#crossover snippet

“A thermos? Who the hell would send us a thermos?” Dean sat at the table in the bunker, glaring at the offending thing sitting within arm’s reach in front of him as if it had personally wronged him.

When he’d found the package in their PO box—or, rather, in the lock box for parcels that went along with the block of PO boxes that was there—he hadn’t been entirely surprised that there had been no return address or that the package hadn’t been addressed to them by name. Anyone sending them stuff wouldn’t use their real names.

But it wasn’t like they made a habit of purchasing stuff online and burning the use of a credit card by doing so.

When Sam hadn’t fessed up, and with Cas and Jack too computer illiterate to handle something like online ordering, Dean had talked himself into it being a present. Maybe from Jody or someone else.

Now, seeing that the meticulous wrapping with entirely too much tape had revealed a thermos carefully packed in bubble wrap, Dean was back to suspicious. He could have seen Crowley doing something like this just to mess with them, but would Rowena? He didn’t know how she’d have gotten their mailing address, but she’d chalk it up to having her ways. She’d probably delight in the fact that he was considering her as a possibility at this very moment, whether or not she was behind it.

He’d blame Gabriel if he didn’t know the angel was dead. (For real this time. Probably.) This was definitely something he’d have done. Of course, Gabriel would be more likely to send them a neat package wrapped in brown paper and conspicuously ticking, but….

Did metal really gleam like that or was it a trick? The thermos was light enough to be empty—it hadn’t sloshed or rattled or anything when he’d picked it up—but there was an electronic display on the side that read 2% in bright green letters, and he wasn’t convinced that meant nothing.

He wasn’t keen on opening it and releasing something that might be inside, either.

If Cas weren’t out with Jack, he’d ask if the angel had any clue what was going on, but their choice was either waiting till they got back or—

“Hey,” Sam said as he fit pieces of the packaging back together, “there’s a note written on the inside of this wrapping.”

The wrapping in question had been Christmas wrapping paper adorned with multiple sizes of presents in a rainbow of colours, interspersed with Christmas trees.

Even though it was July.

There had been a scrap of white paper taped to the front with their address penned in a neat hand, and a cluster of stamps in the corner, which was weird in and of itself, because Dean would have assumed the sender would have gone to the post office and mailed it there, paying the exact cost of the shipment rather than guessing and slapping on more stamps than was probably necessary.

If Dean had to guess, he’d say the entire thing had been covered in enough packing tape to have suspended Sam from the wall without him falling.

“And?” prompted Dean. “Whose idea of a joke is this?”

Sam was frowning as he read. “Jasmine Fenton’s, apparently.”

“Who?” Dean was pretty good about remembering the people they’d saved, but Fenton didn’t ring a bell. If the thing had turned up at Bobby’s mailbox—Jody monitored that one for them—it would be a different story, since she might’ve been someone they’d saved before he’d started hunting with Sam again, but—

“Not someone we know,” murmured Sam. He slid the wrapping paper towards Dean. “Apparently, she got our address from a friend who’d been in contact with Charlie.”

Charlie.

That one still hurt.

All right, they all still hurt, just to varying degrees, but he couldn’t dwell on that if he was going to get his job done.

“Why the hell was Charlie giving out our mailing address?”

Sam nodded towards the paper, so Dean huffed and started to read.

Hi,

I know it’s weird for me to request something when you don’t know me, but I’m desperate, and trusting the people I’m around here won’t be enough to save my brother. None of us can save him. We’re too close to the situation, so they’ll be watching us, and I’m just hoping this gets through.

Our friend Tucker Foley knows your friend Charlie. Not their last name, maybe not even their real name, but they found out he was the one behind Fryer_Tuck’s posts years back. They probably know more about us than we realize, so talk to them if you want any of what I’m saying confirmed. They said to call you if it was important, but the number we had was out of service. This is a last ditch effort, I guess. A Hail Mary.

We were only supposed to contact you if we ran up against something we couldn’t handle ourselves, and now we have, so this is me contacting you and begging for your help. Please keep my little brother safe. I’m really hoping you haven’t moved since we got this address, but if you have, then to whoever’s reading this— Please help me. Please help us.

Dean looked up at Sam. “How the hell are we supposed to save a kid when we don’t even know where he is?”

“Keep reading,” Sam said. “It gets weirder.”

“When do our lives not get weirder?” muttered Dean, but he kept reading.

Danny and I weren’t home when the Guys in White raided our house. I don’t know the real name of their organization, but they’re government agents, off the book, who hunt ghosts.

“You seriously expect me to believe the frickin’ government is out here hunting ghosts and they just happened to miss absolutely everything else that was happening right under their noses?” groused Dean, but Sam just gave him a look, so Dean rolled his eyes and looked to see what else Jasmine had written.

They’ve got our parents. They’re questioning Vlad Masters and Danny’s best friends, Tucker and Sam Manson. I couldn’t talk to Sam’s parents, but I talked to Tucker’s (they’re going to mail this for me once I finish and get it wrapped) and they’re not getting any answers, just that their son was taken in for questioning. I’m going to try to get to my aunt’s in Arkansas, but they’ll probably find me. I can’t risk them finding Danny. If the Box Ghost hadn’t been raiding the warehouses by the docks again, they’d already have him.

Dean glanced up at Sam again. “You’re going to be able to figure out where these people live based on everything she’s written here, right?”

“I’m going to try. She’s given us enough names. I know I’ve heard about Vlad Masters before, so I should be able to find something on him if no one else.”

Dean frowned. “I don’t remember hearing anything about him.”

Sam smirked at him. “How often do you read the news except to skim for something that sounds like a hunt?”

Dean wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer.

He won’t know much when you release him. I didn’t have time to explain or tell him the plan. Just— Remember he’s human, too, okay? Listen to him before you do anything else.

“Release him?” Dean repeated. “Release him from where? And what the hell is her brother if he’s not human? If these so-called government agents were focused on ghosts, they’re not going to be looking for vamps or werewolves.”

Sam looked pointedly at the thermos.

“Djinn hide in caves, not frickin’ thermoses. There isn’t going to be a genie in that bottle.”

“Does any of this situation sound like djinn to you?”

Sam knew full well it didn’t, but Dean couldn’t think of any creature off the top of his head that could be believed to be part human and also could be seen as something that would be mistaken for a ghost. The whole dead versus alive, tangible vs intangible thing really made a difference on that front. And it wasn’t something someone could hide.

And the things that could be hidden typically couldn’t be shoved into a thermos.

Maybe the kid had been possessed and they’d somehow managed to capture a demon who’d smoked out? That didn’t really make sense—no demon would stay in a thermos even if some part of them had been closed inside—but he wasn’t coming up with anything better at the moment.

I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else he might be safe. I just know it isn’t here.

Please. Keep him safe. Help him. Try to talk him out of doing something stupid. The Guys in White won’t harm the rest of us. Well, maybe Vlad, but— But he needs to stay safe. Please.

If this is too much, if you can’t take this on right now, please just guard the thermos for me. Danny won’t be happy, but he won’t know how long it’s been until we tell him.

I’ll reach out again once it’s safe.

Thank you.

Jasmine Fenton

“So what do you think?” Sam asked as he looked up. “Open it up in the safe room or leave it closed?”

“Closed till we make some sense of this,” Dean said. “I wanna see if Cas has anything to say about it, too.”

“We don’t know how long they’ll be if—”

“It’s a glorified play date,” interrupted Dean. “Jack isn’t going to learn how to make friends if we’re the only ones he hangs out with. Let him practice not scaring kids while Cas does a grocery run and plays overprotective parent. No one who meets both of them is going to question it unless one of them says otherwise.”

Which they might, despite being encouraged to let people make their own assumptions, but Dean had decided this wasn’t a battle he wanted to fight.

And making friends had been Jack’s idea, one Dean hadn’t been entirely sure he’d be willing to follow through with let alone propose himself after what had happened last time, so not discouraging that was the first order of business.

If nothing else, Jack needed to practice lying.

Cas was markedly better than he’d once been, but he still wasn’t great.

“That’s my point. We don’t know how long it’s going to be.”

“Dude, it’s Jack and Cas. It’s not going to be long. Let the kid dip his toes in and figure some things out. They’ll be back before the beer’s warm.”

“You really have so little faith in them? If someone just thinks he’s an awkward kid—”

“I didn’t miss the rumour mill whenever we moved, Sammy,” interrupted Dean. “You’re fooling yourself if you think there aren’t already going to be stories out there about Jack. He needs to pretend they aren’t true. Getting some practice under his belt now might save his skin later.”

“And ours, you mean.”

“Sure. If that thing” —here Dean tilted his head towards the thermos— “doesn’t skin us first.”

“If Jasmine knew anything about us, she wouldn’t send us her brother if she thought he was something we’d have to hunt.”

“We don’t know what she knows about us. We didn’t know Charlie was telling anyone anything. But even if she did, doesn’t mean whatever Jasmine sent was her brother. It might just be something she thinks is her brother.”

“Or it might be his ghost. A new enough one that he hasn’t lost himself yet.”

Dean met Sam’s eyes.

That was what he’d been thinking and hadn’t wanted to say.

Ghosts couldn’t be saved. Not forever. Eventually, their death would catch up to them, and if they weren’t put down first, they might take an awful lot of people with them, depending on how twisted they became.

“If it’s really a kid, one who still seems to be himself, we shouldn’t do this when Jack’s here.” Sam reached out to pick up the thermos, and Dean didn’t stop him. He shook it; it didn’t make a sound. “Do you figure she put some of his hair in here or something to keep the ghost in place?”

They could just salt and burn it. That was safer than not opening it when—with their luck—it would get opened at a time that was remarkably inconvenient for everyone. They didn’t have to listen to some pleading letter written by an older sibling worried sick about her little brother.

Goddammit.

Dean reached forward and yanked the thermos out of Sam’s hands. “I’ll do the final prep on the dungeon. You research what you can on these guys.”

“Gimme half an hour.”

“You’ve got ten minutes. We just need the basics.”

And, though Dean wouldn’t admit it, Sam was right.

Cas might have some useful information on this, if these guys had ever pinged the celestial radar, but he might know nothing, too.

And it wasn’t worth waiting for something that might turn out to be nothing if it meant Jack might take a front row seat to seeing them put down a monster who had yet to show its teeth.

It was a lot harder to convince yourself that it was to protect everyone else until you learned—the hard way—the horror that waiting meant.

XXXXXXXXX

Danny was talking (well, complaining) before his vision had cleared from the blinding light of the thermos. “If this is your idea of practical joke, I swear I’m gonna ask Clock….”

Once the light faded and his eyes adjusted, it became painfully clear that Jazz was not the one who’d released him, even though he knew she’d been the one to catch him in a thermos.

It wasn’t Sam or Tucker, either.

It wasn’t even his parents or Valerie. That would’ve sucked, given that none of them knew his secret, but that would’ve at least made more sense than two guys he’d never seen before looking at him like they expected him to attack them. And at least if it had been his parents…. Well, he’d been planning to tell them anyway. He hadn’t gotten them to admit that not all ghosts were master manipulators or that they could feel pain, but he had gotten them to talk to him as Phantom without shooting him on sight—even when they weren’t fighting a common enemy.

That was progress.

“Uh.” It shouldn’t be taking this long for his brain to process all this. How long had it been? Too long. “You’re not Jazz.”

And he thought Tucker had a thing for stating the obvious.

Danny risked a quick glance around, gleaning enough of the symbols painted around the room to know that Sam might understand half of them, but he didn’t. About the only thing he really did recognize was the pentagram, just not the other symbols painted in it or the white stuff poured in a thick ring around it. For all he knew, it could be sugar or salt. At this point, that would make as much sense as anything else.

Danny blinked, refocused, and realized that while he’d been distracted, the shorter of the two men had pulled out a shotgun. Or maybe he’d had it the entire time. Point is, it was levelled at Danny now. (And, okay, fine, neither man was short, but one was markedly shorter than the other, even if they were both shorter than Danny’s dad.) Danny didn’t really expect a normal gun would hurt him when he was Phantom, but he held up his hands in what he hoped would be seen as a placating manner anyway. “You, um, really don’t need to shoot.”

Neither of them said anything.

The gun didn’t go away.

Okay.

He could do this.

He just had to think like Jazz.

Danny let himself drift down slowly until his boots hit the floor, and he tried not to think about the fact that the gun had followed his progress. That shouldn’t be too hard. He was already trying not to think about the stain on the concrete that he was pretty sure was blood. “Um, I’m Phantom. In case you didn’t know that. Where, uh, did you get that thermos?”

“Got it as a present,” said the one with the gun.

The taller man frowned at him. “Dean.” Disapproval laced his tone, which had to be saying something, since Danny doubted either of them were his biggest fans. He wasn’t even sure they knew who he was; neither had reacted to his name.

He’d already known, on some level, that this wasn’t Amity Park.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that it wasn’t Elmerton, either.

“What? That’s not even a lie.”

The taller man rolled his eyes. “Danny?” he asked pointedly.

Huh.

Weird that he knew that when he hadn’t reacted to Phantom, but whatever. Maybe if the whole gift thing hadn’t been a lie, there’d been a note taped to the thermos or something. “Danny Phantom, yeah.”

The shorter man—Dean—snorted.

“Danny Fenton?” prompted the taller man.

Oh, crud.

Danny shook his head. “Danny Phantom. As in, a ghost. Which I’d kinda assumed you already knew, but if not, surprise, I guess? Ghosts are real.”

“Yeah, we know,” said Dean. “This ain’t our first rodeo.”

“Right. Well, um, you don’t need a gun because I’m not going to hurt you, so if you can just put that down so I can put my hands down—”

“Who are the Guys in White?”

“Huh?” The question had come from the taller man, and Danny really wished he knew why they were asking. These two didn’t look like they wanted to respond to some recruitment ad, but how did he know what the trainees looked like before they were actual trainees, let alone field agents? “They’re, like, secret government ghost hunters. Think Men in Black, except these guys are obsessed with keeping their suits spotless. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a lot easier to get away from them when they’re like that. Why, uh, are you asking?”

The two men exchanged a look, and then the smaller one looked at the floor—or probably something on the floor, but Danny had no idea what—and then he dropped the gun to a resting position.

Danny was not foolish enough to think that it wouldn’t be aimed in his direction in a heartbeat if he said something stupid, but for now, he thought he could drop his hands without risking the fact that those were special bullets coated in phase-proof foam or something. He didn’t plan to move elsewhere, though. That would probably not be great for his not-bullet-riddled self.

“I’m Dean. That’s Sammy—”

“Sam.”

“—and you’re Danny Fenton, so cut the Phantom crap and just explain why everyone thinks Danny Fenton’s still alive while the local ghost hunters and these Men in Black rip-offs are out for your head.”

Danny stared at them.

“Your enrollment records are current,” continued Sam. “No obituary. Possession of a corpse wouldn’t preserve it indefinitely, and you’ve healed from the damage you’ve taken, so you’re either playing with some pretty powerful magic—”

“Um.” Danny risked raising one hand and a corresponding finger. “I can guarantee you that whatever you’re thinking right now is wrong.”

“So enlighten us,” said Dean, and though he hadn’t raised the gun again, Danny felt like he was still looking into its barrel. His hand dropped back to his side.

Danny wasn’t a huge fan of spilling his secret to veritable strangers, but he was a huge fan of not getting shot, so…. “I, uh, didn’t actually die? Maybe briefly. I dunno. But I didn’t stay dead if I did? I just have ghost powers.”

“Ghost powers.” Dean’s voice was flat. “Meaning?”

“Exactly what it sounds like? I don’t know how else to describe it. I have powers like ghosts do. I can pass through stuff and turn invisible and fly, and it’s a lot easier when I’m in ghost mode.”

The two exchanged looks again. Either they’d been best friends for practically ever or they were siblings, Danny guessed. He and Jazz weren’t as good at the silent communication thing as he was with Tucker and Sam, but they’d gotten a lot better since she’d admitted to knowing his secret.

