We DxS shippers are frustrated. It's simply a fact. Danny absolutely refuses to admit the painfully obvious, and it can get depressing. Therefore, using my amazing powers of imagination (plus a mite of Jazz obsession I've had lately) I have solved the mystery of Danny's thickheadedness. So here's to all the DxS shippers out there, to keep you going, give you a bit of hope.
In the long-lost sunset-horizon days of elementary school, Jasmine Fenton had been a math child. She had been the one fourth-grader to fly through math worksheets with considerably more grace than the boys her age handling their kickballs. She had been the nerd to trot up to the blackboard without invitation and trace out the basic premises of the universe in a graceful, looping cursive. She had been the junior environmentalist disdaining her classmates because they killed trees, wasting so much paper on simple calculations. Even then, she was speeding through equations in her head.
She had been the first in her age group to conquer the childish nightmares that they were plagued with. Cartoon dragons and PG-13 horror movies had posed no threat to the then-eight Jazz, for they paled before the numbers that danced and spun and aligned themselves with admirable precision to explain all that was complex or ambiguous in the universe – and to an eight-year-old, not to mention the successive milestones of nine and ten, much of the universe was ambiguous indeed.
In those time-hazy days, Jasmine Fenton had grown accustomed to thinking logically, to fending off the smallness of her body by priding herself on the scope of her mind. She had grown accustomed to climbing into bed at night with a complex mathematical construct in her head, sculpting its straight lines, leaping joyfully from proof to conclusion, sliding down the curves of eights and sixes, slipping off the end of square-root bars and into sleep. She liked the closure, the calm and focus and order that the problems gave her. She especially liked the way such calmness was juxtaposed to the chaos of her dreams.
In such a way, she rocketed through the public education system, leaping from elementary to middle to high school, from Honey to Jasmine to Jazz; and even with the shortening of her name, her knowledge expanded exponentially. For, upon entering the hallowed halls of Casper High, she discovered the ultimate chain of reasoning, the simple and logical origin of what had previously been the most frustrating variable in all that she did; people. Upon entering high school, Jazz abandoned her sine-curve dreams in favor of dream interpretations, she left the structure of the universe to others and focused instead upon the varying structures of its only interesting inhabitants. She transcended math and moved into psychology, and from the age of fourteen onward, it was with a case study of varied neuroses instead of a dissection of algebraic formulae that she drifted off into dreams.
Then, at age sixteen, she was provided with the ultimate case study, the psychologist's dream, the chain of discoveries that she was sure would win her fame if only she could publish them. She couldn't; and most of her was glad, didn't want to publish them, didn't want to share with others the tangled questions that had helped soothe her in the darkness of night, had engaged her mind in its fullest faculties and satisfied her craving for a challenge. At age sixteen, she was granted the exclusive opportunity to study, constantly and close at hand, the psychological evolution of a human-ghost hybrid; namely that of her brother Danny, though the scientist in her failed to recognize the familial connection. Instead, she was grateful that the subject was one she knew intimately, and therefore she would easily be able to control any variables that could have been caused by his own unique quirks of personality.
At first she focused, as any inquisitive mind would have, upon the fusing of human and spectral that must have been taking place in her brother's psyche; she scanned his human face for flickers of ghostly malice, she studied other ghosts in an effort to catalogue which human traits (love, compassion, ambition, her unconscious mind logged them) were common in all post-human creatures, and which were manifest only in this uniquely human spirit, the shade of Danny Phantom.
At first Jasmine Fenton, budding psychologist, tackled her brother as a series of adjustments and compromises between the ghostly and human halves of him, imagining him as an inner series of struggles between black and white, blue and green. Then her knowledge of his secret leaked out, and she found herself given ample opportunity to observe him as both human and ghost. She eagerly anticipated new and fascinating data; only to find that, as she spent more time with his ghost half, she realized that his ghost half was not at odds with his human half at all, but that the two were harmonized, cohesive. It was then that she abandoned spectral psychoanalysis and saw him as he really was; a human boy given far too much to deal with, who was forced to take on burdens far too heavy for him, leaving his personal problems and development shunted to the fringes of his existence. It was then that she began to contemplate the single thing about him that was the most frustrating, tackling in those moments before sleep when her mind was clear the single question about him that neither she, her parents, nor all of Danny's close friends had been able to answer.
When a week of successive nights had been insufficient to find an answer, she consulted psychology textbooks and found several disorders, complexes, and diagnoses that could explain her mystery; none of them took into account ghost transformations that confused the boundaries between life and death. None of them took into account the mental burden of a prepubescent superhero. She researched on the Internet, read journals, conducted studies at the breakfast table and late at night, tutoring him for tests; still no answers that satisfied her.
Then, sitting dazed in calculus, refusing to absorb the formulas that she had already learned by heart, Jasmine Fenton had a revelation that was shocking, sudden, and not scientific in the least. It was not measurable, testable, or provable; yet she leaned back in her seat, utterly satisfied, and whistled all the way home (a genetic trait of mysterious origins, as no one else in her family could do it).
