Here it (finally) is!

Chapter 7:

Unraveling the Mystery

In truth, though, it was the suspense now that was killing him. Danny just wanted Dash to tell him what he had to do already. What homework to do, which locker to inhabit, how much lunch money to hand over…

But the jock wasn't saying anything. He was looking at Danny while biting his lip. That wasn't how he should have been looking. He should have been triumphant, rejoicing in his victory as a successful first-time blackmailer. Instead, he looked like he had been the one threatened.

"Uhh… Dash? What is it?" Danny finally ventured to ask. Surely, anything that the blond asked him to do would be better than waiting around to hear it as he imagined every single worst case scenario.

Dash looked up from the ground and caught his eye to say the last thing that Danny had ever thought he would say.

"I need your help."

Danny stared. Then he blinked a few times. Somehow, he resisted the urge to bang a hand on his head as if to clear his ears like some old actor in a silent film would do.

"What?" he managed to choke out instead.

"I need your help, Fenton." All of a sudden, Dash was on the ground in front of him, holding out his hands like he was begging him for something. "You gotta help me!"

"Whoa, whoa, just… hold on a sec…" Danny put his hands out and tried to understand what he was seeing. Dash was kneeling on the ground begging him for help when he had just blackmailed him? Where was his former bravado? Why was he staring over his shoulder like a little kid would look at his closet door around midnight?

What was going on?

Why did Dash think he needed his help, of all people? The guy beat him up whenever he felt like it and his own grades weren't even much higher than the jock's. It wasn't as if he could tutor the guy…

"Get up, Dash; you're creepin' me out."

Dash got up and sniffed, rubbing the back of one hand across his nose. "You just… you gotta help me…"

He looked pitiful. Really pitiful. Danny tried to figure out what was going on. "Okay… but what makes you think that I can help you?"

"You help Phantom," Dash said, as if that answered everything.

And, in a twisted way, Danny guessed it sort of did.

Phantom was Dash's hero. He always had been. Now that he needed help, he went to the one human he knew had some sort of contact with the ghost. Little did he know that he was pleading with his idol in disguise. The irony of it all made Danny want to laugh, scream, or explain his secret identity.

Of course, he did none of those things, but instead tried to figure out more of the situation at hand.

"I… don't really do that much, Dash. I don't even fight with him, I just provide him with a couple gadgets from my parent's lab."

"But… you still… you help him. You know him! You could get him to help. He could do it. Just ask him! But you have to. I don't think that I can take much more of this."

Danny thought he understood a bit more now. It wasn't him that Dash wanted help from, of course not. He wanted to use him to get to Phantom. He should have guessed, really. It wouldn't have made much sense for Dash Baxter to come crawling to Danny Fenton for help.

Danny Phantom, however, was a different matter entirely. Being around the ghost would totally boost his image, even if it was only because he had begged for help.

But seriously. Phantom patrolled the city and fought ghosts. He didn't do math homework or fix jock's social problems. Even without getting into the whole secret identity thing with a normal teenager, "Phantom" had much more important things to do, like saving everyone in Amity. And Dash thought that he could somehow manage to pull some strings to get the ghost to do whatever he wanted? Fly-by the field during a game to make him more popular or something?

Man, this guy had some ego problems.

"Dash… I don't think it's Phantom's place to help you out with your little problems. He has a hard enough time fighting ghosts. I'm not sure I can get him to help."

"No, you have to make him help. And it's not something silly, I promise. I really need his help."

"I'm not sure that I can get his help. It's not like I hang out with Phantom and pal around with him or anything like that. I don't even know where he is until he shows up to fight a ghost. I can't just walk over to his house and tell him that you want him to do something. We're not friends; I can't just ask him favors. I really don't think this will work."

"You have to try, at least! You have to promise me that you'll try. You have to- I just… I just blackmailed you. So if you don't ask Phantom for help, I'll… I'll tell the whole world that you help him. I'll tell your parents!" Dash finally managed with a shaky voice. Not convincing, although the underlying threat was.

Danny sighed.

"Okay, what's the problem?"

Dash looked at him, his face now transformed into that mask of vulnerability and fear that looked so out of place on his normally composed and proud expression. Danny wondered for the first time if something really was wrong with the guy.

As the school's star athlete, the guy dating Paulina, the bully leading instead of experiencing every whaling session, and the one kid in the whole school who seemed to be able to do no wrong in any of the teacher's eyes, Danny had always thought that Dash had it good. Better than he did, anyway. But suddenly, this seemed serious. This whole thing was just so weird, so out of character.

On a hunch, he leaned forward and narrowed his gaze, but soon satisfied himself that Dash was not overshadowed. Not only did his ghost sense not even twitch around him, but his eyes weren't discolored and, perhaps most importantly, he hadn't tried to attack him yet.

Plus, any ghost would have known his real secret and wouldn't have tried to blackmail him with this story.

So it made him really interested in finding out what was really going on with the guy. The answer he got, though, was not at all what he had thought he would hear.