Danny bit his lip, and when neither of the other two spoke—probably waiting for him to dig his own grave by somehow saying the wrong thing—he asked, “What happened? Why ask about the Guys in White?” He hoped that would lead to the answer of why am I here? or where am I? without his asking it being so obvious. Knowing the names of the people who were liable to shoot him if he said the wrong thing was a little lower on the priority list than that, even if these two didn’t seem to think so.

“How many people know about your little secret?”

Danny frowned at Dean’s question. “Two more than before if you guys believe me, but why does that matter? Where’s everyone else?”

“Detained, probably, if it really is a government organization,” Sam said, studiously ignoring Dean’s glower. “There was a raid. As far as we know, your sister is safe.”

“You talked to Jazz?” They must have. “She said there was a raid?” In hindsight, that made a lot more sense than the whole ‘trapping him in a thermos’ thing being a practical joke or a mistake or payback for something he’d already forgotten doing, but— “What about Mom and Dad and my friends?”

In theory, Sam and Tucker should be farther away from whatever the situation was, since they hadn’t been with him at the time, and the Guys in White shouldn’t know how much they helped Phantom. But raid implied somewhere being stormed, and if these guys were trying to claim all the FentonWorks technology without paying for it this time….

“I’m still working on that,” admitted Sam, and Danny’s heart sunk to his toes. Sam and Tucker were caught up in it, too, then. Or, at least, they’d been caught up in it, even if they’d managed to get free since.

When had this happened? How long had he been in there?

“We and your friend Tucker knew someone in common,” started Sam. Knew, not know. That was not exactly a great start. “She apparently gave you a phone number and an address. Welcome to the address.”

Danny had a vague recollection of that, but— “That address was for a PO box, wasn’t it?”

“So welcome to the physical location of our residence,” snarked Dean. The gun was still lowered, but he didn’t look relaxed. “If this is your ghost mode, show us your human mode.”

“You mean being a regular person?” Human mode sounded creepy. Like he was playing at being human like Spectra always did. Or Johnny or Ember or someone else. “If you know who I am, then you probably already know what I look like, so why does it matter?”

Another look.

They were holding entire conversations with those looks.

“It matters if you aren’t still the boy you think you are,” Sam answered quietly. “If you have people who are fabricating your continued existence—”

Danny held up a hand again. Thankfully, that did not mean he got a gun barrel to the face. Maybe things were improving. “Okay, one, no, no one is making up the fact that Danny Fenton is still alive. I am. Even when I’m Phantom, I’m still me, y’know? Using my powers is easier as Phantom, but I can still do it as Fenton.”

Aaaaand now the gun was pointed at him again. Great. “So even when you’re impersonating a dead kid, you mean?”

He could risk intangibility or go straight to body contortions, but those were exhausting, and if these guys were the ones that Tucker’s friend had said could help if they ever needed it—

“At this point you’re just trying to antagonize me, aren’t you? Fine.” He let himself change back, smirking when they both started at the sudden light, but he’d give them this much: they didn’t drop their guard. It was probably best for him if he went back to acting casual. Danny stuck his hands into his pockets. “Now can you stop pointing a gun at me? Please?”

“Will you let me examine you?” asked Sam.

Danny made a face. “Which entails what, exactly?”

“Holy water, silver, iron, looking for a pulse, you name it,” drawled Dean. “The usual.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He walked towards Sam, crossing over the line of crystals on the floor without issue (he had started to wonder if they’d been tapping into the human equivalent of Desiree’s magic, but thankfully that didn’t seem to be the case), and he saw Sam glance at Dean again before the man offered him a flask and told him to take a drink. He was passed a few more objects and he apparently passed those tests without issue, and then Sam took his wrist to check for a pulse before eventually looking at Dean and nodding.

The gun only lowered after he’d done so.

“Now can you tell me what’s really going on?” pressed Danny. “Did the Guys in White raid FentonWorks? Are they still questioning Mom and Dad?”

“I wasn’t lying when I said I was still working on all of that,” Sam said. “I didn’t have time to do a lot of research before we freed you. Most of what we know came in Jasmine’s letter.”

“What letter?”

Sam produced it from his pocket, and Danny read it over hurriedly. Jazz was going to Aunt Alicia’s—or might already be there, assuming she’d made it. He wished Spittoon weren’t a dead spot so he could try her cell phone. He wished Aunt Alicia had a landline. He’d have to figure out some way to contact her. Unless the Guys in White would be monitoring that? He should probably take the battery out of his cell phone. It might be dead anyway, but—

“You want to fill us in?” Dean asked.

Jazz had mailed him here via Mr. and Mrs. Foley because she hadn’t known any other way to get him out of Amity Park without the Guys in White finding him. They had Jack and Maddie, Sam and Tucker, probably even Vlad unless he’d managed to talk his way out of it—

Were they only talking to Vlad because he was the mayor of Amity Park, or were they talking to him because they somehow knew—

Danny swallowed.

Tucker would be able to find out.

Danny didn’t have the skills for that.

These guys might be good, but if Tucker was friends with their friend and not them, then it was that friend who had skills as good as or better than Tucker’s.

“I don’t know that I can,” he whispered. “Can you at least find out if Vlad’s free? Vlad Masters, I mean? If they don’t have him— If they don’t have him, then he might even help.”

“Amity Park’s mayor hasn’t been seen for almost a week and a half,” Sam said quietly. “I’m assuming that was the day of the raid.”

They must know. The Guys in White wouldn’t keep Vlad otherwise. It would be too dangerous for them to kidnap someone so public, especially if they didn’t dare accuse him of being a ghost where anyone might overhear them. Given the mess that had happened Elliot, he wouldn’t blame them for being wary of throwing that one around, but still.

The Guys in White had Vlad.

They had to.

And if it was because they knew about Plasmius—

If it was because they knew about Plasmius, then there was a good chance that they already knew about Phantom—and that that was why Sam and Tucker had been questioned. It might even have been the real reason for the raid on his house and why his parents were probably also detained.

It also might mean Jazz had never made it to Aunt Alicia’s, even if her last ditch effort of getting him to safety had worked.

“I need to help them,” he murmured. “I need to free them. They could be getting tortured right now for all I know.” He looked up, meeting the eyes of the two men who were still, for all intents and purposes, strangers to him. “Please. Help me?”

"We still cannot exactly choose which universe to go into, but we can at least get a forewarning and a general explanation of what is to come."

Both Ultra Magnus and Megatron seemed to approve of it while Rodimus peered at the screen, "Is it scanning the next universe already?"

"Indeed!" Brainstorm nodded, "Actually, we scanned it before hand but it was a small sample." He brought up a picture of... Rodimus? No, it wasn't Rodimus. It was Hot Rod. With green optics and some different detailing but it was definitely Hot Rod, Rodimus' old identity and frame. "Since you are our illustrious main captain of our duo-captain system, I thought it was only fair that we use your likeness to find the Rodimus in the next universe- Lo and behold, we found you! Somewhat."

"Huh, so what, in this universe I have green optics?" Rodimus couldn't help but ask, intrigued by his other self. Drift snorted, amused at the sight of the green optics yet couldn't help but find Hot Rod's optics... kind for some reason. The smile on his derma certainly helped.

"And you have yet to hold the Matrix, your frame hasn't been reformatted." Ultra Magnus noted, peering at the mech's green optics.

Megatron hummed, "How long until the scan is finished? What can we see?"

Perceptor tapped against his keyboard. "Not long, we're still locked on to Rodi- pardon, locked on to Hot Rod, so we shall soon see him in action at least."

"Speaking of which! It's done!" Brainstorm announced as suddenly the screen changed.

All their faceplates immediately turned grim as they found themselves seeing an area with grey bodies with torn chassis and spilled energon. There was a strange amount of mirrors around, floating in the air, and Hot Rod was in the middle of it.

Heaving, panting and hurt. Optics wide and searching as he tensely looked around his surroundings.

In his servos was a katana, similar yet different to the kind that Drift carried. The blade was interesting, a dark mixture of white, red and blue swirling along the metal, glowing like cracks on the sword's blade.

"What the frag?" Rodimus asked as Hot Rod kept stance.

"Give it up, you may have killed other demons but I can assure you. I am no demon you have ever faced." A voice reverberated from the mirrors, a dark shadowy figure in each mirror with haunting pale blue optics.

"Demons?" Drift repeated tensely, his own servo instinctively going to his swords at his sides.

"Perceptor! Brainstorm! Is this happening now?" Megatron barked as Hot Rod's optics narrowed, energon dripping from his intake as he kept his guard up.

"It is! It's-" Brainstorm quietened when the screen spoke once more.

"Those other demons were talentless brutes who were not worthy in becoming like me. You may have slain other demons but I... am far above them." A figure darted out of the mirror, faster than a normal mech's optic could process- Hot Rod had barely reacted in time, managing to change directions and block an incoming clawed servo with his sword with a grunt.

It revealed who he was fighting up against- "Is that a sparkeater!?" It looked very similar to a typical spark eater. Only it wasn't decaying or dilapidated. Their frame was polished, shiny, underneath the stain of energon. But those sharp metallic tail-like bladed tendrils were unmistakeable. "Why is it talking?!"

"And how did it get out of that mirror?" Ultra Magnus asked and pointed out at the same time.

Spark-eaters were mindless, and they certainly couldn't jump out of mirrors!

"I believe that is just how spark eaters are in that universe." Perceptor said with a tense and haunted look on his faceplate, no doubt remembering the time he and several others had been turned into sparkeaters.

Hot Rod struggled to keep against the spark-eaters strength but managed to grin, "You'd be surprised!" His optics sharpened before his moved. A strange whistling in the air as abruptly, he slashed at the so called 'demon' spark eater.

Ni no Kata kai: Yoko Mizu Guruma!

It took a second for the words to translate from... Human Japanese?? It meant; Second Form: Improved, Lateral Water Wheel.

But in the same second, before anyone could even ask any type of question- water seemed to phase into existence. Slicing a circle around him, the sharp liquid crashed into the intelligent spark eater, sending them flying back against the mirrors- but instead of going inside, it cracked the mirror they landed on. The tendrils they had were cut off, flailing in clear pain.

"What the heck was that?!"

Rodimus held his servos up at the looks he got, "Don't look at me! I have no idea why that Hot Rod has a weird water mod! It very much clashes with our name though, I thought he would've gone for a fire one."

"I don't think that's a mod." They all turned to Brainstorm who seemed enthralled by the Hot Rod on the screen. "There's something off about this, but I can't put my finger on it."

"Grrr- right, yes. The weird swordsmechship you can do." The demon snarled, pained and- were they healing? The tails were back! What the pit?! "I'll give you that, Hot Rod. You're no ordinary mech- someone who dealt with Proteus wouldn't be that easy to kill..."

Proteus? Who??

"Senator Proteus?" Megatron muttered incredulously, recognizing the name.

"This is your last chance, demon. Surrender! Atone for the innocent lives you've take—" Hot Rod said, optics burning with righteous determination, something that Rodimus was cheering for yet at the same time. He couldn't remember if he'd been like that when he was younger... Definitely not.

This alternate universe was already so wild with just him alone! Not to mention the spark eater.

"Never! Those worthless lowlives have two uses! To work as they were forged and constructed or to be feasted on by those more powerful than them! Like ME!" Primus could you be any more villainous?

Megatron's faceplate twisted into an angry scowl, glaring at the sparkeater. He was very pleased to see anger on Hot Rod's own faceplate.

"Speaking of such, did you know, little slayer? We are being watched. Not by my brethren, but something else. And I sense such delicious sparks akin to yours."

"Someone else is there? Brainstorm, can we look around or-"

Ultra Magnus interrupted him, optics wide as suddenly the demon was looking at them. "He's talking about us!" He barked suddenly the spark eater launched itself at them, at the screen. Behind him, Hot Rod looked alarmed and immediately sprinted towards the spark eater.

"That's impossible!" Perceptor barked but suddenly the AU Observer's screen sparked and shattered- with the force of a spark eater and a familiar red and yellow mech behind it.

"SCATTER!" Megatron screamed, grabbing Rodimus and throwing them both to the side to avoid the flailing spark eater who hissed and snarled. Drift and Ultra Magnus had done the same, with Drift unsheathing his own swords, prepared to fight.

Hot Rod landed in a roll but immediately leapt towards the spark eater, speaking human Japanese once more.

Mizu no Kokyū - Shichi no Kata: Shizuku Hamon Tsuki!

This time, the translation was automatic.

Water Breathing - Seventh Form: Drop Ripple Thrust

Hot Rod stabbed his sword several times at the spark eater- water forming once more, a surface that depicted droplets that were sharply stabbed against the howling spark eater.

"PUT THE LAB IN EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN MODE!" Ultra Magnus roared as Hot Rod was suddenly flung back thanks to a lashing sharp tail, a cut along his chassis all the way to his shoulder.

===== Fire Bot on Lost Light =====

i would write more but- well, honestly i shouldn't XD im going to end up writing spoiler territory stuff- i mean i kinda already did but im still on the fence of the details ive already revealed so those may or may not be changed.

but yeah, this is ONE of the ways hot rod could've accidentally gotten on the lost light.

i have other ways in mind but for now...

“This would be much easier if you’d talk to me,” continued Lucifer as he walked around the bar to sit two stools away from the boy. “If nothing else, you could tell me your name.”

No answer.

Predictable, really, but he’d be lying if he claimed it wasn’t antagonizing, and he certainly wasn’t about to start that. Still, Lucifer kept an easy smile on his face. “It would only be polite. After all, you are a guest in my humble abode.”

The boy snorted and sat up, finally looking over at Lucifer. “Okay, first of all, by no one’s standards is this place humble. Second, you dragged me here, so I’m not sure if I’m more of a guest or a ‘guest’.” Even without the air quotes, the boy’s stress on the word had it dripping with sarcasm.

“The first one, though I would hardly call a stern suggestion dragged.”

That got him a raised eyebrow. “You’re coming home with me,” the boy said in a poor imitation of Lucifer’s accent. “I’m sure you’d rather that than my alerting the authorities?”

“I wasn’t going to leave you out on the streets.”

Bright blue eyes narrowed at him. “Why not? Other people are left on the streets. What’s so special about me?”

That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Lucifer couldn’t even guess at the answer, and that irked him. Dear old Dad had done enough meddling in Lucifer’s life already—he wouldn’t have gotten his hands dirty again—which meant one of his siblings surely had a hand in this, but which one? To what end?

What was he missing?

The boy crossed his arms again, though he kept his elbows off the bar this time. “You shouldn’t even have been able to find me,” he muttered. “No one was supposed to find me.”

“A common enough sentiment among runaways,” Lucifer drawled after taking a sip of his drink, “but particularly among those who are running as much for their sake as someone else’s.” He leaned closer, meeting the boy’s eyes, and added, “Tell me, what is it you really desire?”

The boy shrugged. “I wouldn’t turn down a Nasty Special right now. With extra sauce.”

It hadn’t worked last time, either.

More proof that there was more to this boy than meets the eye. Not that he’d needed it. The boy wouldn’t be here in the first place if Lucifer had. Still, the fact that the boy had briefly shaken Maze after running away from Lux the first time was impressive. There were precious few who could disguise their trail that well.

Lucifer hadn’t asked, but he suspected Maze respected the boy for it. Every threat she’d made to him since had had a more obvious undercurrent of teasing on her tone, at least, and the boy tended to laugh them off anyway. He’d been more comfortable around her than he had been around Lucifer from the start, but the banter between them had grown to the point that Lucifer was inclined to call them friends before he’d call them acquaintances.

Mazikeen, for her part, wasn’t sharing an ounce of what she’d learned from their exchanges with Lucifer.

Lucifer took a long drink before setting the glass aside and asking, “Would you settle for dinner at my brother’s house?”

Amenadiel was worried about who the boy was and what his showing up might mean for all of them, which was no surprise because Amenadiel always worried about that sort of thing, but Linda had been the one insisting on getting a proper introduction to Lucifer’s ward sooner rather than later.

That’s what she’d called the boy: his ward.

Lucifer didn’t really think the term could apply when it had only been a couple of days. He didn’t even have a name to put to the boy’s face.

(He’d checked the police records. Unofficially, of course. There wasn’t so much as a missing person’s report matching the boy’s description filed within the last year. The next time he found an unattended computer, he intended to expand that search.)

