#i was SO tempted to give jazz a little deerstalker hat but it just didnt make sense in the timeline

[reallydumbdannyphantomaus]

Switch

danny and jazz are such siblings. even when under a secret identity, danny cannot stop being an annoying younger brother. also, spectra! (ao3) (masterpost)

Part 3 Chapter 2

Something was wrong with Kwan.

If asked, Danny couldn’t exactly say what had concerned him in a way that made sense to most people. Kwan didn’t seem angry or sad. He wasn’t yelling all the time or too depressed to get out of bed. If anything, he seemed almost aggressively happy. Like the moment Danny started to worry that he was upset, he smiled bright and made a joke.

Maybe that was what did it. No one was actually that happy all the time. But all of a sudden, Kwan stopped complaining. He never sat down at the lunch table with a groan and launched into whatever stupid thing Paulina had done in Algebra. He never whined when he died in Doomed. He never put his feet in Danny’s lap and switched the channel from National Geographic to whatever sports game was playing. He didn’t make fun of Danny at all.

When exactly it started, Danny wasn’t sure. But he’d first noticed about a week prior, when he, on reflex, sneezed into his hand instead of his elbow. Kwan had always hated it when he did that. “That’s nasty, dude. Go wash your fucking hands,” he’d said every other time. One of the things about being a doctor’s kid was that he was particular about sanitization.

This time, though, Danny was already off the couch before he noticed that Kwan hadn’t said anything. Instead, he was staring at the pillow in his lap, mouth twitching in a grimace. Kwan, noticing his stare, turned and smiled up at him.

“Are you good, dude?” Kwan said. He was so fucking earnest, too. Like a goddamn puppy. Staring up at him with big ol’ eyes. So goddamn concerned because Danny stood up suddenly.

“Yeah. Yeah, no, I just…” Danny let the sentence trail off before sitting back down.

It didn’t hit him until he got home that night: Kwan hadn’t said anything about his sneeze.

So something was wrong, but what was he supposed to tell anyone? “Oh, he’s too happy”? “He didn’t make me wash my hands when I sneezed”? They’d call him a lunatic. Maybe he was. How could he know what was wrong if Kwan wasn’t going to say anything?

He could talk to Dr. Huang, but that felt too close to snitching. He didn’t even know for sure that something was wrong beyond just a feeling. This whole thing just felt… nuts.

Well, if he was crazy, maybe he needed to go to an expert.

—

“Any reason you insisted we meet in the mall and not at home?” Jazz said, slurping on an Orange Julius.

“Because Mom and Dad are somehow simultaneously the least involved and the nosiest parents in the world?”

“Fair enough.” Jazz took another slurp. “So what’s going on?”

Danny pinched his nose. “Okay, look, I’m going to tell you all this in confidence and if you ever tell one single other person about this I will never tell you anything ever again for as long as I live, okay?”

“Are you… okay? Like are you in danger? Because even if you hate me, I’m not going to let you—”

“No! Jesus,” Danny said, pointedly ignoring the fading bruises under his shirt. The hunter ghost—Skulker—had come after him again, but at least this time he’d managed to get the asshole in the thermos. Kwan had looked sick when he saw the mark, though Danny wasn’t sure why. Kwan had seen him worse before and had never come close to vomiting. “It’s just personal, is all, okay? And I don’t want to hear anything about it from Mom or Dad or Lancer or—or anyone!”

“Okay, okay.” Jazz held her hands up in surrender. “Are you finally going to tell me what happened between you, Sam, and Tucker?”

“Nothing happened, we just… don’t hang out anymore.”

“Uh huh.”

“I mean it!”

“Danny, the three of you have been best friends since fifth grade. You didn’t gradually grow apart; you suddenly fell apart. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, but I’m not an idiot.”

Danny crossed his arms and slumped in his chair. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jazz took another sip of her drink. “Okay, okay. Then what did you want to talk about?”