Satisfied that her own personal challenge had been overcome, that she possessed the intangible element to psychotherapy as well as the laboratory skills, Jazz kept the knowledge close and secret, her own guarantee of success, with no need to ask the world's opinion or approval. That is, until she found that same question asked of her in a voice so desperate, so grasping and agonized that she felt, in a deep female-intuitive part of the brain, that it was time to pass on her personal mystical knowledge to those who needed it most.
If Jazz had not known of ghosts' annoying tendency to pop up with neither explanation nor warning, she would have called that particular day ordinary. While the children of America lay splayed out across couches watching various mind-numbing TV shows, Jazz lay on her stomach tapping laptop-keys with one hand while stirring an oozing green chemical solution with the other. Explosions and roars of sound drifted up from the bowels of the house, but they were no more frequent or violent than usual, and Jazz had grown so accustomed to them that they no longer made even the slightest impression on her intense concentration. She had fallen into the rhythm of chemical symbols and catalysts, and very little could have drawn her out of acidic contemplations and measurements of particle reactions. Therefore it was all the more startling when her focus was shattered by one of the few sounds capable of shattering it; the swinging open of the front door, accompanied by the ringing echo of her brother's voice.
Even as Jazz jerked her gaze away from the laptop screen to stare at the new silhouette in the doorway, her mind was working; of course Danny arrived home later than her, he always did, he always hung around after school with Sam and Tucker and generally dawdled all the way home. At the same time she realized the tension and high-strung nervousness in Danny's voice, which had made her glance around, fearful of a ghost attack, was not caused by a ghost at all.
Instead, Jazz blinked, treated to the rare and almost dreamlike sight of her brother strolling in from the outside world, hand in hand with a strange blonde girl Jazz had never seen before.
Her reaction was immediate, almost instinctive. Without thinking Jazz pushed herself into a sitting position, snapped the laptop off, smiled and nodded in response to Danny's greeting and the introduction of What's-her-name. She pushed the fizzing bottle towards the middle of the coffee table, stood and strolled out of the room, unconsciously making sure that the hand reaching for her cell phone was hidden from the view of the two lovebirds in the foyer. The number she dialed was not one she had ever bothered to memorize, and it took a moment of searching through her memory in order to bring it to the forefront of her mind, but then her fingers moved fast from years of typing practice and the voice she had been hoping for was echoing down the line in a matter of seconds.
"Hello?"
She moved into the dark silence of hallway, standing at the foot of the stairs, out of Danny's earshot. "Hi, Tucker. This is Jazz."
"Um – hi, Jazz." He was clearly perplexed, hesitant, unsure. "What can I do for you?"
"Put her on."
There was a moment of silence, a lapse into thought, and Jazz glanced back through the doorway, suddenly wondering if ghosts had enhanced sensory perception. Just in case, she retreated to the top of the stairs. She was leaning against the doorpost of her room before Tucker's voice returned.
"I don't think I can. Have you talked to Danny lately? I mean, if you don't know –"
"I know, Tucker, I know. He just walked in the door. Now, can I talk to her or not? I know she's there." The confidence in her voice was absolute. They had been her greatest study, these three; she was utterly positive that she could predict their actions in any adverse situation, and this particular situation had factored heavily into her imaginings. Tucker was silent; there was a burst of static and muted sound, as though the phone was being wrested from its keeper.
Then Sam's voice burst into her ear, vicious and hurt. "He brought her home, didn't he?" she demanded, bitter and almost in tears. "Why? Why does he have to do this to me, over and over? He has to know, he has to know by now, it's not possible that he doesn't know –" the accusations were growing in pitch and volume, and Jazz felt a sympathetic ache in her own chest as Sam fell silent. When the voice came again it was almost a whisper. "And if he really, truly doesn't know – I think that might be worse."
Jazz let herself smile, a droll, therapeutically empathic smile, yet at the same time with an element of the child's gloat (I-know-something-you-don't-know) as though she was talking to her brother's more-than-best-friend face to face instead of over the phone.
"Listen to me, Sam," she commanded, cutting off the bitter rant that she could feel building up on the other end of the line. "Listen. I've figured it out. I know why he's doing this. I figured it out a while ago, I just never thought to tell you. I know why he's being such an ass, okay? Just listen to me."
Sullen silence, what might have been a sob strangled before it was given full voice. Then a bitten-off murmur: "I'm listening."
This time the silence originated on Jazz's end, and in it was the shuffling of papers, the preparation to teach. "Look. You've known Danny for most of his life. You've been closer to him than just about anyone else, closer to him than his family, definitely closer to him than me. So tell me – ever since the accident, what's been the one thing he's wanted, more deeply and desperately than any other?"
"Paulina," came the reply, a lashing out, instinctively trying to cause guilt, to cause pain. But Jazz was patient; she had to be. She would never have survived sixteen years in the Fenton household otherwise. Therefore she waited silently through a dozen half-spoken and bitten-off answers, twice as many moments of silent contemplation. Then, almost in a whisper, but with absolute certainty: "He's always wanted – to be normal. To not have to deal with the fights, the injuries, the enemies, and all the rest of the crap he deals with."
