A Little Overshadowing Never Hurt Anyone

Catching Up With Jazzy Pants -Chapter 23

TW: Mentions of Experimentation and Torture

(But it's a DP fic so you already know that XD)

Jazz clutched the strap of her bag tightly as she looked up at the large entry doors for the "Gotham Ghost Hunting Convention," secretly praying to clockwork that Danny wasn't in there, and that he just got lost and this was a whole big overreaction on her part. Another deep breath — Sam was right, she needed to calm down. Finding Danny would be really difficult if she was hyperventilating every five minutes.

Her parents had been inside since six in the morning setting up their booth. She had told them that she was going to sleep in and meet up with them later, while secretly, she was brainstorming how to find her lost dead brother in a city full of people that are actively hunting him, and others like him, down.

She always disliked her parent's work, even before Danny died and they became more of a threat to him. They had always prioritized their work on "The Ghost Zone" way ahead of their own children. Sure, they were interested in taking care of Danny for the first two or so years, but then he became boring just like she had when she was that age. Their work was just simply more important than their own flesh and blood. Of course, the kids would be fine fending for themselves for ten hours a day while their parents worked in the lab experimenting on some stupid green goo!

They were entirely neglectful, leaving out experiments around the house that could easily hurt (or kill) one of them. If CPS had ever come by their house they would have failed the second the Fenton Automatic Ectoplasmic Ghost Turret aimed at the evaluator's head when they walked through the front door. Even before Danny died, he and Jazz still had accidentally gotten shot with weapons in the house. Luckily they had only received minor burns because "these only hurt ghosts, not humans."

Jazz hated it! Ever since she was five years old, she had to take care of her little brother. She taught herself to read and write, and she attempted to cook for them once and a while, not that it ever really turned out without a fire going off in the kitchen or something attacking her from the fridge. She received her cooking skills from her parents, all right.

Eventually, as she got older, her phone number became attached to all of the bills and medical records. If anything happened with Danny at school, her number was called, not her parents'. Even then, the teachers didn't mind! They knew that Jazz would take more of an interest in Danny's social and educational well-being than they did. Mr. Lancer would even pull her aside some days to tell her about problems Danny was having in school and how she could help him overcome them.

Talking to her parents about Danny was a last resort — even then, it's not like they would retain any information if it wasn't about ghosts or some experimental talk. And once they got home they would just tell Danny he couldn't play video games for a week and then go back downstairs to finish their latest invention.

Jazz has always taken care of Danny, whether she wanted to or not. And it pains her so much that she has to see his looks of fear from across the dinner table when their parents talk about how they plan to dissect Phantom in great detail. She hated herself for the fact that she didn't even notice that he died for three whole months! She was just as bad as her parents, too focused on her school work and making sure she could get her psychology degree when she should have been focusing on her brother.

But she would turn eighteen in a few months, and when that finally comes around, if anything happens, she can take Danny and run. And if they fight back legally she has dozens upon dozens of records and pieces of evidence of neglect, child endangerment and so much more. She will have custody within an hour of the judge taking up the case. But she needs to hold out until Danny finishes high school — she doesn't want him to have a botched education just 'cause she wants him to be away from the people who killed him (even if it was unintentional). He can graduate at seventeen like she did and they can leave to somewhere safe. She always wanted to study psychology at Gotham University... Maybe she can convince Danny to come. She will keep him safe. And he can probably fulfill his obsession with all of the crime here. It is worth a shot.