“Kwan.”

“Ah. The new friend.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t talk about him much.”

It was true enough; Danny figured that talking about Kwan would only draw attention to the fact that Sam and Tucker weren’t around anymore. Of course, Jazz had noticed anyway.

“Well, he’s just—weird lately.”

“Weird how?”

“Gah, I don’t know! It sounds dumb if I say it out loud.” Danny slumped even further in his seat.

“Dumb or not, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me anything.”

“It’s—he’s too nice!”

Jazz tilted her head in confusion. “And that’s a problem?”

“No! I mean, yes!” Danny groaned. “Look, he wasn’t being mean to me before, you know? But… he teased me sometimes. We teased each other. But now it’s like he can’t be anything other than perfectly nice all the time, even when we’re just messing around. Like, the other day I sneezed into my hand—”

Jazz wrinkled her nose. “Gross, Danny.”

“That’s what he always said! He always told me to wash my hands and that it was disgusting and stuff. Now he just sits there awkwardly even though I know he noticed.”

Jazz hmmed. “It does sound a little strange, but not overly worrisome. Can you think of anything that happened recently that might have impacted him?”

Danny thought back for a moment. “Well, he was friends with the kid that died.”

“You see? It could very well be a response to the grief he was feeling, then. Something that just needs to run its course.”

Danny shook his head. “But he wasn’t acting like this at first. It only started after—” The words died in his throat.

“After what?”

“The shrink.” Jazz gave him a look. “Sorry. Grief counselor. He started seeing her around when this whole thing started.”

“Danny, Dr. Spectra is a highly trained specialist. She’s trying to help Kwan. Correlation is not necessarily causation.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that just because two things happened at the same time, it doesn’t mean they’re linked. He could just have other things on his mind.”

Danny groaned. “Ugh, I know it sounds silly and—and small! But he’s not acting like himself. Maybe it has nothing to do with the—with Dr. Spectra, but something’s wrong, Jazz. I know it.”

Kwan didn’t seem sad, it was true, but—shouldn’t he? His friend just died! He should be upset. Conflicted. Instead, it seemed like Kwan was going out of his way to seem entirely unaffected. It couldn’t be normal.

Jazz slurped the dregs of her Orange Julius. “Are you sure you aren’t just looking for problems to avoid thinking about something else?”

“Am I—what?”

“Are you sure this isn’t about whatever happened with Sam and Tucker?”

Heat flushed his face. “Yes, I’m sure. And I told you I didn’t—”

“I’m just worried—”

“—want to talk about it! I know exactly what happened! I don’t need you to therapize me about it!”

Jazz shrank in her seat. “I’m only trying—”

“I don’t care! Why don’t you listen to me for once?”

“I am listening—”

“It sure doesn’t feel like you are.” Danny jolted out of his chair, knocking it over. Heads snapped over to their table, and his face reddened further with embarrassment. He picked the chair up and jammed it back under the table. “Whatever. I’m done with this.”

“Danny, wait!”

He ignored her and stalked away.

—

Danny wandered Amity Park in a fugue of fury for twenty minutes before he calmed down enough to start making a plan. The conversation with Jazz, frustrating though it was, had also brought him to his first lead: the shrink.

Okay, so it wasn’t much of a lead. Correlation, causation, blah blah blah. But even if it wasn’t actually her, this Spectra lady might have some idea of what was bothering Kwan, right?

As the thought crossed his mind, Danny shook his head. No. No. That was the sort of shit that had pissed him off about Sam and Tucker. Invasion of privacy and shit. He could not turn around and be the world’s biggest hypocrite about it now.

Maybe he could just… look her up. Spectra didn’t sound like a common name; maybe he could find something on the internet. A school she used to work for, or something. If she was legit, she should have credentials online, yeah? A thread to pull at. Something.

Tapping in “Spectra” to the search bar led him to a brand of breast pumps. Damn it. Looked like he’d need a first name at the very least.

