"What do they say?" Valerie asks.

He shrugs. "Dani says she'll be fine, and I don't have to tell them just for her. Jazz thinks I should. Me and Sam and Tucker have been talking in circles about this for months anyway. I was wondering if--I kind of wanted to get the opinion of a ghost hunter."

"Of someone that hated you?"

The past tense comes out before she can think about it.

(Hated. Not hates)

(She can't see him as evil-ghost-Danny-Phantom anymore. Everything she thought she knew about him has crumbled over the past few days, and it hadn't started when she learned he was Danny Fenton. It had started when she saw him fighting to save Dani)

"Yeah," Danny says. "Exactly."

She lets out a long sigh, and thinks of her dad, back home in their rundown apartment. Of silent breakfasts, stilted conversations.

"You're lucky," she says. "You know?"

"Lucky?" he repeats. "Why would you say that?"

"Because your parents are ghost hunters," she says. "They might be surprised to find out you're not just human, they might have a million questions for you, but they'll understand in the end. They will. Not like--"

His expression is confused for a second, and then sympathetic. Genuine, and unexpectedly human on his pale face.

"Valerie," he says. "You and your dad..."

"Tell them," Valerie interrupts, before he start asking questions she doesn't want to answer about her own family.

(She doesn't know how to talk to him)

(But on the other hand, if Danny can tell his parents that he's a halfa, maybe there's some hope for her yet)

"Tell them," she says, again.

-//-

Dani hasn't been out of the lab since her melting incident during lunch, so she doesn't know much about what's been going on outside. Danny has been down a few times, and Jazz once or twice, but they can't exactly talk openly with the two adult Fentons right there.

Danny comes down late that night, though, looking thoughtful and tired, and hoists himself up onto the examination table next to Dani. "You doing okay?" he asks.

"I'm not melting any faster than I was earlier," she says.

He raises his eyebrows, so she corrects herself and says, "Well, not much faster. And your parents are trying to find a way to stop it."

"I think I know something that would help," Danny says.

"Yeah?" Dani can't help letting just a little bit of skepticism into her voice, even though she knows it's rude, just because she knows he's not a scientist and it's hard to see what he might have been able to figure out. She has no idea what he thinks he'll be able to do to help.

"Yeah," Danny says. "Mid-morph sample."

He says it so casually that at first she doesn't even process the words. When she finally does, she shakes her head hard. "No, Danny," she says, dropping her voice to a hiss so his parents won't hear. "You don't have to tell them just because of me."

"You told them about you," he points out, lowering his voice too. "Maybe now's a good time for me to tell them, too."

"That's different," Dani says. "I... I don't have anything to lose." She's melting. She might die. If she doesn't get somebody to help her, she might not live to see another day. He has a family and a life and things that he can lose.

"I do," Danny says. "I do have things to lose, and I don't want to lose them."

"And that's why you can't tell them," Dani says.

He puts his arm around her shoulders, and it hits Dani that--maybe she's one of those things. "No," he says. "That's why I have to."

And she's not going to argue with him anymore, because honestly? Honestly, she is scared that she's going to die. And maybe she wants to believe that there really is someone looking out for her. 

"Can I help?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, we'll do it together."

"When?" Dani asks.

Danny lets go of her shoulder and leans forward, raising his voice. "Hey," he calls. "Dad!"

"Now?" Dani asks.

"Why not?" Danny says. "It's like tearing off a band-aid, right? The faster you do it, the sooner it's over."

"What's up, Danny?" Jack calls over at them.

"There's something we want to talk to you and mom about," Danny says. "Is that okay?"

Dani doesn't see where Maddie Fenton comes from--the last she'd seen, Maddie had been heading upstairs, but here she is again. Maybe she'd been summoned by the sound of Danny and Jack's conversation, or maybe she's been there all along, half hidden behind her larger husband. Either way, it means that there's no time left to think, or for him to change his mind.

"What did you want to talk about?" Maddie asks.

"It's about something that's supposed to be able to help me," Dani says, before Danny has a chance to say anything. "Um... something that was supposed to make my ghost form more stable. It was something Vlad figured out while he was... experimenting on me. I don't know how it was supposed to work, exactly, but he always said that it would help."

"That's great news!" Jack says. "What was it that was supposed to help?"

Dani doesn't dare even look in Danny's direction. "A mid-morph sample from another halfa," she explains.

Jack visibly deflates, and Maddie says, "Oh. Well--unfortunately that would mean that we'd need another... someone else like you."

"Yeah," Danny says, and Dani watches both adults turn their attention back to him. "That's actually what we wanted to talk to you about. See--"

(He's been so calm, Dani thinks, since he came down here. Suddenly he sounds afraid, and if it wasn't already much too late, she would have slapped her hand over his mouth to get him to stop)

(There's no going back)

"Me and Jazz already knew about halfas," Danny says. "Before she came here."

"So there are other... half-ghosts?" Maddie asks.

"Yeah," Danny says. 

"And you know where to find one?" 

Danny stands up. Dani realizes she's holding her breath.

"Yeah," he says again. And just like that, he goes ghost.

-//-

Danny has thought a lot about what would happen if and when his parents ever found out what he is. He's imagined it on long patrol flights, worried at it during school, dreamed about it on hard nights when he can't keep the nightmares away.

So in a way, the moment of reveal feels anticlimactic before it even happens. He has lived this too many times in his imagination for the reality to still be able to surprise him. The glowing rings pass over his body, he changes from human to ghost, and he stands there waiting for what's going to happen next.

