This is a collection of Short Stories! Not One Shots. These are complete stories with a beginning and an ending, or at least to the best of my ability to give them endings.

This is short #1, the summary is this: Jack has always known that ghosts are evil, there is no question about it, but what happens when Phantom says something to make him think otherwise.

This is not a revelation story, this is a 'planting a small idea of the revelation in Jack's head' story.

Reviews are more then welcome and suggestions will be taken into account if anyone is just dying to say something to me. This goes for all stories!

Of a Father

Words: 3,000

POV: Closed 3rd Person

It had been well hammered in the mind of Jack Fenton that ghosts were evil. They fed on the fear of humans and so they were inherently evil, no matter what decade they came from or which region of the world they had resided in, it was a statement of fact so bold and so clear that it needed no further clarification: ghosts were evil.

So then why was he questioning this fact when he saw Phantom that morning?

He had been the only one at home when the emergency call came through on the Fenton Hotline. It was early Saturday morning, the Fenton residence had a lazy air around it, as if there was a spell put on the normally chaotic household. Maddie had left the house to go shopping for bread, cheese, milk, and lug nuts. Jack knew not to expect her anytime soon since Maddie's equal of shoe shopping was at the hardware store goggling at wrenches and blowtorches instead of pumps and Pumas.

Jazz was at a friend's house, though Jack had his suspicions about this 'friend' of hers. She looked more dressed up than usual when she traipsed down the stairs in a skirt, blouse, high heels, and hair done up prettily with her face masked in makeup. Jack commented on how beautiful she looked and she thanked him, giving him a peck on the cheek before she left the house. He would have to sick Danny on her later.

Speaking of Danny, Jack hadn't heard from him all morning. He guessed that his son was sleeping in his room. The concerned father had heard Danny entering the house near three o'clock in the morning last night. He had been in bed and decided to not try to reprimand Danny that night. He and his wife had done it so many times before that it seemed not worth the effort, plus he had been tired and went right back to sleep after he heard the door shut.

Jack had been on the couch, crafting his newest needlepoint creation when the Fenton Hotline went off and he answered the call. A ghost had been reported being seen downtown and they needed someone to come and stop it. Jack gently laid down his needlepoint, tucking the needle in the canvas so as not to let someone stick themselves if they moved it, and hastened to the G.A.V. with enthusiasm. It was not often he went on a ghost hunt by himself and he could just picture the look on Maddie's face when he brought a ghost back home. With any luck, he would catch that Phantom punk.

Jack arrived in time to see Phantom was there, and that the other ghost had just disappearing into the thermos that Phantom always seemed to carry around. Ignoring the obvious plagiarism of his invention, Jack pouted, feeling cheated that he didn't even get a chance to catch the ghost, but then he realized that Phantom was there, unguarded because the ghost had not seen him yet, and armed himself with a bazooka.

The gun whined slowly as it charged a shot, Jack taking careful aim at Phantom's back side. He had been practicing his aim lately and was getting better, but he still didn't want to miss. He was about to pull the trigger when the gun suddenly went dead on him. He pulled a loose trigger, the clicking sounding empty, like he was trying to fire a toy. The sound made Phantom turn around and spy him with those eerie green eyes of his. Jack was suddenly very nervous with the ghost so close and he so defenseless, but Phantom made no move, almost as if he was waiting to see what Jack would do.

Taking the quiet moment to look down at the gun, Jack saw that it hadn't been charged.

"Shoot," he said, running a hand through his short black hair in frustration.

He looked back up at Phantom, who had moved slightly from floating in the air to sitting on a nearby roof, his legs dangling over the edge as he looked at Jack with a questioning gaze.

The ghost hunter wondered why this picture felt so weird, then he realized that Phantom wasn't attacking him. Jack, for some reason, felt indignation at being so thoroughly ignored.

"What?" he shouted up at the ghost kid, waving a fist at him angrily. "Am I not good enough to fight?"

Phantom cocked his head to the side, frowning at the man.

"Why would I fight you?" he asked, that voice of his echoing around the air and drifting down to Jack, making his spine tingle.

"Because, I'm Jack Fenton!"

The ghost smirked and shook his head in humor, making Jack even more confused and angrier. This kid was making fun of him, not seeing him as a threat at all. It was hurtful to be dissed by your prey, to not be a threat to the things you hated and hunted, it meant you had nothing on your side to win against a ghost. The only way to get at least a foothold in any fight was for you to inflict your own fear in your opponent.

"I'm sorry, but that's not a reason," Phantom said, staying where he was but leaning closer to see Jack better. "There are probably a lot of Jack Fentons in the world, why would I want to fight all of them?"