“Should I?” The boy’s eyes flicked to Lucifer’s empty glass. “Judging by how fast you downed that, he’s not a good cook.”

“How much I happen to drink has nothing to do with the quality of the food at our family dinners.” The company, on the other hand….

“Good enough,” the boy said, straightening up and spinning the stool so his back was to the bar. “When do we leave?”

-|-

Danny didn’t want to write this place off until he knew something for certain, so he let the local superheroes take care of things and hung back in the shadows, trying to keep his head down.

The shadows were not as empty as he was used to.

Maybe, if he’d been better actually hiding in them, or if he’d just stayed invisible for as long as possible when things got dicey, he wouldn’t have attracted attention.

His best efforts otherwise were dismal, apparently.

Clearly, showing up to the scene of as many attacks as possible on the off chance that he’d run into Dani—or some lead about her—had been the stupidest thing he could possibly do, something Jazz and Sam would no doubt have pointed out to him repeatedly if he’d mentioned it.

But he hadn’t, mostly because he knew they wouldn’t be happy about it. Sam, Tuck, and Jazz knew what he was really up to, even if they didn’t know the full story about Dani, so they were keeping up the pretense with his parents of being invited on a business trip by Vlad.

Keeping secrets kept getting him into trouble in the long run, but it worked well enough in the short run. It wasn’t like he was going to tell anyone here what he was really doing or how he always managed to avoid getting shot.

He had not expected that people on both sides would find reason to distrust him when he hadn’t even done anything, though.

Sure, his showing up to the scene of the crime, even when those scenes were far apart, might be more pattern than coincidence and give them cause to question if anyone worked out the math, but no one back home had ever blinked twice at that. And, okay, maybe that one hero had been noticeably freaked out the first time he’d met Danny, but Danny had assumed that he’d just been having a rough day. The bank robbers had nearly shot them both.

(Well, they had shot Danny; Danny had just been intangible at the time. Maybe that had been more noticeable than he’d thought?)

And it was hardly his fault he’d frozen everything green on sight the minute he’d noticed a plant moving in an unnatural way. He’d thought it was Undergrowth. He’d been quick about it, too—hadn’t even bothered transforming since he could handle ice easily enough in human form now, thanks to his ongoing training with Frostbite—and he hadn’t thought there were any witnesses around.

Something he’d been wrong about, apparently.

Story of his life.

“This isn’t what it looks like, I swear,” Danny insisted. “This is all a big misunderstanding. I’m just a tourist.”

Really, he should have known they wouldn’t believe him.

Ask box trick-or-treating - receive a snippet if you drop by - Happy Halloween, everyone!

Mabel squared her shoulders. “He meant to come back, but he hasn’t, so he must be in trouble! We have to help him. Please, Grunkle Stan?”

Stan patted the armrest of his chair and she slipped up onto it as easily as she ever had, and it hurt her a little inside to see how relieved he looked when she did.

It’s not that the others hadn’t taken the news well, but…. Wendy hadn’t been thrilled to find out she’d been working on top of what was potentially a giant hazard without knowing a thing about it so she could prepare accordingly—though truthfully, Mabel wasn’t sure if that was partly for show so she could ask Stan if they’d get hazard backpay. Besides, Mabel was pretty sure Wendy’s concern was more for them than for herself, or at least for the people they’d been when they’d first arrived in Gravity Falls. She suspected Soos was a little hurt that he’d never managed to earn Stan’s trust before now so that he could help with all of this before Danny had spilled the beans, though. Even Dipper had admitted to her that he’d have felt vindicated if Stan had just acknowledged that weird things went on in Gravity Falls before push had come to shove, even if he’d never breathed a word about the rest of it.

But he was still their Grunkle Stan.

“It’s like this, kiddo.” Stan’s familiar rumble held a note of regret, but there wasn’t a hint of leniency in it, nothing she could push on to make him give way. “We know something bad is coming even if we don’t know exactly what it is, but because we don’t know exactly what it is, we have to be prepared for anything. If you and Dipper try to summon Danny here, you won’t be successful unless we take down some of our defences—”

“We don’t have to do it inside!” The words spilled out of her in a rush. She hadn’t been helping everyone else gather supplies and paint one warding after another to blithely suggest striking through half their work. “I know you’re doing everything you can to protect the Mystery Shack, but we can do it in the yard! Or farther out into the woods!”

Something in Stan’s face tightened, and Mabel realized he didn’t think that was better.

He thought it was worse.

“The problem with summoning something,” he said carefully, “is that you never know for sure what you’re gonna get. You might be putting out an invitation for Danny, but something else might come along and hijack that.”

“But if he’s in trouble—”

“He doesn’t need us to save him.”

“But if the owner of the second journal—”

“If the owner of the second journal summoned him and they still have him by the time we find them, we’ll help him. But even if he’s not somewhere he’s supposed to be, he’s got some pretty powerful allies to have been here in the first place.”

Mabel frowned. Dipper had been worried that summoning Danny might pull him away from his home and they wouldn’t have an easy way to return him, and she didn’t want that, either, but that wasn’t the end of the world. They could apologize for that, and she was sure Danny would understand. But if he needed help and they didn’t even try?

Well.

If she were being perfectly honest with herself, he might understand that, too.

His warning hadn’t explicitly said they might invite someone else in if they did this, but between Danny’s warning and the journal entry, she couldn’t really blame Stan for thinking that. Plus, she trusted Stan too much to dismiss his concerns.

“We might have to face whatever this is without him.” Stan nudged her arm with his shoulder. “I don’t think it’s our best move to risk inviting in something else when we’re not entirely sure what we’re facing in the first place.” There was a pause. “Do you understand why I believe that? Can you accept it and trust me?”

She didn’t want to—it felt like giving up on Danny—but Mabel nodded.

She did understand.

Besides, as much as Danny had wanted to go home, he’d also wanted to help. She’d seen that in him even if he hadn’t always wanted to admit it. He might find a way back to them on his own, even if someone else had summoned him.

-|-

As the days slipped by, Mabel started looking for Danny less and less—she no longer ran to the window whenever they heard an unexpected sound from outside, something that was not an uncommon occurrence—and Dipper couldn’t help but feel terrible. There was a heaviness in his chest that wouldn’t go away.

Mabel wasn’t supposed to be that sad. She was easily distracted from it, thankfully, but she smiled a little less often than she had before. Genuine smiles, anyway. Not every smile she wore these days was a real one. Dipper had noticed that even if no one else had.

He knew she still wanted to try summoning Danny even if she’d stopped asking him about it.

Dipper hadn’t stopped looking for a way to send a summoned Danny back, exactly, but there wasn’t anything in his journal or Stan’s that was specific to what he wanted. He knew that knowledge might be in the second journal or that it might be something never discovered by the author—Grunkle Ford; he had to remember the author was his grunkle even if it was hard to imagine someone who wasn’t Grunkle Stan.

Of course, that knowledge might not even exist to discover. The whole search might be a wild goose chase. Still, without some sort of guarantee either that they wouldn’t rip Danny away from the one thing he’d wanted the entire time he was here without being able to return him or that they wouldn’t accidentally summon something bad that couldn’t be properly banished back to wherever it had come from—

He agreed with Grunkle Stan.

It wasn’t worth the risk.

Especially not if Danny’s warning was right.

Dipper threw himself into the search for the second journal instead, hoping that once it was found, Mabel would have a little more peace of mind.

Well.

He hoped they’d both have a little more peace of mind.

Even if he didn’t admit it to her, Danny’s disappearance—and the fact that he didn’t turn up like he’d promised, assuming the message Soos had found was real—ate away at Dipper. Dread that he’d somehow made a mistake curled inside his chest, and claws of doubt tore into him each night he lay awake without answers.

Stan had made as much progress as he could without the second journal.

He’d said he could try to infer what was missing and extrapolate from what he already had, but he hadn’t sounded too confident that that would work.

Danny had said he’d been in a portal accident, and Dipper didn’t want to accidentally repeat whatever mistakes had been made to cause that accident. He knew they had to go about this carefully.

He also knew they wouldn’t get any closer to rescuing Ford until they had the second journal. He’d subtly asked around (the woods, not the town) to see if anyone had heard of someone (something) finding a lost book, to no avail. Mabel had even risked asking the gnomes. (Despite threatening not to give an answer until Mabel agreed to be their queen, one of them—Jason?—had slipped up and given away the game. They hadn’t known anything, either.)

As each day passed without any sort of progress, any sort of lead, the desire—desperation—to find the second journal grew.

In hindsight, that’s when it had all gone wrong. Instead of being as careful as he could have been, as careful as he should have been, he’d done something he’d regretted.

Something they’d all regretted.

You’re friends with the Phantom, aren’t you?

He never should have listened.

Of course I know who he is! I see everything.

He never should have assumed.

He’s not here to help you, but I can.

He’d thought, if this was a friend of Danny’s, maybe they’d come because he couldn’t.

We can make a deal.

It had been a mistake.

After all, I know what you’re looking for.

A stupid mistake.

I know where it is.

Something he couldn’t undo.

I know who has it, and I know what they’re planning to do.

He’d thought he’d do anything to get the journal.

I could make sure you get your hands on it.

Getting the journal meant saving Grunkle Ford, reassuring themselves that Danny was okay, and preparing themselves for whatever else was coming.

Don’t you want to see it before it’s destroyed?

He hadn’t known back then that Gideon had had the second journal or that he’d used it to summon a demon.

If the journal is destroyed, you’ll never get what you want because it won’t exist anymore.

If he’d been thinking clearly, if he’d been half as suspicious as he’d been of Danny when he’d first turned up, if there hadn’t been some sort of deadline—

Tick tock, do you hear that clock? Every second brings us closer to destruction.

It hadn’t been a lie, but it hadn’t been the truth, either. At least, what Bill Cipher had really meant and what Dipper had understood were two different things.

Do you know what it feels like to have time literally slipping through your fingers? You people always compare it to water, but it’s more destructive than that. Every lost second burns. Tick tock goes the clock, down and down till there’s nothing left—except the agony of missed opportunities and lost chances.

He’d known Mabel had thought he’d given up on Danny. He hadn’t wanted Stan to think he’d given up on Ford, too.

I’m not asking for much—just a suit to go with my hat and tie.

It hadn’t seemed like a bad deal at the time. Stan had loads of old suits in the closet, and he wouldn't exactly mind losing one if it meant getting the final journal. Dipper had figured he’d just need to empty the pockets of mothballs.

So, what’s it going to be, Pine Tree?

He should have known it was too good to be true. He should have asked more questions.

Do we have a deal?

He hadn’t.

-|-

Five years was a long time to wait.

In Danny’s mind, it was too long. He’d forgotten things, important things—they’d probably been important things? They usually were with his luck—and if he’d ever found out the date beyond the year, he didn’t remember it now. He’d focused on summer of 2012, Gravity Falls, Oregon, and not much else. He didn’t know much else. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d wanted to write anything down or camp out in Oregon for the entire summer, tempting though that had been. He hadn’t even tried to coordinate vacation plans with his friends so they could do a road trip.

That was too risky.

Clockwork would have figured out his plan if he’d done that.

Of course, that was assuming Clockwork hadn’t already figured out his plan. Danny had been busy enough with stuff this summer that it sure felt like Clockwork had figured it out and was subtly pulling strings to keep him away. Every time he tried to plan his trip, even just as far as grab a bag of essentials and leave in the middle of the night, something would come up that he couldn’t push off onto someone else.

Now, Dani was covering for him, and she could handle whatever near world-ending disaster decided to rear its ugly head while he was gone.

He couldn’t afford to miss this window.

He probably already had, but if he hadn’t—

It was still summer. It was the last week of August, but that was still summer.

Danny had told his parents that he was taking off for at least the week, and now he was flying over Oregon in search of the elusive Gravity Falls. If he’d learned anything since his last visit there, it was that it had the same sort of reputation as Amity Park—nice and boring, with the odd crackpot story coming out of it that no one else believed—and that it could be just as hard to find, like it sometimes wasn’t on the map at all.

Considering Amity Park sometimes wasn’t—there had been another Ghost Zone incident—he wasn’t going to put anything past Gravity Falls.

In truth, this wasn’t where he’d thought he’d be five years ago, but then again, he hadn’t really thought about his future five years ago beyond making sure that that one horrible future never came to pass.

He’d been working for his parents since graduating high school, and things had gotten better once he’d taken his own advice and coughed up the truth about what had happened to him all those years ago. Once he’d told them who he’d become, they’d accepted him with a wholeheartedness that had made him wonder why he hadn’t told them before—or why he hadn’t let them remember knowing before.

They had been as supportive as they’d known how, doing everything from making sure their weapons didn’t affect him to offering to do family therapy to help them find a way forward. They’d even insisted that he didn’t have to give up on his dreams, that they’d help him become the astronaut he’d always wanted to be in any way they could, but Danny had experienced outer space as Phantom more than once now, and—

And it wasn’t that being an astronaut wasn’t still something he wanted to do, on some level, but it was something he was willing to let go of in favour of doing other things.

Besides, he was basically a liaison between the Ghost Zone and the Human Realm now. He couldn’t just leave that behind to pursue a completely unrelated career without a second thought, especially when he knew the odds of actually becoming an astronaut were slim and making it to space the proper way were even slimmer. Astronomical, really. Especially with a start as late as his would be.

Anyway, he didn’t want to risk one or two of the ghosts from further afield deciding to toe the line or completely negate the deal he’d struck surrounding the Amity Park Portals, and he still felt like that was his responsibility.

His parents could hold down the fort while he finished up some old business out here, though.

Probably.

Dani could help with that, too, if it looked like something might explode. She’d gotten good at working with their tech, even if she didn’t want to work for them—with them—like he did.

Dani had also been the one to give him directions for flying to Gravity Falls when he’d finally mentioned his plan. She had much more experience finding landmarks from the sky than he did, and flying was infinitely faster than driving. Plus, at some point, she’d apparently been to Gravity Falls. Naturally, she wouldn’t talk about it; once she’d realized why he was so interested in it, she’d refused to say anything until Halloween of this year. This was supposedly to reduce the chances of Clockwork finding out everything, but Danny suspected it was just because she enjoyed annoying him.

Whatever.

He’d get the story out of her eventually.

In the meantime, he wanted to know how this one ended.

Had Mabel and Dipper ever found his message? What had they thought when he’d just disappeared on them—especially if now wasn’t as close to the day it had happened as he hoped it was? Had they ever tried summoning him? He wasn’t sure if that would have worked—quite aside from the fact that they’d be getting him rather than the Danny they had known if it did work, he figured Clockwork would have done something to prevent it. Not that Danny could think of something Clockwork could do to ensure that, but it was Clockwork. If anyone was going to find a way to bend the rules, it would be him.

Danny still had some kind of memory-erasing gun hidden in the wall of his childhood bedroom as a testament to that fact.

He’d put it there upon getting back and hadn’t touched it since.

Not that he hadn’t been tempted to. Tucker had been up for testing the thing as long as it wasn’t on him, and Sam had made a comment she might not have truly meant about using it on Valerie to dissuade her of the notion that Phantom had ruined her life, and it’s not like he hadn’t mind-wiped people in the past, but—

But this was different.

Maybe it was because it fell a little closer to the side of technology than magic. Maybe it was because he suspected how often something similar must have been used in Gravity Falls and how much that had terrified those who had seen its effects but not known what was happening. (He hadn’t faced circumstances like that when he’d used the Reality Gauntlet; that had been bigger and the effects more permanent, and he’d destroyed that thing for a reason.)

Or maybe he hadn’t used the memory gun because of Jazz.

Jazz had freaked out when he’d first told her about it, talking about how he couldn’t possibly know the damage it did and otherwise looking far more disturbed about the whole thing than he’d ever felt. He hadn’t thought telling her everything about the Reality Gauntlet situation would improve matters, so he’d tried talking in hypotheticals, and he’d lost every argument.

Somehow.

He’d lost it again last year when he’d been ready to use it—really, actually ready.

She’d stopped him.

He’d let her—on some level, he knew that—but he’d stopped because he trusted her.

