#cc02

Not to say that they didn’t care for her, they did, but they couldn’t be called role model parents by any means. They could get so encased on their research that sometimes it was safer for everyone involved to just let them to it and enjoy the little ghost-free interactions that could be encountered every now and then.

When Danny had grown up enough to be an acceptable company (which was still pretty little considering the standards of human interactions the senior Fentons could provide to other people, let alone a child. At that point Jazz was more than ready to take anything she could get) there was not as much reason to keep striving for their parent’s attention, but the habit had been already ingrained, and good notes were not a bad thing to have, so there was not a motive to stop.

Danny was as cute as a button (still was, but he got all flustered and retreated to safer pastures whenever she brought it up, so she refrained. No way she was reprieving herself from her brother), and she was ecstatic to have someone to play with that wouldn’t, couldn’t really, run away screaming from the crazy-psycho-wannabe ghost hunters.

What with them sharing parents and all.

It would be a good empathy exercise if anything else.  

So Jazz made sure to teach Danny her ways. They took care of each other and then promptly proceeded to have their very own improvised survival training in their own home. Sadly, even with all of this, she worried it might not be enough.

In other words, the main reason she had to get into psychology? Her family. Specifically her brother.

It was clear to her, and to anyone else if they had bothered to look into it, that their parent’s main concern was not their family dynamic, and as long as the food was not openly engaging in hostilities against the younger ones, they refrained to paying more than the basic of attention to their doings. Which was a good thing for when the kids wanted to play around, but not so much for when they really needed parent supervision.

Jazz had taken it upon herself to learn more about what made people tick. Taken it upon herself to learn how to take her family from barely functional to something a little less distressing to witness. And she would succeed even if she had to glue their parents and them together to make it work.

For a while, it looked like it was going to stick.

And then the Ghost Portal had backfired on all of them.

Their parents had been over the moon that their apparent failure had been a ruse, a ghost trying to mess with their work, they said. In either case, it had only caused them to become even more invested in the ghost research, and now that they had legitimate proof of the existence of ghosts and their realm it would be even harder to talk them down once they got going.

Unlike her progenitors, she was more concerned with the impact the frequent ghost attacks that followed the accident would have, and the obvious repercussions there would be against her family if anyone put two and two together and realized her parent’s shenanigans were at fault of all the public destruction via ghost.  

And Danny-

For the first time since she could remember Danny was pushing her away.

It was telling, than even neck deep in ghost attacks the thing that could hurt her the most was his reticence to talk to her. Nonetheless, her brother needed her and she would always rise to the occasion no matter how stubborn he could get about it.

It had taken a while for her to understand, but eventually, she did.

He had died.

Her parents had, however unknowingly, put the final nail in the coffin.

Literally.

Jazz had been devastated. But then, she was not the one who died, was she? Or did he?

She stuck by her brother. She listened. She observed. And by whatever miracle, she confirmed that her brother, while wary, was still her brother. He was not a vague impression, not a faded memory, not unfeeling, not uncaring.

Au contraire, her little brother was, if the ghost fights were anything to go by, caring way too much to be healthy.

It was, to some point, comprehensible. Danny thought the activation of the portal was on him. He felt compelled to help however he could.

Which was unfair because honestly, their parents were the ones that fucked up. But alas, the responsibility they held for the attacks didn’t mean they were capacitated to deal with the consequences.

So she continued to stick by her brother. Talked him down when it was obvious he would keep going his merry stubborn way even if it half killed him again. And then brainstormed together how to make the best out of this god-awful situation.

Jazz was not a fighter, so she had to resign herself to back up, running interference, and dealing with collateral damage. It was not as much as her brother, but in needed to get done.

And then, in one of the many attacks to Amity Park she had been able to talk down a small group of ghosts.

She prevented them from attacking, all thanks to her knowledge of psychology. It was not her fighting prowess that ‘defeated’ them, it was her words.

She had been useful.

So, maybe, she didn’t need to be an excellent fighter to help her brother out. Maybe- maybe she just needed to understand better.

Because, really, weren’t most the ghost just people? Dead people, yes. But still people. Persons whose feelings had amplified at the moment of crossing over. And that just translated to tons of unfinished business. And what was the point of a psychologist if not help people? She could help others in her own way.

She wanted to.

That was a thing that apparently she shared with her little brother

Danny took it upon himself to protect the humans.

But who was helping the ghost?

Not all the ghosts were evil. If her brother’s tales about the Ghost Zone and its size where anything to go by, with the Ghost Portal they could have completely razed over the town if they wanted to. It didn’t add up. Some of the ghosts would even just come to the living world to mess around, not hurt, just play.

She had seen her brother herding the tiniest-non-humanoid ones that would sometimes flock in their neighborhood around as if they were little sheep. It was kinda cute, actually.

So maybe, if they learn what made them tick in an emotional sense, they could talk it out with the ghost. Maybe not all of them, but most. And wouldn’t that be a great help to relieve Danny’s load?

When she brought it up to the others- well. Sam and Tucker had just stared at her.

“What are you talking about?” They asked.

She had tried to explain, and they just looked at her like she had a screw loose. She was flabbergasted. They had spent way more time than her in the presence of ghosts. How had they not noticed?

The two teens had exchanged glances, gotten up, said their goodbyes, and made their way home. And that was it, an easy dismiss. She could only gape after them, and turn to her brother.

He was already looking at her.

He stared at her too, but he gave her a melancholic smile

“They don’t want to understand.” Was all he said.

That was enough to comprehend.

And that was the thing everything reduced to, wasn’t it

You could not see what you did not want to acknowledge. Not even if it was slapping you right in the face. Their parents were proof of that.  

Because the truth was that no matter how many people bitched about it her little brother was a hero.

Phantom was a hero.

And at the end of the day, Sam and Tucker were just civilians.

They didn’t know how bad it could get.

They didn’t know the grimmer parts. They didn’t think about them, they didn’t have to, because her brother was shielding them too.

That all the ghostly abilities her brother had acquired were not just “cool ghost powers”, that no matter how many times Sam talked about the responsibility she was not the one losing sleep over it, that no matter how Tucker sometimes wished he was ‘special’ too, there was always a price to pay. And Danny’s had come with interest.  

They didn’t want to acknowledge that Danny had died.

Jazz was the one waking up to her brother screams, the one constantly smuggling medical equipment into the house, the one fretting about whether her brother occasional lack of pulse in his sleep was a bad thing this time, the one to share sleepless nights along with her brother just talking trivialities so they could pretend for a moment.

Danny had always been hers like Jazz had always been his.  

If their constant quarrels and natural stubbornness could not tear them apart in the middle of their parent’s madhouse but made them stronger, then a triviality as whether one of them was dead or not was not going to tear them apart.

And maybe someday she would have to join him on the other side. But that was cannon fodder for the future.

For now, she would only concentrate on ways to help. The faster she learned the better.

And if She and Danny had flourished and learned to cope in the madhouse their parents had built.

What better option to have an intensive course than another madhouse, right?

-.-.-.-

NOTES:   :D

I like to believe that clothes were not the highest priorities in the Fenton household because Jack and Maddie can survive off jumpsuits alone and probably tried to convert their children too.

So Jazz and Danny would get their hands in any scrap of normal clothing they could, and by this point, Danny doesn’t even care if he has to use Jazz’s hello kitty sweater because that is better than his dad’s face.