A joke? Did Phantom just try to crack a joke? A bad one yes, but a joke nonetheless. Jack blinked in confusion, bringing his fist down to his side and sighing in defeat, looking at the ground with his fractured pride on his broad shoulders.

"Even if I wanted to fight you, you're unarmed," Phantom said, making Jack bring his head up to look at the ghost again. "I would never fight an unarmed man."

"How moral of you," Jack rolled his eyes, knowing that the ghost was lying; they always went for the kill. "And who taught you that?"

"My dad did," Phantom answered automatically.

Jack was taken aback. A ghost that remembered its parentage was rare, almost unheard of. On top of that, for that ghost to put its human morals to work after death was completely unheard of, but it was a loose theory. If ghosts worked off of memories of their death, then it would be valid to say that some ghosts would remember what they were taught and that would pass down to the ghost after death. For some reason, the human thoughts of morality and right and wrong decisions seemed to bypass this transferring of memory, but it did happen with other aspects of the dead person's mind: anger, fear, and sorrow being the three most recognized emotions of transference.

Jack's brain went into overdrive, thinking hard and fast like a train on a track that had no breaks. The theories that he knew and the facts that he knew twisted into new theories and facts in his mind, forming a hypothesis.

If he took into account that Phantom was still a child, that would mean he would still look to his father as a father-figure and would still be learning from him at the time of his death. Therefore, whatever Phantom had learned from his father would be transferred to the ghost.

He looked back up at Phantom and guessed the specter to be at around fourteen; old enough to know anger, but not nearly old enough to know true anger and sorrow unless Phantom had had a very hard and demeaning life before his death. Whatever his parents had taught him, would be the only things that would pass on to his ghost.

The ghosts of children were usually very mindless since they were not old enough to fully experience life. Very young ghosts were very deadly since they lacked understanding of death and were, therefore, very dangerous to be around if one had a tantrum. Teenage ghosts were rare since most teens seemed to not become ghosts, but when they did, their anger could be very dire. The immaturity of a teenager ruled the ghost with too many strong emotions at the time of death, but Phantom seemed different.

He wasn't angry, he had a smile on his face most of the time that Jack had seen him around when he was not fighting another ghost. Phantom was not sorrowful, not looking for a life that he could not return to. Phantom was never in any kind of emotional pain that would drive a ghost's instincts to put fear into people and to be a nuisance.

That still puzzled Jack since he could not explain it, even the most moral of people, when they were alive, turned into mindless, hurting ghosts. It was the fact that was so clear it did not need definition: ghosts were evil! End of story, there was nothing more to say.

Ghosts were evil!

But why not this one?

Why was Phantom not attacking him right now? The ghost was certainly strong enough to kill him and he was unarmed. Was it that moral of not harming an unarmed man that kept him from doing so? Ghosts were driven by their thoughts; they would not go against what they thought was right and not do what they thought was wrong, no matter how twisted the thought process. Could Phantom not go against this moral that, for some strange, inexplicable reason, kept with him in death?

"Did I say something wrong?" Phantom asked, looking confused at Jack.

It was enough to bring the man from his thoughts.

"You want me to believe that you have the ability to process the morals that your father taught you?" he didn't sound challenging, he was intrigued and it was a simple question with a not-so-simple answer.

"I respect my father. I admire him, why would I go against him?" Phantom said.

Another question came to Jack: did Phantom think that he was still alive? The way he used his father in the present tense suggested so, but his father might still be alive, or a ghost himself. If that was the case, then did Phantom still interact with his father, both as ghosts? Could the ghost of the father, in some way, still teach the ghost of the son? Did such familial ties last in death?

Jack looked up at ask another question, but Phantom was gone.

"Well how do you like that?" he murmured, feeling empty handed despite all of the knowledge he had just gleaned from a few short minutes from the ghost.

He packed up his uncharged bazooka and left downtown, heading back to Fenton Works in a haze of thought as his mind circled the possibilities that had just come to him. After nearly running over the neighbor's family cat, Jack was fully in the present as he pulled up to his driveway. He found the door unlocked and saw Danny sitting on the couch in the den, watching T.V. but he didn't seem to be very interested in it.

The teen looked up to see his father enter the house. Jack couldn't read the emotion on his son's face, but he saw curiosity in his eyes.

"Hey Dad," Danny greeted, picking up the remote and turning down the volume to better converse with him, "where did you go? You weren't here when I woke up."

"Ghost alert," Jack said, placing the large gun on the couch and sitting next to Danny.

"Did you catch it?"

"No, that Phantom kid did."

"Oh," Danny left it at that.

Phantom seemed to be an odd piece of conversation between Danny and his parents. He never really spoke about the ghost, but it always seemed like he had something to say when the subject was brought up. The Zone knew that Jazz had an opinion about everything, and Phantom seemed to be at the top of her list to defend. Jack rubbed his eyes, becoming tired just thinking about the long conversations that he could never understand with his daughter.