Still, if she’d arrived back in Amity Park any later, or if the Guys in White had moved any faster—

No. No, he didn’t need to remember that right now. He’d gotten through it, and that was all that mattered.

The fact that he might need the gun in the future was the reason he hadn’t brought it back here, though.

It was still insurance.

There was a reason he’d first made that deal with Clockwork, after all.

And there was a reason he still had a few tiny misgivings about coming back against Clockwork’s wishes. Orders, more like. Or cryptic warnings.

But there was also a reason he was determined to come back and see this through, whatever happened.

-|-

Danny felt the world-bending weirdness that seemed to ooze out of Gravity Falls before he could reliably pick out any landmarks, but there was the water tower, same as ever, which meant the shack should be over—

Danny adjusted his course, frowning, and flew faster, but it was starting to get harder to do, like he was trying to push his way through molasses. That skin-crawling, spine-tingling feeling of wrongness he’d first felt five years ago was stronger now. Instinct told him he should fly in the opposite direction, just get out of here and forget about this entirely, and he wasn’t sure the feeling was the result of something Clockwork had done.

That was a terrifying thought.

What the heck had happened here?

Was this some residual effect of whatever Clockwork had tried to warn him away from?

Maybe he shouldn’t be feeling bad about putting off this visit to deal with everything that had come up this summer.

Maybe it really would’ve been bad if he’d stayed here or found time to come back sooner.

The Mystery Shack was in roughly the same spot it had been the last time he’d seen it, but it looked like Vortex had paid it a visit when he’d been in a bad mood. Soos and Stan were up on the roof, patching holes, and Wendy seemed to be sorting debris from the yard into various piles—scrap, salvage for reuse, and scavenge for parts, maybe? She didn’t bother chasing the goat and pig away from everything (when had they gotten farm animals? Had he just missed them last time?), but she did seem to be making a concerted effort to keep them away from the smallest pile.

Danny slowed, not entirely by choice, and forced his way closer. He didn’t bother staying invisible, but he didn’t call out, either. He landed on the lane and transformed back in a familiar flash of light, hoping it would be easier to walk than to fly—

—and it was like someone had found a way to muffle the feeling that made him want to flee.

It was still there, but it was tamped down and infinitely easier to ignore, much like it had been five years ago.

He remembered feeling it back then, remembered getting used to it to the point that it didn’t really bother him unless he focused on it, but he did not remember it being that much worse in ghost mode. He was pretty sure he’d gotten better about ignoring it regardless of which form he was in. He’d assumed it was simply his reaction to Gravity Falls in general, some product of its weirdness as a whole, but now that he’d come back, now that he’d felt both….

Now, it seemed pretty clear that that run-danger-flee feeling was a result of the Mystery Shack itself.

Or, more likely, something inside the Mystery Shack.

Or something that had been inside the Mystery Shack and had exploded with enough strength to leave this feeling lingering behind, at least.

Danny blew out a breath and started to walk into the yard. He didn’t meet with any weird resistance now; walking felt totally normal, not like he was trying to push two magnets of like poles together.

The new vantage point let him notice Mabel and Dipper sitting with Stan on the porch steps. They looked pretty much the same as he remembered, which hopefully meant they were as unharmed as they appeared. Apparent destruction aside, maybe he wasn’t too late. Maybe he hadn’t missed everything, even if he’d missed the start of it.

Like the others, Mabel, Dipper, and Stan were busy. As far as he could tell, they were alternating between repairing the steps—a rust-spotted metal toolbox with a hammer on top of it sat at the edge of the porch, at least—and looking at the book in Stan’s lap. Danny wasn’t wholly convinced was one of the journals. The shape was wrong, wider than he remembered, and—

Wait.

Danny’s eyes flicked to the two figures on the roof and then back to the three on the porch.

What?

Something that might be guilt or maybe dread curled around Danny’s lungs and squeezed, and he stopped as he realized he’d come too late.

The state of the Mystery Shack hadn’t been the start of it, the first casualty in whatever fight they were facing. It had been the end. Or somewhere in the middle. They were still cleaning up from it, whether because it had recently happened or because they only now had time to deal with it.

Was this his fault? Not entirely—he knew it was stupid to think it was entirely his fault when Clockwork had straight up told him something was coming regardless—but was it partially his fault? For not being here? For not trying harder to be here? For not inviting Sam and Tucker and Valerie on a family road trip out to visit the friends he’d made here five years ago and being the calvary this fight might have needed to make sure things hadn’t gone as far as they had?

He had not come right back like he’d promised.

He should have, but he hadn’t. He’d let Clockwork distract him, and—

“Hey, we’re closed for repairs right now.”

Danny started. He hadn’t even noticed Wendy walk over to him, but she was looking at him in the same way she’d looked at him the first time he’d seen her. Well, mostly. The suspicion was better hidden behind a false smile this time, but it was most certainly still there.

He didn’t think he’d changed enough in five years that she wouldn’t recognize him, but then again, that could be a large reason for her suspicion in the first place. If she were looking for him, she’d be looking for the old him. The younger version of him. Not someone who was older and taller than her, if not by a lot.

“The grand reopening will be in a couple of days. If you’re still in town, you’re welcome to come back then.”

There was a tightness to her words that wasn’t hidden by what sounded like a half-hearted attempt at a congenial tone.

She definitely didn’t trust him, but frankly he couldn’t blame her for that.

Whatever Clockwork had sent him to warn them about had happened, and saying it had been rough regardless was no doubt a gross understatement. Who wouldn’t be jumpy, wondering if that was the end or if the universe had something else up its sleeve? It had been beyond bad. Even if the town itself looked okay, the state of the Mystery Shack told its own story.

Danny swallowed. A quick glance told him the three on the steps were watching him, and he couldn’t hear any hammering coming from the roof, either. Things had grown quiet in the eerie way that Gravity Falls could go quiet, and the urge to leave cranked up a couple of notches.

He ignored it and opened his mouth instead. “Are you guys okay?”

It was a stupid question. He knew that. They must have gone through a lot in his absence, and he knew better than anyone that sometimes, some pretty big things could happen that didn’t leave a whole lot of physical evidence behind. Not all the time, anyway. Sometimes, it just depended on how you looked at the situation.

Especially when interdimensional portals were involved.

Something that might explain the two Stans, come to think of it.

Wendy blinked but didn’t answer, more caught off guard than he’d ever seen her.

Danny heard movement from the direction of the shack and looked over to see Dipper on his feet and Mabel already running towards him. The two on the roof had put their tools down and were likely coming down, too. If they hadn’t recognized him, they’d decided he might be a threat.

That shouldn’t be surprising, really.

Mabel skidded to a stop less than two feet from him and stared up at his face. “Danny? Is that you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but apparently Mabel wasn’t finished.

“Were you summoned away by the Time Police? Is that why you’re older? Did you meet Blendin?”

What?

“Time Police?” Danny repeated, even as Mabel hugged him and started to tell him why they hadn’t tried summoning him back and how they’d hoped he’d made it home.

Yeesh, if there were so-called Time Police running around here, no wonder Clockwork had been extra adamant he not interfere. It wasn’t just a matter of flying under the radar of the Observants; he needed to be unnoticed by these people, too—especially if Mabel didn’t seem to think it unlikely that he might be kidnapped and held somewhere.

“It’s a long story,” Dipper said as Mabel pulled away. He glanced at Wendy, who gave him a slight nod.

Danny was still trying to figure out how he’d managed to pass some test of theirs despite barely speaking when Dipper asked, “What did you say when you first came out of the thermos again?”

Danny had absolutely no idea what he’d said.

Well.

That wasn’t true.

He couldn’t remember, but he could guess.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Um. Was I complaining about being in there? I was probably complaining about being in there. It’s not exactly fun.” He hesitated. He remembered not knowing who they were or where he was, so maybe— “I might’ve asked about Vlad Masters. He was a real pain back then.”

He was still a pain now, sometimes, but Jazz—with the help of Tucker, Valerie, and Sam—had dug up enough on him to blackmail him into getting therapy, which had helped. A lot. The fact that Jazz had gifted some modified Fenton tech—smaller, more inconspicuous versions of the Spectre Deflector in a variety of wearable tech designs—to each person she could think of before coming to Vlad with her allegations was likely the only reason she’d been successful, though.

That’s not to say his parents hadn’t tried to cut Vlad off once they’d found out everything—his mom had even threatened to file a restraining order—but sometimes, the best way to beat someone was at their own game.

And, honestly, Vlad working through his issues after all those years he’d spent alone being bitter and jealous and resentful had made a marked difference. He could still be an egotistical jerk, but he was less of a creep. Danny had even agreed to learn a few things from him perfectly willingly a time or two, something he’d have never considered while Vlad was still on his ‘renounce your oaf of a father, be my son, and convince your mother to marry me’ schtick.

He had not realized how much sleep he’d been losing dealing with Vlad alone until it had quieted down.

“I knew it was you,” Mabel said as her elbow dug into Dipper’s side. He yelped and scowled at her as he rubbed at the spot, but he shot a relieved smile in Danny’s direction soon enough.

“Glad to hear you’re not dead, kid,” Wendy said with a growing smirk as Danny side-eyed her at the nickname. “Catch up with the twins if you want, but if you’re hanging around, you can stay on that wanting to be helpful kick and help us get things ready for the reopening.” She pointed towards the old toolshed, which looked like the most pristine thing in the entire area. “Grab what you need out of there.”

She turned to resume her work, and Danny’s eyes wandered over the twins and back to Stan, who was still sitting on the steps but had now been joined by the two who’d been on the roof.

It was Stan’s brother who’d been with Soos, Danny realized.

The guy wasn’t a clone or a doppelgänger from another universe, for all that he and Stan looked similar enough to be confused as such; he was Stan’s long-lost twin. Sixer. The author of the journals.

“You won after all, huh?” Danny murmured as he looked down at his friends.

The younger set of Pines twins exchanged glances. “Kinda,” Mabel whispered. The exuberance had drained from her voice and face, and she hugged herself. “Your warning helped, but….”

But it hadn’t been enough, not on its own.

“It was rough.” Dipper’s voice was flatter than Mabel’s. His hand found Mabel’s before he added, “We got through it, but it’s hard to know if it’s…. If it’s really over. Bill could bend reality, possess people— What if he finds a way back? What if we didn’t really stop him?”

Danny frowned. “Is he a ghost? Bill?” Possession was definitely a ghost thing, and reality-bending certainly wasn’t out of the picture, but if this was all about a ghost—

“He is the most powerful and dangerous creature I’ve ever encountered.”

The answer came from Sixer, and Danny wanted to blame the weirdness of this place for the fact that he’d completely missed the man’s approach. Soos had sat down on the steps with Stan, telling him something in a low murmur that Danny couldn’t make out. Danny wasn’t surprised he’d missed that movement, but the completely silent approach—

“Stanford Pines,” the man said, stretching out his hand. Danny realized he was staring at the six fingers and mentally berated himself for that as he reached out his own hand. “You can call me Ford.”

“Danny Fenton.”

Ford’s grip was strong, like Jack’s always was.

“You’re the one who convinced Stan to talk.”

Danny smirked. “I might’ve spilled the beans on my own if he hadn’t started coughing up some answers.”

“Why?”

Danny didn’t realize until that moment that this was an interrogation, but from the looks Mabel and Dipper were giving him, they weren’t about to interfere. A quick glance in Wendy’s direction convinced Danny she was listening, too, if the slight tilt of her head and the slowness of her work were anything to go by. Maybe they weren’t as accepting about his showing up again as he’d thought they’d be.

Maybe they thought they couldn’t afford to take the risk of being so trusting, after everything.

This was Gravity Falls.

“I thought it would help things go better than they did.”

Ford raised an eyebrow.

Okay, so maybe that hadn’t been his motivation for it from the start, but it was still true enough. That had clearly been Clockwork’s reasoning, and now that he could remember making the deal with Clockwork in the first place, Danny knew that had been the main reason he’d agreed.

The insurance of the memory gun had been nice, even now that he knew the effects could wear off under the right conditions. There was no denying that. Still, a major motivating factor was the very real possibility—read: threat—of things here going poorly and becoming his problem once it had spread and was therefore much more difficult to deal with without a lot of casualties. Clockwork hadn’t given details when Danny had asked, because he was Clockwork, but anything that was worse than the last future Danny had seen wasn’t one he wanted to come to fruition.

“One of my allies— I mean, one of the ghosts I know—” Danny broke off. He didn’t mind filling in Ford—if he wasn’t trusted by the others, that would have been obvious by now, and Danny felt he owed them something of an explanation—and he had a vague recollection of Clockwork telling him his secret might get out anyway. This had to have been what he’d meant, right? “Maybe I should back up. How much do you know about me?”

“Pretend I’ve been living in different dimensions for the past thirty years.”

Oh. Right.

Danny gave Ford the quick version—probably the gist of what he’d told Mabel and Dipper last time—and asked a few questions of his own. Curious as he was whether Ford had ever wound up in the Ghost Zone before there had been a stable portal to their world, this Bill character was the more pressing concern. Mabel broke off to go back to sit with Stan and Soos when Danny turned the conversation in Bill’s direction, and that told him as much about what had happened as anything else.

Still, from what they were saying— “I take it the thermos didn’t help?”

“Thermos?” Ford repeated, glancing at Dipper.

“We tried it after he possessed me,” Dipper said as Danny spluttered out a what?, “but it didn’t hold him forever. He got out somehow.”

The same way the Box Ghost always did, maybe? Danny still hadn’t figured that out. No circular container could hold him, yada yada yada, but despite looking into it—with the help of his parents after telling them everything—he was at a loss for how the Box Ghost managed to do something none of the other ghosts could.

“And it didn’t seem to be affected during Weirdmaggedon,” continued Dipper, as if Danny had a clue what he was talking about, “but when we tried to cram too many demons and stuff into it, they burst through the metal.”

Oh.

Comforting.

So that was a thing.

He should ask Clockwork how that other thermos of theirs was doing. He didn’t want to have to deal with his evil future self again if he could avoid it.

“Okay, just— Hold on a sec. You were possessed? Like, possessed possessed?”

“Like not in my body while he wore it like a meat suit possessed,” Dipper deadpanned.

That was what Sidney had done to him the first time. Displaced him, not overshadowed him. Danny’s control over his powers might not have been great at that point, but he’d still had them and been terrified. Dipper wouldn’t even have had that edge.

How come Clockwork’s so-called best versions of events—or at least the ones that weren’t as bad as the others—included Dipper getting possessed by someone (something?) his grunkle thought was the most dangerous being he’d ever run into? Why was there no version where that didn’t happen? Danny was not convinced the world would have ended if he’d been able to ship Dipper a modified Spectre Deflector.

That settled it. Danny was going to have words with Clockwork when he got back.

It wouldn’t change anything, but it would make him feel better.

“And Weirdmaggedon—?”

Weirdmaggedon had been exactly what it sounded like and, as far as Danny could tell, pretty much the result Clockwork had hinted at. They’d made an interdimensional portal, just like his parents had, and released more than they’d bargained for—just like his parents had.

It had also come to an end yesterday, which in Danny’s opinion was fairly damning evidence that Clockwork had been onto him the whole time, pulling strings Danny hadn’t ever been aware of to keep him away from here.

So why had he finally stopped pulling strings?

Danny was sure he was where he needed to be right now: here, even if he was much later than he’d wanted. He still clearly remembered how adamant Clockwork had been that Danny hadn’t been dropped in here to blatantly interfere—that is, help in some concrete fashion that constituted real helping—because he figured these guys could handle the situation, even if whatever Danny had done would help them get up to speed faster.

Handle it they had, apparently, even if it had gone off worse than it should have.

So if he hadn’t been drafted to do anything about that—if he genuinely couldn’t have helped—then why go through all that in the first place? Clockwork could have achieved something incredibly similar by freezing time for thirty seconds, finding that passage he’d written in the journal, and leaving it open where Stan could see it when Dipper and Mabel were around. Whatever he’d tried to say, he hadn’t needed Danny. Danny’s presence hardly counted as minimal interference alongside that, and it would’ve been easier for Clockwork to achieve.