Will it be an attack? Will they recognize the infamous ghost boy and come at him with weapons? Will they take the time to ask questions and hear his explanation? Will they pull him close or push him away?

He's imagined all of those reactions and more.

But what happens first is really the best possible thing that could have happened. They put aside the questions and surprise and all the things he can see that they want to say, and focus on helping Dani. Maybe it would have been different, if they hadn't already been prepped by her to believe that halfas exist, but luckily they have been, and so things don't go as badly as they could have.

And Dani gets her help. What Vlad had tried to take from Danny by force, he gives to his parents willingly. And he doesn't understand at all what they're talking about when they take that data and start to examine it, but he hears the tone of excitement that he's learned to associate with an invention that's about to work.

And he knows Dani will be okay.

The questions don't come for him until later, when he's gone up to his room to pretend to study, and answer texts from his friends. Yes, he'd done it. Yes, things had gone okay. Yes, Dani is going to be fine.

No, he doesn't know what's going to happen next.

His mom comes, knocking at his door and then comes in as soon as he answers.

"How did it happen?" his mom asks him.

Danny lets out a long, slow breath. She doesn't look angry, and she doesn't look afraid, and those have always been the two reactions he'd been most scared his parents would have.

"The accident with the portal," he says at last. "You remember, I managed to get it turned on, but what I never really mentioned was that... I was sort of inside the portal when it happened."

"Of course," she says, closing her eyes. "We should have known--"

"You couldn't have known," Danny says quickly. "Because you didn't know it was possible." He shrugs. "But it was. And--you should probably know that what Dani told you about where she came from? It's not exactly true. Vlad didn't just find some human to turn into a halfa. He cloned her from me."

"Why?" his mom asks.

Because he's a fruit loop. Because he wants a son, or maybe he wants an apprentice, or maybe he doesn't even know what he wants, but he's got half a dozen crazy hang-ups from the accident he'd had in college, from the accident that had made him a halfa.

"It's a long story," he says, because that's a whole thing that he just doesn't know how to explain right now.

"He knew you were a half-ghost?" his mom asks.

Danny nods. "Since that class reunion you guys dragged me and Jazz to," he says.

"And he never said anything?" his mom asks.

"We made a deal," Danny says, and leaves it at that.

She looks absolutely outraged at this, and for half a heartbeat Danny thinks she's going to keep asking questions about Vlad. He doesn't want to do any more talking about Vlad tonight, though, and so he's releived when her next question, when it eventually comes, is about something entirely different.

"Were you ever going to tell us?" 

"I think I always knew it was going to happen eventually," Danny says. He thinks about bad futures and alternate timelines, and bad dreams in the middle of the night. "But I wasn't going to say anything until I had to, just in case..."

"Molecule by molecule," his mom says, echoing the comment he'd made to her when she first told him and Jazz about Dani being a halfa.

"It's a hard thing not to think about," Danny says. "But--Mom, honestly, deep down I don't think I ever believed you and Dad would do that. I wouldn't have told Dani she'd be safe here otherwise."

She looks a little comforted by this. A little, but not much. "And then she melted," she says quietly. "And you had to say something. Right?"

He sighs and leans back in his chair. "It's just been a weird few days," he says. "I mean--with Dani and everything." And Valerie, and just the suddenly growing number of people that know who he is now, who had not known this time last week.

"I'm glad you told us," his mom tells him. "Even if it was only because you felt like you had to."

"Yeah," Danny says. "But I still should have said... something before now." He looks away, fiddles with a pen sitting out on his desk. "I was just, uh... I don't know. It's a lot easier to keep secrets once you start." And apparently, once secrets start coming out, it's hard to stop that, too. Because here he is, talking to his mom about his ghost half.

(Who's next, Lancer? Dash?)

(Nope)

(Nope, nope, nope)

"Alright," his mom says. "Well I'm sure we're going to have a lot more conversations about this, but for right now I want to get back downstairs to help your father with Dani."

"Yeah," Danny agrees. "Probably a good idea. And if you need anything else from me..."

"I'm sure we will," she says. "It'll be a lot easier to get Dani stabilized if we have an idea of how her biology is supposed to look. And if she really is--" A moment's hesitation. "Cloned from you, then you'd be the most logical source of comparison."

"Makes sense," Danny says. "So I'll be here if you need me, unless, uh..." He gestures vaguely out the window. "A ghost shows up, or something. But otherwise just I'll be here, working on my math homework."

"And we're going to have to talk about that, by the way," his mom says, pointing at him on the way out the door. "Homework comes before ghost fighting." 

"Jazz says the same thing," Danny says as he pulls a face.

"She's right," his mom calls as she heads for the stairs.

"Try telling that to the ghosts!" Danny shouts after her, and smiles when he gets an exasperated 'Danny!' in response.

His phone buzzes, and he looks down at an incoming message from Valerie, asking if everything had gone alright.

It has. Somehow. Shockingly.

Good advice, he tells her, and then puts the phone down and shakes his head.

His life has taken a couple of weird turns. Good, but... weird.

There's an explosion from the basement, followed almost immediately by his dad shouting haha, it works! and Jazz yelling back that she's trying to study, keep it down! 

Okay, so maybe things haven't changed all that much. Halfas, clones, secrets...

The one thing he can count on is that there will always, always be explosions in the basement.