"Tired?" Danny asked him.

"No, just thinking. You're the one that should be tired."

Danny stiffened next to him, the talk now eddying into waters that Jack knew he had to address at some point this morning.

"I heard you come in pretty late last night," Jack stated, nothing behind his tone to suggest that he was mad or upset, but Danny's shoulders slumped all the same as if he could detect something else there.

"I'm sorry," Danny began to say, but he was only halfway through when his father cut him off.

"I'm tired of hearing 'sorry' come from you Danny," Jack's tone was now harsh, his frustration leaking out from him. "Almost every night you do this. It drives me up the wall and your mother is always worrying about you. Every time you say you're sorry but you do it again just the same. I don't want apologies or excuses, I want explanations."

It was the first time that Jack had said this to his son. Maddie was always firm about punishing Danny, hoping that the mere threat of a grounding would keep him from staying out late, but it obviously wasn't working. Jack had been puzzled at first when Danny's odd behavior had started, but now he was just mad. He wanted to know why more than anything else right now.

When Danny was not forthcoming with an answer, Jack sighed and slumped into the back of the couch.

"Do you respect me son?"

Danny looked up at his father in surprise, his young eyes wide and his mouth slightly open. Jack was a little surprised himself when he had asked the question, but he wanted to know. The way that Phantom had said that he respected his father . . . it was something he wanted. Phantom respected his father even in death, and Jack was clinging to the fact that Phantom was truthful to him to make this true. Even if Phantom had been putting on an act, he was convincing enough to make Jack wonder himself about his status as a father.

"Of course I do," Danny said, almost looking hurt that Jack would have to ask that question, then he licked his lips in thought, seeming to decide on what next to say very carefully. "I respect and admire you, I would never go against you."

Deja-vu hit Jack like a steamroller. He looked at Danny wonderingly, trying to put where he had heard those words before. Danny looked expectantly at him, searching for something in his face, but after a few minutes of silence, Danny lowered his head in defeat and what looked like sadness.

"How long am I grounded for?" he asked, his voice sounding a bit depressed.

"Two weeks," Jack said, still trying to place the words.

Hadn't Phantom said those words? It sure jogged his recent memory and he was pretty sure that Phantom had said them. Why hadn't he recorded it? It would have saved him a lot of head ache.

"Danny, were you downtown this morning?" Jack asked.

"No, I was here, sleeping. I woke up and you were gone, remember?"

Jack hummed, but was not convinced. How else would Danny have heard that conversation? Unless Danny had never been there.

But how-?

"Jack! I need help getting these sacks in the lab!" Maddie called out through the open door, her arms full of brown paper sacks and plastic draw bags.

"Danny, get the groceries, I've got the rest," Jack ordered.

"Yes sir," Danny said quietly, but was smiling faintly as he rose from the couch and up to Maddie to take the sack from her hands.

As Danny passed him again to head to the kitchen, Maddie looked at Jack expectantly.

"How long is he grounded?" she asked him.

"Two weeks, he already knows."

Maddie nodded and frowned.

"I wish he would stop doing this," she said, sounding tired. "I was up most of the night thinking about him."

"I know Maddie, but we'll keep trying. There was a ghost alert today."

"I know, I heard about it on the radio. Did you take the call?"

Jack smiled, glad he was able to distract his wife before speaking.

"Yes, and boy do I have more stuff to blather on about!"

"I can't wait to hear it. Is Jazz back yet?"

"No, oh, that reminds me. Dan-o!"

"Yeah?" Danny asked, coming into the room again.

"I want you to spy on your sister, wheedle any information you can about this new 'friend' of hers."

"Wouldn't that be prying into her private life?" Danny asked with a raised brow. "The one she keeps screaming at us about because we never let her have one?"

"That's the one!" Jack nodded.

"I don't know Dad. . ."

Jack pulled out his wallet and dug out a twenty, putting it in front of Danny's astonished face.

"How much do you want to know and when do you want to know it?" Danny asked, swiping the money with a conspirator-like smile.

Jack heard Maddie scoff and felt her eyes roll at them as she turned to get the rest of the sacks from the car.

"Keep me informed," Jack straightened and walked out the door, Danny trailing behind as he pocketed the money.

"Yes sir," he saluted and went to help Maddie.

Jack was glad that the tension between them was gone, but still, the way Danny had smirked at him, the words he said. It nagged his mind to no end and he wanted to recall why it was bugging him, but it just wasn't surfacing.

"So Jack, what did you want to talk about?" Maddie asked as she loaded his arms with sacks to go down to the lab, breaking his train of thought.

"Oh, Maddie you won't believe what I found out today about the ghost kid!"