Crud, what had Clockwork told him when he’d gotten here the first time? Why couldn’t he remember? It might’ve been important, in that roundabout way Clockwork sometimes said important stuff without seeming to say it. (Really, now that Danny had gotten to know him better, he figured Clockwork played it straight about fifty percent of the time, and most of that was under the watchful eye of the Observants. Or maybe these Time Police people, since Danny had no doubt that Clockwork knew about them.)

Maybe Danny hadn’t been able to keep his word to his friends about coming right back, and maybe he hadn’t helped as much as he’d wanted to back then, but he was back now, and he could help now.

He knew what it was like to use humour as a coping mechanism, to build a shield out of sarcasm and spears out of bad puns.

He remembered avoiding stuff and leaving as quickly as he could once an uncomfortable topic came up—and not always because such topics were sometimes accompanied by prototypes that had successfully locked onto him as a ghost.

He still picked something to focus on sometimes when he needed a distraction from the reality of a situation gone from bad to worse. He’d often thrown himself fully into a situation in an effort to help even if he should have first stopped to think things through more so he didn’t put himself at as much risk. He’d taken arguably stupid risks when they’d had a big reward because he’d been betting that he’d get through it more or less intact, especially when doing so had meant helping someone he cared about.

When it came down to it, he understood—essentially—where these guys were coming from.

He wasn’t that different.

And that, at least, was something he did remember Clockwork making a point about.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help,” he said. “I wish I could have been.”

The sentiment was true, and the words were certainly not something he’d utter lightly, even if this wasn’t Amity Park.

Dipper shrugged and looked down at his feet. “It’s okay. You got home like you wanted, right?”

“Yeah, but—” Excuses weren’t something they needed to hear right now. He glanced at Ford and saw understanding in his eyes, not condemnation, so that was something at least. Of course, Ford hadn’t met him until now, so he was hardly the first person Danny needed real understanding from to feel better about this whole thing. “Maybe I can help now, if you’ll let me?”

Dipper made no show of hiding the confusion on his face when he looked up at Danny. “Help how?”

“For starters, I can listen if you ever need to talk. I know what it’s like to watch someone else control your body. But I can also help you learn how to stop that so it never happens again.” He hesitated. “I’d need to know more details about your possession, but if you’re willing to share them, I’m sure I can find a way to make sure he can never get inside your head again. Or anyone else, either.”

“Without surgery?”

The question came from Ford, and Danny raised an eyebrow. That seemed too far out of left field to not be relevant in some way he didn’t understand. “Yeah, without surgery. If it’s not something that can be dealt with in a mind over matter way by strengthening your will and resisting so strongly that you don’t consciously know you’re resisting—which is a thing so don’t tell me it’s not; my dad’s done that for ages—then it’s just a matter of modifying one of my parents’ original inventions.”

“Your parents are inventors?”

Danny nodded. “And paranormal scientists with a focus on ghosts, meaning I wasn’t entirely surprised when I found a secret lab in the basement last time I was here. That’s kinda where I expect labs to be, even if they aren’t secret.”

“I wonder if I’ve seen any of their work.”

“You might’ve, but they haven’t published for a while, just filed for patents. I can tell you more about them later.” Danny looked back at Dipper. “Meeting them might not be a bad idea, though, especially if you want to think about doing an internship with them in a few years. Well, with me, but I work with them—”

“An internship?” Dipper repeated.

Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Like, a summer job if you want to do something while you’re in high school, or a gap year if you want some money for college, or something for course credit if you’re in college. I could make it happen if you’re interested. You or Mabel or both of you.”

Dipper blinked and stole a glance at Ford before facing Danny again. “You’re— You’re offering to be my mentor?”

Was he?

He was, wasn’t he?

He could do for the Pines twins what Vlad had never been able to do for him, though not for lack of trying.

That was it. That was the point of this entire thing. He was sure of it. Clockwork had gotten him exactly where he thought Danny needed to be and left Danny to his own devices long enough to do what Clockwork had planned all along.

Danny couldn’t even be mad at him. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world; Dipper and Mabel were good kids, and they could use some guidance when it came to arming themselves against possession. If nothing else, learning how to modify something to help them in a tight situation would undoubtedly serve them well.

Besides, if doing this prevented something worse than this Weirdmaggedon thing from happening? Or prevented it from happening again where it could spread beyond the boundaries of Gravity Falls? Danny would do whatever he could to stop that.

And from the little he’d heard of this Bill Cipher character, he wasn’t convinced that it was the end.

Not forever.

Not if there was any possible way for Bill to free himself or claw his way back to this reality or whatever could happen if things went sideways again.

“I want to do some digging before you agree to anything, but I suspect you could do worse,” Ford said quietly as he reached over to put a hand on Dipper’s shoulder. “Stan’s well on his way to recovering all his memories, but we’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.”

“Recov—” Danny stopped as his mind processed what Ford had said.

He didn’t need to ask, not really.

He could guess.

Gravity Falls was where Clockwork had gotten that memory-erasing gun.

“Come on, you can meet him again,” Dipper said, turning to lead the way back to Stan. With Ford following behind them and Stan watching them come, it was hard not to feel penned in.

Danny offered them a smile as he got closer. “Um, hi, I’m—”

“—the messenger boy,” Stan said. His voice didn’t hold any malice, and thankfully he didn’t sound like he was ready to toss Danny off his property for not giving them a proper warning about all of this. Of course, Danny wasn’t entirely sure how much had Stan remembered and how much Mabel and Soos had filled him in before Danny had walked over here. “Yeah, I remember you. You’re late.”

You’re late was infinitely better than you’re too late, even if Danny knew the latter was true.

“But I’m here to help now,” Danny said quickly, “if you’ll take my help?” He included Soos in his look, thinking the man had as much right to weigh in on that decision as the rest of them.

Soos’s answer was a small smile that Danny took as forgiveness for bailing on them, even if he wasn’t sure Soos really meant it that way. Stan’s counter was more to point. “How can you help?”

“Well.” Danny glanced over his shoulder at Wendy, who had given up the pretense of not eavesdropping and was watching them with crossed arms. “I’m a lot better at fixing stuff than I used to be. Why don’t I start with helping you get everything ready for the reopening?”

“I’ll find you some tools,” Soos said as Stan grunted something that must have been an affirmative. At least, no one argued with Soos, which meant no one was arguing with Danny.

It wasn’t the help he’d imagined he’d give. Acting as a sort of mentor to two (soon-to-be?) teens who’d been caught up in something much bigger than they could’ve anticipated hadn’t been on his bucket list, either, but this felt right. It may have come about as a result of Clockwork’s meddling, but Danny couldn’t bring himself to mind. It didn’t feel like Clockwork was making him do something anymore. This was his choice, and he was deciding to help his friends however he could.

Clockwork had once asked him if he thought he’d only helped one person—or at least influenced only one person’s path. Something like that. Either way, Danny hadn’t entirely understood what he’d meant at the time.

He did now.

Catching up with each other might take time, and it might be a slower rebuilding of friendship with them than it would have been had he gotten here earlier, but they’d get there eventually.

After Soos walked down the steps, Mabel pushed the toolbox farther away and scooted closer to Stan before patting the steps beside her. Dipper claimed a spot at Stan’s feet, so Danny sat where Mabel indicated.

Mabel slipped her hand into his and squeezed it. “I’m glad you’re back,” she whispered. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I’m glad I’m back, too.” He wanted to echo her sentiment that he was glad they were okay, but he wasn’t sure they were. Not yet. Not completely.

He’d make sure they would be, though.

Somehow.

No matter how long it took.

-|-

“Drinks are in the cooler,” Wendy said with a nod towards it. “Help yourself.”

Danny was already holding a thermos, but it found a new home on the ground when Dipper came back with three cans of pop.

No one mentioned it, and Danny never opened it, but Stan didn’t miss Soos raising his eyebrows in Wendy’s direction, nor her answering shrug.

Soos was no stranger to being unsettled and rolling with it, either, so Stan wasn’t surprised when he took it in stride. “Who wants marshmallows?” Soos asked the group less than a minute later, holding out an open bag with one hand and the campfire forks, handle first, with the other.

“Me!” Mabel exclaimed, closely followed by Dipper. Danny dragged his feet, moving considerably slower than the other two, though he still accepted a campfire fork and a marshmallow from Soos with a murmur of thanks. He shot Stan a questioning look as he headed back to his seat but mercifully kept his mouth shut. Good. They could talk later.

(Later wasn’t going to be over supper; later was going to be when Wendy and Soos had gone home and the kids were in bed. If Danny had any sense in his head at all, he’d realize that.)

As the kids started debating the merits of a perfect golden brown versus a crisp, blackened outer crust when it came to the ideal roasted marshmallow, Stan settled down on one of the logs to watch. The wind was in their favour at the moment, whisking the smoke away from the seats, although Stan knew—they all knew—how quickly that could change.

The kids didn’t know why that change happened so quickly around these parts, and he suspected that neither Wendy nor Soos knew the details even if they suspected that it was more than just the usual atmospheric quirks, but that was just as well.

Knowing everything that lived in the woods wasn’t exactly conducive to wanting to stay out here.

It wasn’t particularly safe, either, unless you knew how to handle yourself.

Ignorance was sometimes all the protection you needed, so he hadn’t been overly worried about the kids at first, but if they had the journal—

No. He couldn’t worry about that yet. If Danny didn’t at least have a plan for getting it by tonight, Stan would take the first opportunity to look into it that presented itself. He pretended not to believe in any of this—something Soos and Wendy clearly believed, meaning he’d played his part well; their veiled ‘protect the Shack from spirits’ plan would barely cost him till it started making him money and they could afford to up the ante—and when he did see the journal, he fully intended to keep his true emotions off his face.

He could pretend it was nothing more than fanciful folktales, that the shining golden hand on the front wasn’t an aching reminder of Sixer.

Stan accepted a fork from Wendy that had already speared a hot dog just as Dipper’s marshmallow caught fire. Mabel smirked and licked goo and ash from her fingers as Dipper frantically blew out the flames. Danny, with a not very subtle glance toward Wendy, offered to swap with Dipper; his marshmallow was the only one that hadn’t been incinerated. Dipper accepted, and both kids looked happy with the outcome.

Stan watched all this with a hint of a smile fixed on his face, the usual expression he wore when he was genuinely proud of the kids and trying not to show it.

He was proud of them. If they had the third journal and had managed to keep it from him, not to mention all the messes they must have gotten into because of it (and who they were), then they had some good heads on their shoulders.

He was also afraid for them, mostly because he knew they didn’t know the half of it.

Danny might’ve been fed some cock and bull story of what was in store for them. It could all be a setup for something he couldn’t see yet, maybe even something Danny didn’t know was coming. Alternatively, the warning might be genuine, as the kid believed. Being genuine didn’t make it not manipulative, though. Still, Stan wasn’t going to give up what had become his life’s work on that account. If something bad happened, he’d deal with it and keep going.

Like Ford would, if their situation were reversed.

Stan held his supper just above the licking flames, rotating it slowly while the kids attacked the package of hot dogs and readied their own meals. Beside him, Soos was cooking his a little lower, letting it bubble and blacken before turning it. Wendy had yet to start anything for herself, even though there were enough forks for it.

She was frowning at Danny and casting worried glances at Soos. Soos gave her a small nod of acknowledgement when he noticed but said nothing, and Wendy retreated past the ring of seats, saying something about the smoke getting in her eyes. Stan saw Danny’s eyes flick to her before he gave a visible shrug and laughed at one of Mabel’s jokes.

Whatever Wendy—and Soos, no doubt—had tried to do, it hadn’t worked.

Stan leaned forward slightly, just enough to let the heat of the fire bake into him and drive away the stab of coldness that flash of missing Sixer had brought. They had had more failed schemes than successful ones, even with Ford’s brilliance. Stan himself was at the root of too many of those failures, but he wouldn’t fail now, he couldn’t, no matter what some supposedly omnipotent smartass thought and had sent Danny here to accomplish.

“—so many people are afraid of the dark,” Dipper was saying, and Stan realized he’d been a fool not to pay more attention to their conversation.

“Well, I think it’s still sensible sometimes,” Danny said. “I mean, there could be living shadows. Not, like, living living, but conscious and able to move and masquerade as normal shadows, only darker, so…. Yeah.”

Stan started humming to himself, a little ditty that had been one of Ford’s favourites, and pretended he was ignoring the conversation entirely—and that he was completely oblivious to the sidelong glances he was getting from everyone but Danny.

“Is there anything like that in your book?”

It wasn’t the opening Stan had expected. He’d figured Danny would go with more subterfuge. Instead, he’d been about as subtle as a hammer.

“What book?” Dipper’s voice was noticeably higher than normal, and Mabel was frantically slicing a hand across her throat in between shooting Stan worried glances he pretended not to see, keeping his eyes on the hot dog he was roasting.

“The journal.” Danny sounded exasperated, and no wonder. He wouldn’t know that Dipper hadn’t told Stan about it yet.

“Can we talk about this later?” Dipper hissed in a loud whisper, and Stan risked another peek over at them to see the frown etched on Danny’s face.

“Why? It’s easily still light enough to see. C’mon, give it here.”

Stan just rotated the stick, letting the hot dog dip a little farther into the flames, and pointedly did not look up, even though he could still see the desperate look Dipper shot Mabel.

She shrugged.

Dipper groaned, but then he reached into his vest and pulled out the journal. Stan would recognize it anywhere, even if this was the first time he could recall seeing that particular book. A few distinct scuffs on the cover, a little less wear from years of repeated reading, and a different number emblazoned on the front— It was obviously a different book, but it was also entirely too much like the first journal to think it might be anything else but another piece of the puzzle.

He'd been looking for thirty years, and Dipper must have found it in less than thirty days.

Stan had no idea if that was coincidental or not. Given Danny’s presence, he was leaning towards not. Whoever was pulling those strings might have been very happy to interfere in more than one way he hadn’t noticed, which meant he wasn’t about to rule anything out.

“Okay,” Dipper said, glancing over at Wendy and Soos, “there’s, um, something I haven’t been telling you guys.” Now, he looked across the fire. “Grunkle Stan?”

Stan looked up, raising his eyebrows at the book and now ignoring the look of confusion on Danny’s face.

“Yeah, kid?”

“I found this book,” Dipper started, and out came more of the story than Stan had been able to piece together for himself.

-|-

The old guy was still putting on a show, and Danny didn’t get it. Dipper clearly didn’t think Stan had known about the journal before, but he must’ve. He had one just like it in the basement lab! Besides, he’d talked about saving some guy named Sixer, and Danny—who had had his fair share of nicknames—was willing to put money on the fact that Sixer was this author. Or at least knew the author. Like Stan probably did.

The hand on the cover had six fingers. That could not be a coincidence.

Except Stan was acting like it was, and Danny hadn’t known enough about Sixer to want to say anything to Dipper, who would immediately demand answers he couldn’t give, but Stan—

“Go on, show it to him,” Danny said when Dipper finally paused for breath and Mabel didn’t immediately start telling her side of things like she had before. He was pretty sure they were telling a heavily edited version of how they’d found the journal and some (Danny really doubted it was all) of the things they’d gotten up to since, and that was fine. Danny didn’t need to know all the details, and Stan would find the rest out eventually if he needed to know them.

But it sounded like Dipper and Mabel were making up a story, and they weren’t doing a whole lot to not make it sound that way. He wasn’t convinced the only lake monster they’d encountered had been mechanical or that they’d been wrong about vampires lurking in the woods and whatever else. He knew there was some accurate information in that book, and he knew there was some truth in their tale, but someone who didn’t know about any of this probably wouldn’t believe them about any of it.

Just like someone from outside of Amity Park wasn’t likely to believe him about all the ghosts.

If he were walking into a situation where he thought he might be faced with heavy skepticism, he’d edit his story, too. If people thought you were nuts, they’d never believe you, not without proof. But it wasn’t like Dipper and Mabel didn’t have proof. Heck, even if Stan hadn’t had the other journal, the fact that not everything within the Mystery Shack was fake was proof enough, and Danny didn’t even need any weird feelings to know that.