"I think I'm being haunted."

Danny quirked an eyebrow. "Oh really?"

He lived in the most haunted town in the world for several years and he was just now figuring out that the place was haunted? Wow. Even he hadn't expected Dash to be quite that slow.

But, Dash had phrased it oddly if that was what he had meant. He said that 'he was being haunted'… singling himself out of the crowd. No, he didn't mean that Amity was haunted. That much was obvious even to football players. And Dash had even fought a few ghosts in his time. The thought of one shouldn't make him shiver in his shoes and crawl to loser Fenton for help. No, this was something different.

Fortunately for him, Danny was just the person to know what to do.

"No, seriously," Dash implored. "You have to believe me. There's this ghost that keeps on following me and appearing randomly and it's freaking me out because I don't know how to make it go away."

He looked over his shoulder, then the door and mirrors as if expecting the ghost to show up right then and there to prove his point. But nothing appeared. The bathroom looked the way it always did. Danny closed his eyes and tried to determine if there had been a drop in temperature, but he couldn't detect one, even a small one. So there was no ghost here.

But Dash wasn't lying about this. He was too scared out of his wits to be making this up. And crawling to the loser wimp for help didn't seem to be in keeping with the jock's idea of a practical joke.

Danny furrowed his forehead in thought at what Dash had said the ghost did. It didn't seem to be normal behavior for a ghost. To just… show up and do no damage…

"How many times have you seen it? When has it shown up?"

"It's never at the same time, but I'll see it several times per day. And almost always at night too… when I'm in my room." The tall boy shivered violently.

Danny smirked. "What, it's under your bed?"

"No, in my closet."

"Oh. Well, um, what does it do?"

"It creeps me out! I can't sleep at night when that thing is there."

"O-okay, Dash, okay. Just calm down," Danny said, reaching out a hand to steady the blond. "Does it say anything to you?"

"No."

That ruled out nearly half the ghostly population. Most specters simply loved to announce their presence to the world with long winded titles. Take Tecnhus. Or even the Box Ghost. His introduction was not nearly as long, but still, "I am the Box Ghost" every single time the guy came out of the Ghost Zone meant that Danny had heard it several hundred times. And it got old pretty quickly.

"Does it try to communicate to you or touch you or take anything out of your room?"'

"No."

Well, then it wasn't a ghost obsessed with teddy bears. If that was the case, the ghost might very well have reason to visit Dash's closet every night. But nothing was gone. No toys, no lettermen jackets. And he had seen the ghost around town too, and perhaps even at school. It wasn't interested in anything Dash had. But it was interested in following him around.

If it had been a ghost looking for a friend like Klemper, he would have made his intentions painfully obvious from the beginning. Then, too, if it wanted to attack, it would have done so by now without this skulking in the background.

Danny was starting to agree with Dash on this one. This didn't make any sense and that fact alone was rather unsettling.

"Has it done anything to you?"

"No…." Dash slowly admitted, "But it might!"

"Okay… is it a ghost you've seen before? Is it Skulker? Poindexter?"

"Who are they?"

Danny sighed. Of course Dash wouldn't know any of his foes by name. He was still calling Phantom Inviso-Bill a few months ago.

"Skulker is the big metal suit of armor with lots of guns and flaming green hair. Poindexter is the black and white guy who came out of locker 724…"

"No. It isn't any of those. It isn't any of the ghosts that Phantom fights."

Danny was confused. A ghost that he didn't fight? A ghost that he wasn't familiar with? That he didn't even know was out? That was not a pleasant idea at all. He didn't think that his security had been that lax, but who knows what damage a ghost who could get past his defences could manage.

"Then… can you describe it?"

Dash shifted around, clearly uncomfortable with this part.

"Well… that's the weird thing…" Dash paused.

Oh? There was something even weirder about this situation? Danny wasn't sure that it was possible, so he looked warily at the jock while awaiting an answer.

"It kinda… looks like… me." Dash looked up from the floor to lock frightened eyes with Danny. "I think… I'm being haunted by my own ghost."

THE END.

In the episode "What You Want," Danny rips out the super-scary-footballer-Dash-Ghost and throws it into the portal. Which means that there's a ghost of Dash floating around the Ghost Zone. That's the basis for this story.

And… that's all, folks. This story is over. I've thought for several months about how I could continue this and have not figured it out yet, so… this story has to be finished. (that being said, if you can see how this would go forward, be sure to let me know, although I make no promises) I want to thank you all so much for being a part of "Jumping at Shadows" and making the writing process such a great one. You people are pretty awesome. B)

There will definitely be more chaptered stories along the way, although my big project now is the phandom wide "Through Danny Phantom." DannyPhantomSG-1 and I plan to re-watch the series over the course of a year, one episode per week. Starting this Friday (tomorrow, June 1) with "Mystery Meat." We can all talk about the show and create artwork, fanfics, or videos based off of each episode. It's going to be really fun… and even more fun if you join us! See s/8169889/1/ for more details and let me know if you're interested! ^^