He could ask Jazz, but she was kind of the last person he wanted to talk about this with. He could ask Kwan, but he was definitely the last person he wanted to talk about it with. He could go by her office on Monday?

That would be reasonable, he supposed. Just wait.

It was Saturday, so the school was closed. He was supposed to head over to Kwan’s in an hour, but he hadn’t planned on leaving the conversation with Jazz so abruptly, so now he was stuck wandering around the city until it was time to go over there. He could go home, but Jazz would just corner him again. He could show up early, he supposed, but since Kwan was the one he was so worried about…

Danny put his phone away and started back down the street. Mindless wandering it was. He walked for another five minutes before he stopped and faced a brick wall.

“I hate waiting,” he said, resting his head against the wall.

Well, he had ghost powers. He had an hour to kill. He could just… sneak into the shrink’s office. Take a peak at her name and maybe see if she had anything incriminating lying around. Like cult robes or human bones or something.

The thought had barely formed in his mind before he was slipping into an alleyway and transforming into his ghost form—into Phantom. 

(He’d started referring to his ghost self as Phantom out loud, even. Kwan didn’t even tease him for it.)

He flew toward school, flickering on his invisibility. One of those things he’d been practicing with Dr. Huang: using two powers simultaneously. No more falling unconscious from exhaustion. Dr. Huang insisted that if she was going to let him fight ghosts, even provisionally, then she was going to do her best to make sure that he was as prepared as possible. If he wasn’t hanging out with Kwan, then he was training with her.

(You aren’t gonna die, she said, not on my watch. Not if I have anything to do with it.)

(Danny whined and complained, but there was a little warmth in his chest at how blatantly she cared.)

And he could see the payoff now, flying while invisible like it was second nature. He had enough brain space leftover to obsess over what was wrong with Kwan and that terrible conversation with Jazz, even.

He practiced holding intangibility, too. If he didn’t have the brain space to obsess anymore, that was an unrelated consequence.

It can be forgiven, then, that since he was putting so much effort into not thinking, he didn’t notice that, when he flew into Spectra’s office, someone else was already there.

He flicked off his invisibility and intangibility all at once, hovering over Spectra’s desk, and someone screamed.

“Ahh!” he screamed back. The bright light of a phone flashlight blinded him, and he pawed at the light switch with his eyes squeezed shut.

“Who—Who’s there?” a thin, familiar voice demanded.

Danny blinked away the spots in his vision to see fucking Jazz, trembling but trying to pretend she wasn’t, one hand on her hip. Which, seriously? He’d tried so fucking hard to avoid Jazz and her big sister disapproval, and where did he find her but breaking into school. If he wasn’t currently a ghost and also breaking into school, he would so be lording this over her head for forever.

“Uh, Phan—Phantom.” He tried to make his voice deeper, but it cracked in the middle of the word. Fucking puberty.

“Who’s Phan—are you glowing?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Are you floating?”

“Yeah?”

“No.” Jazz shook her head, stepping back. “No, no no no, this can’t be real!”

“Look, I know it’s weird, but can you please freak out more quietly?” Danny flicked his head back and forth, like someone would spring out of the darkness. It was stupid; who else would be here, anyway? But he’d already had one big surprise and he wasn’t looking for another one.

“You’re a ghost?”

“...Yeah.”

Whatever reaction he was expecting her to have (fear? anger?), it wasn’t for her to kick the wall and shout, “God dammit!”

“Are you okay?”

“No! If my parents find out that they’ve been right about ghosts this whole time and I’ve been wrong, they are going to be so insufferable. My brother, too.”

Danny couldn’t help it. He pointed and laughed.

“Yeah, yeah, yuck it up,” she said, because she was exactly the kind of teenager to say “yuck it up” without a hint of irony. “Can we, like, agree to call you a ghoul or something? Literally anything other than a ghost?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. Just because she didn’t know he was her kid brother didn’t make him any less her kid brother.