Dipper had shoved the last of his second hotdog into his mouth, so Danny wasn’t surprised he wasn’t answering right away. Everyone had cooked and eaten their meals over the course of the story, but Dipper had done the most talking, even considering Mabel’s additions. Still, Mabel hadn’t gone for the package of marshmallows afterwards like Danny had expected, and she wasn’t jumping in now like he’d thought she would, either. He’d honestly thought she would regardless of whether or not her mouth was full.

“You know,” Danny prompted as Dipper swallowed, “the journal, the weird code, everything.”

Dipper frowned. “I am showing them the journal.”

“You haven’t opened it!”

“It’s okay, kiddos,” Stan interrupted. “I can borrow this tonight and get some nice bedtime stories out of it. Have a few laughs. You wouldn’t mind? I’ll give it back to you in the morning.”

Danny knew he was staring, but he was hardly concerned about being polite (or inconspicuous) right now.

Dipper bit his lip but got up to hand the journal to Stan when Mabel reached around Danny to nudge him.

“You can’t be serious,” Danny said, because that was repeating itself enough in his mind that he had to say it out loud. He could see Stan not wanting to tell them about the portal, but why was he acting like—?

“He’s not,” Wendy said, and Danny jerked around to look at her. “Stan might be Mr. Mystery, but that doesn’t mean he actually believes in any of this stuff.”

She said it with an easy smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and Danny was frankly glad she didn’t have her hands on the journal, since it was altogether too likely she’d try something on him before he could explain himself.

Stan shot Danny what was very clearly a warning look before the mask of harmless old guy was back.

Danny didn’t care.

Look, Danny understood the importance of keeping secrets. He understood the importance of keeping secrets from people you care about. But, hypocritical though it surely was, when the situation wasn’t about him and his secrets, he could see things a lot more clearly.

“Sure he does,” Danny said before he could change his mind.

The fire popped in the sudden silence.

“I’m not sure—” started Stan, but Danny cut him off. It was too late to turn back now anyway.

“We don’t need to pretend,” he said. “You all know I’m not a normal kid, and I’ve been here long enough to know that there’s no way I’m going to convince you of that. Trying to do that just keeps backfiring on me anyway. So. Yes, the supernatural exists—”

“Not here,” Soos whispered, and it was confusing enough for Danny to stop because, yes, here, in Gravity Falls, that was his point, that was the whole—

Wait.

Soos was looking at the trees.

So was Wendy.

Even Stan wasn’t keeping his eyes trained on Danny; they kept flicking away to the forest and roving over the little that was illuminated by the firelight.

Speaking of which.

It had not been this dark a moment ago.

How quickly did the sun set here? Had Dipper really talked for longer than Danny had realized, or was it just a quirk of this place—or whatever lived in the forest?

Danny swallowed. “Maybe we should move this inside?” he guessed.

“We should send you packing,” Wendy muttered, barely loudly enough for Danny to make out her words, but he still winced.

If she’d said it any louder, Stan might’ve agreed, even though he knew more about Danny’s situation than even the twins did.

“Let’s do this in the living room,” Stan said. “If you’re going to talk, I want a comfy chair.”

He hadn’t denied what Danny had said, but he hadn’t confirmed it, either, and that had everyone else exchanging glances. If Danny hadn’t seen the portal in the basement, he might wonder how much Stan was just humouring them, too.

“We’ll join you when this is out,” Wendy said as she picked up a shovel that had been resting against a tree near the campfire forks. Soos, too, reached behind him and produced a bucket of water that Danny hadn’t noticed earlier.

He thought about offering to put out the fire with his ice powers and then decided that wouldn’t help his case. It was probably best he didn’t do anything particularly weird while Wendy had a shovel—especially when Soos had a pail of water that might have been drawn from the same source as the water in the water gun from Stan’s secret lab. Danny could do without getting soaked and taking a shovel to the head right now just because these guys had found something that could mess with his intangibility.

Stan led the way back to the Mystery Shack, still clutching Dipper’s book and doing a phenomenal job of keeping his true thoughts hidden. Mabel and Dipper trailed after him, whispering furiously to each other and not hiding their emotions at all. Danny started to follow them with his thermos in hand, hesitated at the hiss of water meeting flame behind him, and glanced over his shoulder to see Wendy and Soos stirring the ashes.

“I wasn’t lying before, you know,” he said when Wendy noticed. She stopped long enough to draw Soos’s attention, and then they were both watching him—and the woods around them, which was almost enough to have his skin crawling, even though he knew there weren’t any other ghosts around.

Clearly, in Gravity Falls, ghosts weren’t the only things people needed to worry about.

Wendy raised her eyebrows in a silent prompt, so Danny continued, “I’m not a threat to you guys.”

“Just because you don’t mean to be,” Wendy countered, “doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

Soos gave him a sympathetic look at that but didn’t say anything, so Danny turned away.

He couldn’t argue with Wendy’s words when he knew they might be true.

-|-

Dipper didn’t know what Danny thought he was talking about.

That’s not to say Dipper didn’t try asking Danny once he caught up to them; he did. Danny only shook his head, though he seemed a little jumpy himself when he followed them into the living room, glancing around far more than anyone had been at the firepit.

Maybe whatever made him uncomfortable about being here was stronger inside than outside.

Dipper could ask, but it wasn’t like he’d get an answer. Right now, he wasn’t inclined to think Danny would straight up answer any of his questions, not until he’d said whatever it was he wanted to say. Dipper decided that, however hard it was, he was going to bite his tongue until he’d heard Danny out.

He’d try, at least.

Stan settled on the chair and kept the journal—closed and face down—on his lap. Mabel and Dipper sat at his feet so they could lean back against the chair, but Danny hovered (not literally) by the dinosaur skull and had set his thermos on top of it. Wendy and Soos came in a couple of minutes later, each carrying a chair from the kitchen.

Wendy tossed the opened bag of marshmallows to Mabel, who caught it and smiled. She grabbed one and took a bite out of it before offering the bag to Danny, who shook his head. The bag settled at Stan’s feet, and Dipper reached for one even though he wasn’t sure he wanted it anymore.

Holding a marshmallow would give him something to do.

Even his free hand was jittering, drumming a wild tattoo against his knee, and he debated grabbing a second marshmallow to give it something to do, too. Mabel had done that, though he wasn’t sure if that was because she was uneasy or because she’d wanted two marshmallows.

Dipper nibbled on his as Soos and Wendy got settled.

Mabel reached for a third, even though her second was only half eaten.

“Okay,” Danny said, “um, you’ve all noticed, or you know, that I’m not…normal.”

“Normal is subjective,” Soos said as he leaned forward to get a marshmallow from Mabel.

“Yeah, but I’m…. I’m way less normal than I used to be, by everyone’s standards. I got into an accident and came out of it with ghost powers.”

Stan hummed a note that might have been amusement.

Danny turned to look at him. “If I stick my hand through the wall, will you stop pretending? I can— Ow!” Danny, who had tried to do just that and ended up scraping his knuckles against the wood, shook out his left hand and cursed under his breath. “I forgot you guys did something to the house.”

“That was Dipper,” Mabel said cheerfully around her mouthful of marshmallow.

“More proof some stuff in that book works, I guess,” Danny said. He glanced back at Wendy and Soos. “Um, you two are willing to roll with me on this, right? I saw the box of salt, and that doesn’t do anything to me.”

“We noticed,” Wendy said flatly at the same time as Soos assured Danny they wouldn’t try to do anything if he didn’t.

Danny didn’t look entirely comforted, but he nodded. He turned back to Stan, his face settling into a sort of grimness Dipper didn’t entirely understand. “I know what it’s like to pretend, even if I don’t have to pretend around everyone like you do.”

Stan snorted.

“Look. I get keeping secrets from people to try to protect them. That’s, like, my life. But what you’re doing….” Danny hesitated.

“I’m trying to run a business, kid.” Stan slapped the journal, a solid thump that made Dipper jump. “If this thing has some ideas that might spruce up the place for tourists, I’m all in.”

Danny shook his head. “No, you don’t get to do this anymore. Even if you don’t tell them everything, they need to know something, and that something starts with the fact that you know perfectly well what this place is like.”

“It’s Gravity Falls. You can’t live here for any amount of time and not know what it’s like.”

Dipper blinked and saw Mabel shoot him a startled glance. Wendy opened her mouth, but Stan continued before she got a word in. “Back end of nowhere place like this? It’s not the only place I’ve been that’s got this, you know, this vibe to it. Makes it a good place to set up something like the Mystery Shack.”

Danny growled and grabbed the journal from Stan, pulling it right out of—right through?—his hands. Dipper didn’t need to look to know that Danny was flipping to the page Dipper had shown him earlier, the one with the writing in the strange code. He held the book open for all of them to see, tapped the green ink, and said, “Do you know what this says?”

Dipper craned his head around to look at Stan’s face.

It wasn’t the mask of confusion he’d expected.

There was still confusion, but there was also…surprise? Sadness? Regret? Realization?

Dipper didn’t understand, and from what he could see of everyone else’s expressions, they didn’t, either—except Danny, who still looked stubbornly determined and more than a little bit frustrated.

Stan reached for the book, and Danny let it go with a muttered, “Finally.”

“I haven’t used this since I was a kid,” Stan murmured as his fingers traced over the unintelligible words, and Dipper’s world tilted as the implications hit him.

“However,” continued McGonagall, “I suspect there was a very good reason these odd things happened even before you were successful in building this portal. Miss Fenton, as strange as this may sound, particularly given the, ah, scientific upbringing you seem to have had, you are in fact a witch, and much of what you have seen can be explained by accidental magic.”

Jazz blinked.

Whatever she’d expected when this conversation had started, it had certainly not been that.

“Are you sure?” she asked before she could think about her words. “What if it’s not me? What if it’s…someone else?” Danny had tensed beside her, and she was very pointedly not looking at him.

“I understand your disbelief, but I can assure you, we are not mistaken.” She held out a folded letter on thick parchment, and as Jazz cracked the seal and stared at letter inside, trying to make sense of the words, she continued, “I would like to offer you a place at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on a partial scholarship. We would cover half the cost of basic school supplies as well as your travel expenses to and from the school in September and June. You would need to cover the cost of travelling home for the holidays should you choose not to stay at the school over the break.”

“You’re offering her a scholarship?” Maddie whispered, exchanging a look with Jack. He’d paled at the mention of magic and had begun eating his cookie more slowly than Jazz had ever seen him do, considering it was usually gone in one or two bites. Now, it looked as if he were listening as intently as Maddie.

“It is an acknowledgement of the cost of international schooling as well as a bit of honey to sweeten the pot, I confess. Still, I daresay the fact that Miss Fenton’s name appeared on our rolls rather than those of Ilvermorny’s is further proof that she belongs at Hogwarts.” Perhaps catching Jazz’s expression, McGonagall elaborated, “Traditionally, you would attend a school of magic in North America—either Ilvermorny itself or one of its satellite campuses. While it’s certainly possible for students to venture further afield than the school nearest them, it is admittedly a rare thing.”

“And, what, because Jazz’s name never showed up somewhere for this Ilvermorny place, that means their magic isn’t as good or something?”

Jazz elbowed Danny, not liking the challenge in his tone when she wasn’t sure of this situation. It was far too early to be that combative! It was easier to accept that magic was real than that she herself had it; she knew enough ghosts to believe that magic wasn’t something that manifested in death alone. She herself, though? She thought of herself as positively ordinary, especially compared to the rest of the family.

Especially compared to Danny.

Which is why he needed to shut up and listen rather than speak up and challenge.

“I do not make it a habit of speaking ill of other schools of magic,” McGonagall said smoothly, “so no, Mr. Fenton. It is not a case of our enchantments being stronger than theirs. It is a case of where the student will do best. Transfer students are rare, and those cases aside, most schools do not accept those who are not or will not turn eleven within their first year, as it’s been determined to be one of the most effective ages to begin magical education. A good grounding in other subjects has already been established, and the students are young enough yet mature enough to effectively control and develop their magic. It is a skill as much as it is a gift.”

“But Jazz is sixteen,” interrupted Danny. “What do you want with her now?”

McGonagall smiled. “That is, I believe, the reason Miss Fenton would do well with us. Her situation is unique, and our coming year will be unique as well. She would have an easier transition to the Wizarding World through Hogwarts than she would at Ilvermorny.”

“May I ask why you foresee your coming school year as being, ah, unique?” Maddie asked, an echo of Danny’s suspicions in her voice.

“The last year was a tumultuous one, I’m afraid,” McGonagall admitted quietly. “The Wizarding World itself was at war, and scars do not heal overnight.”

Jazz eyed Danny again as he shifted in his seat, but at least he was biting his tongue as McGonagall explained—about the Wizarding World and the War, about the International Statute of Secrecy, about what being a witch meant. If this whole thing wasn’t a mistake—if she really was a witch, if she really did need to go to some magic school to learn how to control her powers so she didn’t have to fumble through it like Danny had after he’d become Phantom—then she needed to know as much about this world as she could.

-|-

“You’re not going alone,” Danny announced.

Jazz raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t put down her book. Usually, she was the one barging into his room, not the other way around. Still, she didn’t protest when he sat down beside her on her bed. “I haven’t even said I’m going.” She knew exactly what he was talking about, of course. If there were any chance of another topic, she’d have turned a page of her book in the last two hours.

“No, you have to go. If that McGonagall person is right, you’re safer if you go.”

“This isn’t your decision.”

“Technically, it’s not yours, either. It’s Mom and Dad’s. But they trust your judgement, so chances are good they’ll do whatever you want to do. Which is go. Because it’s you, and you’re curious, and you’d never pass up an opportunity like this.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m still not sure I know what I’m going to do.”

Danny snorted. “Actually, we both know what you’re going to do. But what you don’t know is what I’m going to do, which is come with you.”

Jazz blinked. “What?”

“I don’t trust these people. Them being interested in you now? That’s weird. Even you have to admit it’s weird. Even if you think living in Amity Park is somehow messing with their magic system like McGonagall obviously thought it was, that doesn’t explain why it’s taken this long for someone to find you or discover your magic or whatever—especially if any interference that actually exists is caused by the portal messing with their magic radar stuff. And that’s assuming they’re right about you actually having magic and it not just being a portal thing or an ecto-contamination thing. Mom and Dad are safe because they always wear their HAZMAT suits, but they don’t always change into new ones when they leave the lab, and you’ve worn yours, what, twice? We know ectoplasm causes different reactions in different people.”

Jazz slipped the folded tissue she’d been using as a bookmark back into her book and closed it, setting it aside as she straightened up and rested her back against the headboard. “Yes, I remember being a head in a jar, thank you. But even if you’re right—and I’m not saying you are—what makes you think you could go with me? It’s not like your absence here or your presence there would go unnoticed.”

“I already checked with Sam, and she can forge me a fancy letter like yours.”

“Which wouldn’t be remotely suspicious, considering I got a personal visit and you weren’t mentioned at all.”

“No, you don’t get it. The letter’s not for Mom and Dad. It’d be for there, a fake transfer from this Ilvermorny place, in case I got caught.” Danny blew out a breath, and Jazz decided against telling him that he’d be found out in a heartbeat if he tried that. “Look. This is suspicious, even if you don’t think it’s suspicious because you can explain it away. I’m going to talk to Valerie tonight—she’s bound to come out to meet me if I fly by her apartment—and I’m going to tell her that I’m backing off. Tuck’s gonna fix the lock on the portal again sometime when Mom and Dad are out, so if I can get Vlad to agree to leave stuff alone, we shouldn’t be getting a ghost attack a day or anything like that. I mean, me not even being here will cut down on some of it. If anything, Skulker’ll have to come find me there.”

“You say all this like you’re thinking it through, but aren’t you forgetting that the ghosts are just as likely to attack because you aren’t here?”

Danny smiled. “That’s where Sam and Tucker come in. They’re gonna negotiate. It might be rough at first, but trust me, they’re more than capable of handling this, especially with Valerie watching their backs. And Mom and Dad should be able to handle anything they can’t get to.”

“And if Vlad doesn’t agree to leave stuff alone, since your plan is counting on it?”

Danny’s smile took on a feral edge. “Oh, he’ll agree. In fact, he’ll be the one offering to send me to a prestigious boarding school, and Mom and Dad’ll sign the paperwork without really reading it if he’s the one bringing it up. He wants me away from Mom and Dad to try to convince me he’s better than Dad, remember?”