"Exactly. He wants to be ordinary. Even now he's trying to reject the ghost half of him. And, I mean, we can't blame him – he's taking on way more than any boy his age should have to think about. Which causes plenty of psychological problems on it's own, but that's not the point." She allowed a slight smile to emerge on her face. "And what do normal boys Danny's age want most of all?"
This time the answer was immediate. "Paulina," Sam replied, and this time Jazz could have sworn she detected a hint of humor underneath the pain and rage.
"Exactly." Now Jazz dared to venture down the stairs again, glancing around the corner, trying to catch a glance of Danny and his new girlfriend, trying to confirm her theory that the girl was of the same mold as most high school cheerleaders. This goal was accomplished, and Jazz turned her attention back to the phone. "Sam, do you get it? He knows you love him. He knows he loves you. He knows all of it, somewhere deep inside that thick skull of his. He just doesn't want to acknowledge it just yet. As smart and fun and pretty as he thinks you are, you're still his gothic best friend. And if he admits to himself that he really is in love with you, if he admits to himself that he has to consider both sides of him in picking who he's with –"
"Then his last shot at normality goes flying out the window," Sam finished, and in it was a grim finality, but also the tinge of awe that came with light breaking out of darkness. Jazz pinpointed recognition and resignation before the phone-magnified echoes faded.
"Exactly." Jazz waited, listening to the Sam's sigh that sounded over the phone like a rush of static. "He doesn't mean it, Sam. He doesn't know that he's hurting you. You know he'd never intentionally hurt you."
"No." The response was immediate, unthinking. "No, of course not. I know that. I just get – frustrated with him, that's all."
"He's a teenage boy. His only purpose in life is to cause frustration to everyone around him as much as possible." The tinge of humor lightened the tension that had grown almost tangible, that Jazz could feel pressing on her skin with real force. There was a delightful element of intrigue in talking to Danny's someday-girlfriend while Danny and his current girlfriend talked softly in the next room.
Sam was the first to break the silence. "Thank you, Jazz," she said warmly, her voice rich with gratitude. "Thank you. That – that makes sense. You have no idea how many questions you've answered. You have no idea how much that helps."
"No, I imagine I don't," Jazz answered, but she was grinning. It was her first triumph over pain, over psychological anguish and self-delusion. "Just be patient, Sam, okay? Trust me."
"Okay. Thanks again," a weak laugh of sheer relieved pain, and the line went dead. Jazz snapped her cell phone shut, still grinning, and stepped into the doorway of the kitchen, placing herself in full view of the ill-fated lovebirds on the couch.
Danny looked up, startled at her sudden entrance, and hastened to make introductions that he had already made once before and that Jazz remembered no better than she had the first time. She nodded and smiled through the quick recitation of What's-her-name's family situation, school denomination, and various virtues. It was only when Danny asked her who she had been talking to that she bothered to reply. "Oh, I was just chatting with Sam," Jazz replied airily, and noticed with a satisfied smirk that Danny flinched at the mention of his almost-best-friend's name.
He quickly recovered, however, and managed a choked "That's nice" through the guilt, shame, fear that Jazz could almost see forming a lump in his throat. At What's-her-name's questioning glance, he swallowed his obvious discomfort and managed a fake smile. "What were you talking about? I wouldn't you guys would have that much in common."
"We're both girls, aren't we?" Jazz was enjoying a return to childhood, withholding a juicy secret and letting her little brother squirm in the suspense. "I just had to talk to her about some stuff, that's all. I guess you might say I had some wisdom to pass on."
Danny's expression had migrated from fake pleasantry into blank bewilderment. "What, some kind of girly talk? Or were you tutoring her for something?" he asked.
Jazz shrugged noncommittally, though she was still grinning. "I suppose you could say I was tutoring her. Giving her a lesson she needed to hear." Danny's brow was furrowed in confusion and a hint of worry – he didn't like not knowing things when it came to Sam, for reasons he didn't understand but his sister did. Jazz had to resist the urge to wink. "I'll tell you, too, someday," she added.
"What are you talking about? If you were tutoring her for our test on Friday, then I need you to tell me now, not someday. Is this important, or are you just having fun being a know-it-all?"
"A little of both. I'll tell you when you're ready." And with that, Jazz turned and left the room, not even bothering to acknowledge the Unnamed Girlfriend. As she was leaving, she heard Danny explaining in an apologetic tone about psychotic delusions running in the family; turning to climb the stairs, she muttered under her breath, "More than you know."
The End. Not the best melodramatic ending ever, but there you have it. I really, really like this story. It's probably my favorite of all the ones I've written, a big experiment with different styles of writing. I've been working on shortening my sentences and playing with new metaphors, not to mention the time-lapse prose at the top half of the story. What do you think? Should I shut up and get out, or do I have something here? Talk to me, people!