“Ugh, fine. You’re not gonna, like, kill me or anything, though?”

“Nah, you’re good.”

“Well, at least my parents were wrong about one thing.”

Danny felt a blush rise up to his cheeks and he turned away from Jazz. She was really willing to trust him despite him being a ghost that she just met. He’d never tell her, but it was nice.

“Yeah, I’m just here to—wait, why are you here?” She’d been so dismissive of the idea that the shrink could be involved, but now here she was not even an hour later, breaking and entering at the school when she’d always been the most obnoxiously well-behaved person he’d ever met. It made no sense. Was Jazz secretly a rule-breaking badass this whole time?

No. No way.

“None of your business!” Jazz reared back and crossed her arms. “Why are you here?”

If that’s how she wanted to play it… Danny stuck his tongue out at her. “None of your business.”

“Jeez, I meet an actual ghost, and he’s a freaking child.”

“You started it.”

Jazz groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fine. Fine. I’ll tell you why I’m here if you tell me why you’re here, okay?”

“Okay,” Danny lied.

“Look, I've been… shadowing Dr. Spectra for a couple weeks now and—something's off about her. She keeps being confused when I mention stuff about psychology that she should know. She hides it well, but she always changes the subject when I bring up any specific theory or practice.”

Danny raised an eyebrow. This was a very different story than “she's a highly trained specialist.”

“So she sucks at her job?”

“Well, that's what I thought at first. Like, definitely bad, don't get me wrong, but not… intentional.”

A hand reached into his chest and squeezed. “But now?”

“My little brother. He's worried about his friend, and I—well, he came to me and said his friend started acting weird when he started talking to Dr. Spectra, and I thought it had to be a coincidence, because she’s not a great therapist but that doesn’t make her evil, and I didn’t want to badmouth her to my kid brother, so I didn’t say anything to him, but then I was curious so”—she took a deep breath and unlocked her phone—“I googled her name, and, well, there was only one result that seemed to be about her.”

It was a blog, homemade, with a glittery pink header that read “Justice for Sarah” in curling font over a blue background. The most recent post read:

The IDIOTS at WXKZ still refuse to print the truth about Sarah’s murder even though we showed them her diary. So I just have to keep posting about it here, I guess. My daughter was depressed, yes, but she was getting better! She was seeking help! She even went to her school’s guidance counselor all on her own. And this ““““““Doctor””””””” Penelope Spectra started telling her lies and making her worse all over again.

Sarah wrote about it in her therapy diary. “Dr. Spectra says I need to not worry my parents so much” “I have to make sure I’m not a problem anymore” She was NEVER a problem! She was my baby! And I don’t care that she swallowed the pills on her own, this Spectra lady is the one that killed her!!!!!

But the cops won’t listen, and the journalists won’t listen, so I just have to keep her story alive here. Please, help me get justice for my daughter. She was 15. She liked drawing bunny ears on all our pictures of her. Don’t let Spectra kill someone else.

Danny could imagine, for a moment, a woman sitting at her desk, furiously typing this post, scrubbing tears from her eyes. There was no filter. No clever designs to enhance empathy, to draw his attention to just the right places. No well-crafted language to make him just the right combination of angry and sad. Whoever made this blog clearly had no experience with this sort of thing. It was honest, in a way that very little on the internet was anymore.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh shit.”

Was this real? Was this the same Spectra? Was she saying this garbage to Kwan?

(If Jazz was right, then he almost felt bad for Spectra, because Dr. Huang would definitely, definitely kill her.)

(He thought about the tightness of Kwan’s face when he insisted that he had nothing to be sad about, really, don’t worry about him, and he didn’t feel bad anymore.)

“Yeah,” Jazz said. “And, I don’t know, it could be a lie. I found an obituary for Sarah, but it doesn’t mention cause of death or anything. It could just be a grieving parent, looking for someone to blame.”