“You can’t just completely ignore your own schooling. You’re not old enough to drop out.”

“Homeschooling programs are a thing, so if Vlad tries to pull that argument on me, I’ll tell him he can be my tutor since you’ll be too busy with your own stuff. Then I’ll be forced to spend at least a little bit of time with him, which is arguably what he wants. There’s no way he won’t see that as a win-win situation.” Maybe because he saw her open her mouth, he hastened to add, “And if Vlad doesn’t agree and you’re going to be a stick in the mud about my schooling, I can always talk to Clockwork. He can probably swing something for me so I can still keep up with my education without the Observants figuring out what’s going on.”

Jazz sighed. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“Hey, you’re the one who’s going to go running off after you’ve had your world turned upside down. It’s my turn to play the overprotective sibling.”

-|-

Weeks later, Jazz finally admitted that Danny had a point. Not about being suspicious about every single little thing that happened, of course, but that they’d both known what she’d want to do the moment she’d heard about the opportunity. Now that she was at Hogwarts, she couldn’t imagine ever closing the door on this path entirely.

Well, okay. Danny might actually have reason to be as suspicious as he was. She was simply reserving judgement. She’d made too many snap judgements in the past to keep making the same mistake now. Still, she’d seen the toll this War had taken on the Wizarding World even before she’d ever laid eyes on Hogwarts.

She doubted getting overseas without simply jumping on a plane or a ship was ever easy, but the paperwork had not been insignificant, even after Jack and Maddie had agreed that it was best to say their goodbyes on American soil and leave her in the hands of another one of the Hogwarts teachers, Professor Sprout.

Saying the journey that followed via a series of authorized portkeys and eventually floo was tedious was an understatement, especially now that she knew what those things were. She’d nearly lost her lunch twice and her passport once—something she’d insisted on having just in case, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary by Wizarding standards—when she’d landed with a tumble and her backpack had flown open. Professor Sprout had been instrumental when it came to helping her survive the journey and walking her through everything and sorting out the scholarship payment, but it was a lot to keep straight.

Amazing as Diagon Alley was, changing money and getting her school supplies had been more of an exhausting whirlwind than an exciting adventure. By the time she was through (getting her wand had not been a short process, much to her discomfort and Ollivander’s delight), she’d long since missed the train. Professor Sprout had anticipated as much, so she’d taken charge of Jazz’s school supplies, saying she’d arrange for their delivery to Hogwarts, and had sent Jazz ahead to the Leaky Cauldron with a note for the barman and instructions to floo directly to The Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade. Jazz had barely arrived in time to cross the lake with the first years.

The fact that Danny had successfully tagged along without having to travel in a Fenton Thermos, though? Considering how many protective wards they’d passed through? Considering he was still here at Hogwarts with her, despite the muggle-repelling charms that apparently saturated the land? It was a little unsettling, considering how many times she’d been told non-magical people simply wouldn’t see anything and would be prompted to turn away.

On their second night, she’d slipped into an empty classroom shortly before curfew and Danny had changed back to Danny Fenton to try to prove that he wasn’t here—seeing everything she was—just because he was also Phantom. Frankly, she couldn’t see where else his immunity came from if it wasn’t that. She’d given him her wand to make sure she really was the only one with magic, but Danny hadn’t felt anything holding it like she had, no warming of the mahogany or feeling of rightness. All he’d done by waving it was hit her arm; there’d been no shower of sparks, no gust of wind, nothing flying across the room or catching on fire or freezing into a block of ice.

Better than the wand exploding, at least, which she wouldn’t put past happening if Danny had tried casting a spell—especially if he’d tried forcing it to work by using his powers.

These days, she barely saw Danny, even as Phantom. He’d made it a habit of staying invisible unless they were alone even before he’d realized all the other ghosts in the school had heard of him. Granted, she was pretty sure they’d known him more by reputation than by sight; it was quite possible none of them had put it together until her name had been announced at the Sorting Ceremony. Aside from what seemed to be customary greetings, none of them had spoken to her at the time.

That hadn’t come until after she’d eaten her fill and been ready to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

Danny’s whispered warning hadn’t been enough to keep her from jumping when the Fat Friar had caught her after the Welcoming Feast in the Great Hall and extended his welcome to both of them. The next morning, the Grey Lady had helped her find her way when she’d been caught on the wrong staircase, making a point of talking to both Jazz and Danny as she explained the tricks of the castle to them, and then Nearly-Headless Nick had asked to speak with her at lunch and proceeded to warn them which portraits they shouldn’t speak secrets in front of, and then—

Needless to say, it did not take very long for everyone to notice that the school ghosts treated her differently than they did everyone else.

Apparently, it was beyond rare for a ghost to take an interest in the living. This went further than mutual understandings or tentative friendships. The first time Jazz had had a conversation with the Bloody Baron, the entire school had known by lunch. Which meant she wasn’t only the American girl, the exchange student who was little better than a first year in most subjects; she was also rapidly becoming known as the ghost girl, despite her conviction that no witch or wizard in this school had an understanding of what the Fenton name truly meant.

She knew Danny didn’t mind it. He thought her being called the ghost girl was hilarious and consequently teased her at every opportunity. Plus, being immediately welcomed into a group of ghosts without any of them spoiling for a fight—even Peeves had kept Danny’s presence quiet after a few sharp words from the Baron—was a new experience for him, and she was glad he had the opportunity for it.

The joke that he was her ghostly guardian had stuck, though, and she thought he encouraged it.

Not that it mattered as long as it was only whispered among the dead.

At least it wasn’t weird that she had private lessons with all the professors to try to accelerate her education. Apparently, the previous year had been…lacking…compared to the usual high standards held by the school, standards it was clear Headmistress McGonagall intended to reinstate—because she was the headmistress, even if she hadn’t explicitly said as much in Amity Park. From what Jazz understood, few of the classes continued as they once had, with some years being taught together on an accelerated basis as they tried to build upon last year’s shaky foundation and strengthen it before ramping up the amount of material covered.

Two months in, Jazz was already starting to cover second year material in Potions, Herbology, Care of Magical Creatures, History of Magic, and—thanks to growing up with Danny and having him whisper in her ear every night as he double checked her work—Astronomy. (Danny found it fascinating how many of the constellations were the same but simply had different names; she was just grateful the math was familiar.) She had more trouble with Charms, Transfiguration, and the practical side of Defense Against the Dark Arts than she wanted to admit—those classes took more practice than mere memorization of facts or technique—but once she started to get the hang of it, she would be cleared to start Arithmancy.

Granted, Jazz was fairly sure she could take almost anyone her age in hand-to-hand, considering she’d picked up some martial arts from her mom and a fighter’s instinct from helping Danny back in Amity Park, but while Wizarding Duels were apparently a thing, physically sparring was not. She’d made the mistake of asking once when she couldn’t find anything on the noticeboard in the Common Room, and the looks she’d gotten in response…. She hadn’t been trying to hit a sore point, but it had most definitely been taken that way by the pair of boys nearest to her.

At the moment, she was getting up early on the weekends to practice with Danny, an arrangement he made it very clear he didn’t like, as he’d much rather be sleeping, but she wasn’t comfortable skipping curfew if she didn’t have to. (And, as much as Danny tried to argue the point, this was not something she considered absolutely essential, even if she didn’t want to be rusty by the time Christmas holidays rolled around. Sure, her parents had agreed to put their feud aside, but she’d believe it once she saw it. A bit of practice was necessary.)

Still, if she wasn’t studying or doing her homework in the library, she was in private lessons with her professors, shovelling food into her mouth while reading a book during mealtimes, practicing in an empty classroom, or off in a quiet corner of the courtyard or curled up on her bed in her dorm room (where it was far quieter than in the Common Room). In her opinion, she didn’t have time for friends when she had so much to catch up on.

She was sure some of the other kids might have teased her about this if she’d ever bothered to listen—or if Danny hadn’t taken the opportunity to freeze Peeves to the ceiling of the otherwise-empty Charms classroom the first time he’d started to loudly taunt her about it. That had been a nightmare. She’d stuttered out the pathetic excuse of accidental magic when others had come to investigate, but Filch wasn’t the only adult who didn’t believe her, going by their expressions, and that had only started more rumours about her.

In hindsight, she should’ve lied when someone had asked her what kind of wand she had. She’d known unicorn hair was a common enough core; she just hadn’t known that thestral hair wasn’t.

Still.

That debacle had gone better than her first flying class with the current crop of eleven year olds, where Danny had tried to coax her along by getting on the broom with her.

Her broom hadn’t liked that.

Or, more accurately, it hadn’t liked Danny.

She wasn’t sure why, unless the broom had somehow known he was there and that he didn’t belong. In any case, it had bucked them both off, and she’d have broken something if Madam Hooch hadn’t been there to catch her with a spell and an apology, setting her broom aside to be given a second, even more thorough inspection later. Jazz had been sent up to the Hospital Wing for a calming potion and returned the next evening for a private flying lesson. Danny had agreed to stay clear of that one, but he’d caught up to her at the second one and gleefully whispered about the joys of flying before someone else had come within earshot and forced him to back off.

Jazz still felt unsteady on a broom; her flight was never quite as controlled as she’d like. She felt more than a little trepidation every time she climbed on one, remembering that fall, but she could see the thrill of it. The wind whipping through her hair, the rush of adrenaline, the occasional illusion of weightlessness— It wouldn’t be quite the same as what Danny felt—it couldn’t be—but it would be similar enough that she knew why he enjoyed it so much.

Once she got better at it, once she had more time to practice and gain the confidence and skill she needed to be a half-decent flyer, maybe she could borrow one of the school brooms and take long flights over the grounds.

She didn’t practice as much as she should, though.

If she ever needed to fly somewhere in a hurry, Danny could take her faster than she could ever go on a broom by herself.

Maybe Danny had realized her reasoning behind this, as he’d stopped pestering her to practice and left her to her own devices.

Two months, however, was evidently all Danny was content to let her have in peace.

“Jazz.”

She didn’t look up from her Transfiguration essay, her pencil flying across the paper faster than she could write with a quill. Pens were finicky here, however many times Danny had gone off somewhere to get her new ones; they always seemed to run out of ink at the most inopportune times. She still had to use a quill and parchment in class and for exams, but pencils and paper worked well enough for homework, at least once she’d done the measurements to know the required length.

Not that she’d ever been short.

She wasn’t entirely sure all the professors would have agreed to let her use pencil and paper for her homework if the Baron and the Grey Lady hadn’t personally decided to escort her as she’d gone to ask them, though. The Baron’s reputation held sway even with the professors, and no one could match the wit Helena had sharpened over the centuries. Really, Jazz was fortunate in that respect; hers was not a usual case, and allowances had already been made.

“Jazz, seriously, look at me. Everyone’s down at the Halloween Feast. Except the ghosts. We’re supposed to go to Nick’s Deathday Party thing, remember?”

“Just give me five minutes to finish this.”

“That’s what you said ten minutes ago. Skip ahead to the conclusion already.”

“I can’t cut corners.”

“You’ve written ten pages, double-sided. That’s more than enough. Just take a break if you won’t call it good. Breaks are important for your mental health, remember?”

Jazz kept writing…until she suddenly buckled forward, scrambling to catch her falling papers and the pencil she’d dropped in surprise while Danny cackled above her.

“You can’t just turn stuff intangible on me like that,” she grumbled as she popped up with everything in hand. Danny, knowing her all too well, hadn’t stopped turning the table intangible, so she sighed and started to pack everything away. “Anyway, Nick invited you to his Deathday Party, not me. He explicitly said he thought I would enjoy the feast more than that.”

“He was giving you an out because he knew you’d be a party pooper,” countered Danny, “not because he was only inviting me. All the ghosts know we’re a packaged deal.”

“And all the professors know something’s up.”

“Yeah, because you’re on a first name basis with more ghosts than kids, which is on you.” Danny crossed his arms, looking like he was waiting for her to prove him wrong.

“Just because I haven’t gotten close enough to call someone a friend—in part because you’re talking to me half the time and making it seem like I talk to myself, by the way—doesn’t mean I don’t know anyone’s name.”

Danny raised an eyebrow. “Name someone in a different year than you. Heck, name someone in a different House than you.”

“Ginny Weasley,” Jazz said immediately. She’d been mistaken for the other girl a few times—they were about the same height, and from the back, their hair was too similar to be easily differentiated—and while Jazz didn’t exactly know her well, she felt they’d get along if they ever had a moment to exchange more than a few words. The other girl was clever and kind, someone with a sharp tongue and, by reputation, more than enough skill to back up any and all boasts.

Thinking on it, she might not be a bad person to reach out to when it came to trying to make friends. Inter-House friendships were rarer than Jazz had expected, even after the Wizarding War, but she’d seen Ginny hanging out with people outside of Gryffindor, so maybe—

“You’re not at the feast, either?”

Jazz froze in the act of closing her bag. Danny had become invisible again—possibly too late, with his luck—and she didn’t need to touch the table to know it was solid. She slid around it and shouldered her bag, grimacing at the weight and thinking she’d have to work on feather-light charms. “No,” she said as she faced the Ravenclaw girl who’d found them. Jazz had heard her called Loony Lovegood dozens of times, but what was her real name?

“Aren’t you going to go? It’s your first Halloween Feast at Hogwarts.”

Jazz shifted on her feet. “I might try to catch the end of it,” she allowed. “I’m supposed to go to Nick’s Deathday Party.”

Jazz’s response was a hum and a nod, and Jazz hoped that would be it, until— “Both of you?”

“What?” The word was out of Jazz’s mouth before she realized it.

“You and your friend are both going? Were you waiting for him to come before you left so you could go together?”

Crud. She had seen Danny.

Jazz dropped her bag onto the table. She was pretty sure Danny was still around, but he was more than used to playing the silent observer by now.

“I never thought you were talking to yourself or hearing voices, you know. Lots of people thought you might be, but most people don’t appreciate that there are some things others can’t see. You wouldn’t believe how many people still don’t believe in wrackspurts.”

Despite all her studying, Jazz had no idea what a wrackspurt was. “Right. Um, thanks. I’m Jazz, by the way.”

“Luna,” the girl said, shaking Jazz’s proffered hand, “but some people call me Loony.”

“They shouldn’t,” Jazz said. “You’re…. You’re right.” She glanced in the direction Danny had been and made her decision. “I’ve never been talking to myself. Luna, this is Phantom.”

When Danny materialized, he shot her a quick frown before offering his own hand to Luna. She only looked mildly surprised as she took it. “I didn’t know phantoms were solid like poltergeists.”

“I’m not like most ghosts.”

“But you are friends with the school ghosts. They all know about both of you, don’t they?” Without waiting for an answer, Luna looked back at Jazz and added, “The Grey Lady thinks you should have been in Ravenclaw. I overheard her telling the Fat Friar so once.”

“Jazz is better off where she is,” Danny said shortly. “It’s better that they don’t look at her twice. And, anyway, you guys have weird passwords. I overheard one once. What is sharp but cannot cut you? I mean. You know that every other House doesn’t have riddles, right?”

Luna smiled. “You wouldn’t need to know the answer to get into the tower.”

“Because there’s not only one right answer?” Jazz guessed, since she could think of a few things that might work already.

“Probably because I can phase through walls,” Danny said dryly. “Y’know, like a ghost.”

“I’m glad you’re friends,” Luna commented, smiling slightly as she took in their expressions. “I don’t think it would be very pleasant to be haunted by a ghost I wasn’t friends with.”

Jazz blinked and Danny looked equally surprised, but they could work with that excuse. From what Jazz understood, most ghosts in the Wizarding World didn’t exactly travel, instead sticking with a particular haunt once they took up residence, so that was really the best excuse for Danny’s presence at Hogwarts as far as the living might be concerned. They didn’t have to know how easy it was for him to go off and do his own thing.

“We met in Amity Park. Where I grew up. I…. I knew him before it happened.”

Jazz thought Luna would ask—who wouldn’t have questions?—but the other girl simply gave her a solemn nod and changed the subject. “I should let you get to the party. I’ll stop by the kitchens and let the House Elves know to make up a plate for you. I don’t think you’ll be back in time for dessert, and the food at the party won’t be to your taste.”

Danny elbowed Jazz as Luna turned away, hissing, “Go on, make a friend who isn’t a ghost.”

“Do you want to come with us?” Jazz blurted out, realizing she’d never asked why Luna herself wasn’t at the Halloween Feast. “I’m sure Nick won’t mind, but if you’re doing something else—”

“I’m looking for my shoes. They’ve gone missing again.” Luna didn’t sound as bothered by this as Jazz thought she ought to be. Jazz hadn’t noticed that the other girl was in sock feet until she’d mentioned it, but a quick glance confirmed that she was and that she seemed unfazed by the cool stone. “It’s just something a few kids in my year have done for old times’ sake, I think. It used to happen much more often.”

That knowledge, in Jazz’s opinion, didn’t help. Judging from Danny’s expression, he didn’t think much of Luna’s treatment, either. From what Jazz knew of Luna’s part in this Wizarding War, she was surprised anyone was still bullying her.

“I’ll help you find them,” Danny said, “and then we can all go, and maybe you two will have time to get back to the feast for dessert. Just…promise you won’t tell anyone about me? Please? Jazz is having a hard enough time adjusting as it is. Obviously.”

Jazz wanted to glare at Danny, but Luna could easily see her, so she settled for picking up her bag again. She’d have to drop it off in her dormitory before going to the party, anyway, so it wouldn’t be hard to meet up with Danny and Luna once they’d found her shoes.

“Don’t worry. I know how to keep my friends’ secrets.”

-|-

Jazz shrieked, clinging to the railing of the shifting staircase as the entire thing began to turn, and heard Danny’s voice in her ear. “Want me to just fly you down to the first floor so you’re not late for class?”

The offer was tempting—he knew it was—but she already stood out without having to pretend Danny’s abilities were her own. She was pretty sure flying unaided wasn’t something she’d be able to excuse as accidental magic, at least not when that flight had as much control as Danny would. Besides, for all that it felt like Danny had been hanging over her nonstop, she knew he wasn’t. She could get in hours of uninterrupted study time, meaning he was up to something.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t tell her what, exactly, his agenda was.

“You know I can’t let you do that,” she hissed back at him.

“So you’ll agree to eat the nosebleed candy and skip out?” The candy in question appeared a foot and a half from her nose and didn’t waver.

Jazz let out a huff of exasperation that may or may not have sounded a bit too much like a growl as she batted the candy away, knocking it out of Danny’s hand and sending it over the railing and out of sight. She’d heard of Nosebleed Nougats, but she had no idea where Danny had gotten one—or why he was trying to convince her to skive off class when he hadn’t before. Couldn’t this wait?

“C’mon, it’s History of Magic. It’s not like it’s a subject you actually need to be there for. You could probably skip out even without eating the magic candy. If Binns actually notices that you’re gone, I’ll vouch for you. He knows what I’m doing.”

Maybe he did, but Jazz wasn’t convinced about that. Danny hadn’t exactly filled her in on all the details about what he did when he wasn’t with her or fetching her some much-needed supplies from the nearest muggle town. She doubted he’d tell the entire truth to a ghost he’d only met a few months earlier before he’d tell it to her.

Then again, this was Danny, on his new overprotective sibling stint. His not telling her could be his way of letting her settle in before he dumped all of whatever this was on her. That would be par for the course, considering what he’d pulled with Luna last week when those Ravenclaws had been gossiping about her.

Come to think of it, Luna was probably the reason he had magical candy in the first place.

“Why are you so intent on me skipping out on class when it’s the only time I have it this week?” True, considering she was learning History of Magic largely by independent study with only occasional check-ins with Professor Binns at this point, she didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, but it was worth a try.

“Helena told me about this Room of Requirement on the seventh floor.” Danny’s voice held a seriousness to it she hadn’t heard for a while, so Jazz didn’t move even though the staircase had slid back into place.

Not back into place where it had originally been, of course, but somewhere that would make it easier if she did what Danny clearly wanted and went straight to the seventh floor instead of to class.

“And?” Jazz prompted, trying to remember how long it would be before the staircase shifted again.

“I’ve got it cleaned up now. It caught fire last year, so some parts of the room don’t change, and I have to phase through the wall because the door won’t show up, which means everyone else thinks the enchantments are broken, but it’s there. And it’ll bring up a portal to the Ghost Zone.”

Jazz stared. “What?”

“I can show you.”

Fine. She’d let him get his way just this once—but only because he was right and would be able to talk Professor Binns around. Jazz hurried up the stairs before they changed again and followed Danny’s directions to the specific spot within the seventh floor corridor. She was studying a tapestry when she saw a flash of light from the corner of her eye and looked around to see him standing in plain view, looking every bit the muggle he supposedly was. “What are you doing?”

“It doesn’t change for me when I’m Phantom,” he said, as if that made any sense. He started pacing back and forth in front of the tapestry while she watched, and after a few rounds, he took her hand and turned them both intangible as he pulled her through the opposite wall.

The room inside was only slightly smaller than the average classroom, except that the entire left half had been cordoned off by a dark blue curtain; whenever it shifted, she could see blackened stone beneath. The rest of the room was lit with what looked like kerosene lamps along the walls, barring the ceiling, which showed a star-studded sky despite the daylight outside. Not the same enchantment as the one in the Great Hall, then, but she’d heard about Firenze’s Divination classroom….

Looking around, Jazz saw a desk along the wall by the door at her immediate right. It was topped with some haphazardly stacked books and a half-filled notebook. A captain’s bed—an unmade bed, she noted with a frown—was pushed up against the adjoining wall, a single sock caught in one of the drawers beneath. Nearby was a low bookcase with what looked like a math textbook next to a single model rocket sitting beneath the mirror on the wall above, though the lower shelves of the bookcase were full. Posters on the walls advertised everything from Dumpty Humpty to NASA. Nearer to the middle of the room, there were a few chairs positioned around a coffee table—also scattered with books and papers—over an area rug speckled with stars. Beyond that stood a small table with a single chair, a garbage can full of what looked suspiciously like the candy wrappers, a little kitchenette built into the wall, and an alcove that she suspected hid a washroom. At the end of the room was another curtain, this one black.

It swayed slightly in a nonexistent breeze.

When it did, she glimpsed glowing green beyond it.

Well, at least that explained why Danny always seemed to have news from home.

“It’s behind phase-proof glass,” he said, following her gaze. “The curtain’s just to keep the light out when I’m trying to sleep.”

“Have you been living here the entire time?” She knew the House Elves had been leaving Danny food even before either of them had found out what a House Elf was (which hadn’t been that long, since the Friar had shown Danny to the kitchens after he’d caught Jazz sneaking him food on their second day), meaning they had to know he wasn’t an ordinary ghost even if they hadn’t told that to any of the living witches and wizards as far as she was aware. Plus, she was pretty sure the House Elves must know he’d been living in this room or this place would be much more of a disaster. She knew he sneaked around to use the bathroom—he’d said as much a few times when he’d ducked out from tailing her—but she wasn’t aware that he regularly sneaked into the kitchens or broke into cupboards for cleaning supplies.

Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Not the entire time,” he mumbled. “I was going to just hang out in classrooms and stuff until Peeves spooked me that one time, remember?”

She remembered.

Danny didn’t do well when caught unawares. He’d started ignoring his ghost sense since coming here—she thought he was supressing it somehow, or at least adapting it so that it didn’t go off around the Hogwarts ghosts all the time, but he’d shrugged it off when she’d tried to ask him about it, so she still wasn’t sure—and she hadn’t seen it go off around even Peeves since the first week or so. Consequently, Peeves had managed to sneak up on him.

The destruction of the stone wall at Danny’s scream-turned-Ghostly-Wail had been put down to a lingering curse that hadn’t detonated when it was supposed to, something left over from the War. Considering Jazz was certain Headmistress McGonagall had had the school combed for such things ten times over, she was pretty sure that was simply the story the students had been told. She had no idea what the professors really believed.

She didn’t think any of them had asked the ghosts, though she knew none of them would’ve given Danny up, even after that.

“I know I told you I was just going to be more careful when it came to the whole ‘sleeping in empty classrooms’ thing, but I was actually going to camp in the Forbidden Forest for a while until I could figure something else out. I was trying to steal supplies when Helena caught me, and then she told me about this place.” He hesitated. “I, um, thought I should show it to you before I showed it to Luna. And Ginny.”

Jazz raised her eyebrows. “Ginny doesn’t even know about you.”

“No, but Luna trusts her, and I’ve seen her spellwork. She’s good. Way better than you are with a wand.”

“Considering how long I’ve been doing this, everybody is better than me with a wand.”

“There are some pretty awful first years.”

“Not my point and you know it. Why do you suddenly want to tell more people you’re here when we’ve been so careful?”

Danny didn’t meet her eye as he muttered, “I think I know why you’re here.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, not just why you’re here here, because I don’t think McGonagall was lying when she said you’d have an easier job playing catchup here than at Ilvermorny considering what happened last year, but…. I still think it’s weird they didn’t find out about you earlier, and I don’t think it’s just because we live in Amity Park.”

“So why, because my magic is so weak? Great pep talk, little brother. Real glad I skipped class now.”

He finally met her eye, and the fact that it wasn’t to glare at her and snippily point out that her weak magic wouldn’t matter one bit for History of Magic made her more uneasy than she wanted to admit. “No, I think Clockwork kept you hidden. I think he was trying to keep us from getting caught up in that War.”

“You’re not even supposed to be here, Clockwork doesn’t exactly care about me, and from the sounds of it, if we’d known earlier, I should’ve gone to Ilvermorny. Try again.”

Danny sighed and wandered over to one of the comfy chairs on the area rug and dropped down, gesturing for her to do the same.

She sat, but only because she wanted answers and he seemed to finally be ready to give them.

“Prophecy is a big deal in the Wizarding World,” he said, which was a giant understatement considering Muggle Studies was considered a lesser option than Divination when it came to elective classes. “I think…. Okay, look, when I haven’t been here, either going to your classes or doing my own homeschooling stuff, I’ve been scouting. I’ve found Wizarding London and their Ministry of Magic and everything and…. Don’t freak out, okay?”

“You know it never helps when you say that, right?”

Danny winced. “Good point. Just…. I’ve been talking to the ghosts I’ve found, and I’ve talked to a surprising number of chatty portraits, and it seems like a few years ago, they lost a whole bunch of records in their Hall of Prophecy.”

“Skip to the reason why you think I’m going to panic.”

Danny bit his lip. Then, “I think you were in one of them. I think we were in one of them.”

“What?”

“I talked to Clockwork,” Danny said instead of clarifying, “and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer, which usually means I’m right.”

Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose. “What are the chances,” she asked without opening her eyes, “that this prophecy stuff doesn’t matter at all and I’m just here to make friends and help kids through the trauma of surviving a war, torture and all?” Dropping her hand to look at him, she added, “You must’ve heard more stories than I have. You know how bad it got.”

“Yeah. They had it worse than we ever did in Amity Park.”

Another understatement.

“Why do you think there’s a prophecy about us again? Did a ghost tell you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what, exactly?”

“It’s just a feeling,” Danny admitted. At Jazz’s withering look, he quickly added, “C’mon, think about it. You have magic and I have ghost powers? I know we’re Fentons and we’ve got Nightingale blood—that one witch hunter ancestor I told you about, remember?—but isn’t that a little much? A ghost and a witch from a family known for ghost and witch hunting? There’s gotta be something someone isn’t telling us.”

Jazz pursed her lips, not wanting to comment on the universe’s sense of irony where her family was concerned. “Have you looked in this Hall of Prophecy place to see if you can find anything to support your hunch?”

“I’ve only been there once. It’s not as easy to get to as it seems, because the magic interferes with my sense of direction if I’m not concentrating. There’s this one room nearby with this weird arch—”

“Did you find anything relevant?”

“Well, no, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

“It also doesn’t mean it does exist.”

“I’m not sure how it works. I don’t think they’d have a record of it if no one was around to hear it being made in the first place.”

“You know this is sounding less and less likely the more you talk, right?”

“Jazz, I’m serious. Something’s coming or something’s changing, and Clockwork won’t tell me what it is. I want to bring Ginny in on this because I think we’re going to need more living allies than just Luna, assuming either of them will agree to help us. You know the ghosts here are too weak to do more than pass information along.”

Jazz frowned. There was still something Danny wasn’t telling her; she was sure of it.

She looked up at the glittering ceiling again, chewing her lip, and then froze.

As her gaze dropped back down to Danny, she said slowly, “You said you were thinking of camping out in the forest earlier, right?”

Danny blinked at her. “Yeah? So?”

“Firenze is living proof that sentient creatures already live there. They’d have noticed you.”

She saw Danny swallow and shift nervously in his seat, which only served to solidify her growing suspicion.

“Firenze has already noticed you, hasn’t he? He’s the reason you actually think there’s a prophecy. Heck, he’s the reason you went looking for this Hall of Prophecy in the first place, isn’t he?”

Danny stared at the carpet and said nothing.

“Look, whatever this supposedly is, we don’t have to play along. Things will be fine if we don’t interfere.”

“Um. About that. I don’t think that’s the case.”

“Danny—”

“Clockwork would’ve tried to stop me if I were barking up the wrong tree, okay? And he didn’t. Which tells me loads. It’s us, so it’s probably a ghost thing, maybe even something with the castle ghosts for all I know. Or maybe we need to work on integrating muggle tech into the magical world. Mom and Dad are inventors, and we know their stuff better than they do in some cases.”

Jazz sighed.

“There’s also, um, this.” He dug something out of his pocket and held out his hand.

She arched an eyebrow at him but reached out, and he dropped a rock into her hand. It was cracked down the middle and had some kind of carving etched into it that she couldn’t quite make out even after a moment of careful study. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Real informative.”

Danny pulled a face. “I found it in the forest, okay? It…. It feels like the Ghost Zone. Like one of the rocks from the Ghost Zone. I think it’s important.”

“You think a random rock you found outside is important.”

“I found it after talking to Clockwork. He spit me back out into the Real World face first into that clearing and I almost broke my nose on that thing. Clockwork doesn’t do coincidence. He does little tweaks here and there to make things the way he wants them to be, the way the timeline is supposed to go, in a way that he hopes the Observants won’t notice. So, no, when he’s involved, I don’t think I’m reading more into this than there is.”

Jazz groaned. “What do you propose we do, then?”

“Talk to Luna and fill her in on the truth. Bring Ginny in on it if Luna thinks we need to. We need info, and neither of us has the time to do a whole bunch of research in the library.”

“Why Luna and Ginny instead of one of the ghosts?”

Danny grimaced. “Until I know what that thing is, I don’t really wanna tell a ghost about it. It hasn’t affected me in any way, but that could be because I’m not actually dead. Or magical.”

Jazz rubbed her thumb over the symbol on the rock, still contemplating the possibility that this was all some grand scheme of Danny’s to get her more friends. The stone had clearly come from something, but that didn’t mean anything; if Danny were trying to stage something, he’d use whatever he could get his hands on. She was sure he’d feel more comfortable if she had more friends—especially if it was someone he’d obviously vetted, like Ginny—and maybe if she did, he’d agree to go back to Amity Park for the next term, when the transition was easier, and claim that he was too homesick to continue at this fictional boarding school.

Or, if Vlad had his way, since he’d agreed to this scheme in the first place and would surely use the opportunity to hold this over Danny’s head, claim that Danny had been too much of a troublemaker or too much of a slacker and he’d been kicked out.

Her parents would probably believe it either way.

Still, she wouldn’t know unless she played along. Danny wouldn’t let this rest, so she’d be better off if she simply let him win this one. She didn’t want to believe in prophecies, even if this was the Wizarding World, but….

But her little brother had already done great things, things worthy of prophecy, and he’d given up so much just to follow her here—even if he had come unasked.

She could give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Okay, little brother,” Jazz agreed. “Do you want to tell them why you’re so famous even the ghosts who practically never leave this castle know who you are, or should I let Myrtle do that?”

Danny blanched, and Jazz laughed for the first time in months.