Danny coughed. Act normal. Act normal. This didn’t affect him personally. “Or it could be something worse?”

“Pretty much. I just can’t figure out why. What would someone get from intentionally being a bad therapist? What possible motive could there be?”

There was a pounding in his skull and his chest. It felt hot, but he couldn’t stop to focus on it. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, ultimately, and it would only make Jazz suspicious of him if he let it out now. “Maybe some sort of cult thing?”

Was he speaking words? Were words coming out of his mouth?

Jazz shook her head. “That seems like something that would involve more people, y’know?”

“I’m all out of guesses, then.”

She rolled her eyes and moved to the desk, tugging at one of the drawers. Danny pushed down the fire in his head, the red swamping his vision and floated forward to help.

They made quick work of the desk, skipping through a bunch of innocuous files, some fidget spinners, blank notebooks and planners. For someone who had been in town for weeks now, Spectra really didn’t have much personal stuff in her office. Danny wasn’t sure if that was suspicious, or if he was inclined to see everything as suspicious right now.

“So, why are you here?” Jazz said as they moved on to the filing cabinet. It was locked, but a simple tug with an intangible hand pulled it right open. “You never did say.”

Danny winced. “Uh. Same thing.”

“Oh, your little brother also made you suspicious that the therapist you’ve been shadowing might not just be bad at her job, but actively evil?”

“Something like that?”

“Hey! The deal was: I tell you my story, you tell me yours!”

Danny opened his mouth to say something smart that would deflect all suspicion, but he was cut off by the sound of the office door handle turning. Before either of them could panic, he grabbed Jazz’s shoulder and turned them both invisible.

The door opened and in stepped Spectra’s odd little assistant, the short man with the green eyes. 

“Now,” he said, voice soft, “I know we didn’t leave those lights on when we left yesterday. Is someone in here?”

The little man swerved around to look under the desk, stopping right in front of Danny and Jazz. Jazz let out a little whimper before Danny got his hand over her mouth and the man’s eyes whipped up.

“Ah,” he said, “so there’s a little ghostie in here. Don’t worry, don’t worry. I’m not here to muscle in on your turf. Why don’t you come out so we can talk? Face to face?”

Danny said nothing, clenching his hand harder around Jazz’s mouth. He felt something wet soak into his palm, but he couldn’t tell if it was Jazz’s sweat or tears. 

“Oh, come now. We can work together! Look,” and there was a bright flash of light and instead of the man, there was now a green blob ghost. “See! I’m one of you. More or less.”

Jazz got impossibly tenser against him.

Yeah, Danny was now willing to say that Spectra was probably evil.

“There’s no need for any… hostility between us. We won’t get in your way if you don’t get in ours.”

There was cement in his mouth, binding his jaws together. There was lava in his chest, burning holes in his heart. He couldn’t afford to be either afraid or angry right now, though. Not with Jazz right there, so very scared that he could feel her heart beating through her shirt.

“What is in your way?” he said at long last. His voice sounded like gravel, but it should help to disguise him.

“Oh, very little. We’ve got our own set up here in the school. Honestly, we’d be glad to have you around. More ghosts means more misery for us.”

“Misery?”

“Yes, well, you see, this is what I meant when I said more or less. My boss and I—we need to feed on human emotion. Misery really does the job for us, and what better place than a high that’s beset by ghosts?”

Danny said nothing, horror wiring his mouth shut.

“So you see, we have absolutely no reason to interfere with whatever your plans are for this town, and we pose absolutely no threat. Honestly, we should be friends.”

Jazz trembled in his hold. That was enough information gathering, then.

“Uh, okay, then,” he said. “Bye.”

Maybe not what a cool, mysterious ghost would’ve said, but he was too strung out, too terrified, too furious to care. He tightened his hold on Jazz, turned them both intangible, and flew them out of the school and into the night.