Archive of Our Own ^beta

The room across from Jazz’s had always been empty– a spare space her parents once described as an office. They don’t need one anymore, not with their lab in the basement giving them all the space they need.

She’s always felt drawn to it for one reason or another, despite the lack of furniture. Nothing but a spartan space with a single twin bed and an empty dresser. A closet with a few boxes for storage gathering dust under the pull string light.

The one spot of the room she’s always been curious about was the far side corner of the ceiling. A single plastic glow in the dark star remained on the ceiling, covered in white paint as though the person who redid the room was in a hurry or didn’t care enough to remove it beforehand.

The spot’s always remained in the back of her subconscious– something strangely off about it, seeing as the house was an industrial space before her parents had remodeled it when they moved in. It could have been her bedroom as a child, but she’s never been into space all that much. And she’s sure she’s always had the largest of the bedrooms in the house, seeing as her room was still the bubblegum pink her six year old self demanded all those years ago.

Jazz feels it represents the strange feeling of loss or absence she’s been experiencing for about a year or so at this point.

But she’s always felt the lack of… something. Finds herself turning around as though someone is standing in her doorway, always making a second lunch for school– peanut butter and jelly, no crust, and a snack baggie of pretzels. She catches herself halfway through most times and simply leaves it in the fridge for her father to devour; no sense in wasting food.

Other spaces in her life seem strange, too– the extra spot at the dinner table, under the single burned out light of their dining room chandelier. The extra peg on the key hanger without an initial. The extra set or space of everything her parents don’t address, and neither does she.

She puts her thoughts in a box and locks it. Maybe it’s cheaper to buy everything in sets of four? Maybe her parents had wanted another child in the past? Maybe even her mother had a miscarriage; this a way of coping for her parents (although she’d rather they see a therapist than waste money on someone who was never even born).  

Jazz has always been an only child. She’s always been her parents’ pride and joy, despite their downfalls. She’s used to fending for herself and only herself. 

She’d feel awful if another kid had to deal with the burden of parents who barely stick around long enough to wish her a good day at school.

Even if it’s lonely, she’d never state so.

It’s early April when her parents call her down from her room with a surprise. 

Her father fidgets with his gloved hands– the rubber squeaking with an awful noise. “How would you feel if your mother and I gave you a baby sister?”

“I’m sorry?” Jazz thinks she has something in her ears, but she can hear just fine. “What was that?”

“Chin up Jazzerincess! We just thought it would be a good time to make an addition to our happy little family, is all!”

Jazz thinks for a few moments. She shudders in horror at the thought of a baby being raised in a death trap like their current house. She’s old enough to handle herself, but an infant can’t dodge lasers like she can, let alone feed itself if their parents forget to eat again.

“Mom, dad– I love you both dearly, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a baby at your age, not when I’m about to graduate and not when you’re so far into your research…”

“Honey, no, not a baby. Another teenager. She’s not a baby at all, just the niece of an old friend.” Maddie looks at Jack before face palming. “I swear, Jack, you need to let me do the explaining sometimes.”

“But she’ll be treated as our baby girl no matter what!”

Jazz looks between her parents as though they’re crazy. “Don’t you two think this is really sudden?”

“It is a little spontaneous, but my old pal from college– you remember V-man right Jazzy-pants?” Jack rambles on. “Well, he can’t handle raising his little niece by himself anymore and thinks it’s best for her to go to public school with kids a little closer to her age! At least during the school year, he said he wants her to visit during the summer still if she’d be okay with it.”

“We’ve been discussing it for a few weeks, and your father and I both agree that she should be around other girls like us at her age. Not isolated in the middle of Wisconsin with Vlad of all people…” Maddie looks off to the side for a second but her expression is otherwise unreadable. “Besides, we can finally make use of that spare room!”

“Whaddya say, Jazz? Is there room for one more Fenton in this old house or what?”

Jazz knows she can’t talk them down from a decision once it’s been made, so she puts on her perfect daughter face and grimaces. 

“Sounds great!”

Jazz spends the next several weeks desperately cleaning the house and removing stray weapons and forgotten fridge experiments.

The ends of her hair are singed, but she needed a haircut anyways.

The week before her new sister arrives, Jazz finishes emptying out the closet of the spare room. The boxes of tax records (really mom and dad? These should be in a filing cabinet!!) are heavy with dust, but she perseveres as she carries them up to the attic.

There’s a lot more stuff in the attic than she remembers– a full set of furniture and boxes without labels. A few random, broken and dusty model rockets sit in a corner and she gathers the pieces to one she recognizes as one of the Mars rovers.

She wonders why she knows what it is, but shrugs as she puts it in her pocket. 

A box stands out to her amongst the crowd, however– a smaller crate, one labeled with a bunch of nonsense in her parents’ handwriting, taped up and even chained shut. It’s an oddity, but she assumes it’s just a forgotten experiment and shrugs it off– best to ignore something innocuous but possibly dangerous to her clothes and hair.

Her dad calls her for dinner, and as Jazz makes her way down, the strange box slips her mind in the awe that comes from the aspect of a rare family meal together.

“Jazzy, come meet your new sister!” 

Said new sister looks thirteen at best. She’s short and dressed like a typical skater kid, slouchy hat and shorts with an oversized hoodie. She looks nothing like Vlad, but she is his niece, so Jazz pushes the thought into the back of her head.

“This is Danielle Masters, she’s almost fourteen.” Jack introduces her with his hands dwarfing the poor girl’s shoulders. She grimaces at the full name and turns expectantly at Jazz.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Jasmine, but please. Call me Jazz, alright?” She offers the girl a hand to shake as a gesture.

Danielle looks at Jazz with a furrowed brow before ignoring the outstretched hand, keeping her own hands in her pockets. “I’m Ellie. Please don’t call me Danielle. Or Dani.”

Jazz lets the rudeness slide off her back and breathes deeply. She can do this. She can treat this girl as a sister. Probably. It’ll just take a while to get through the walls around her heart, is all.

“Alright then, Ellie. It’s good to meet you, would you like to see your room?”

She looks up at Jazz and her face softens. “I thought you’d never ask.”

The first week of having a sister, Jazz has to learn to race to the bathroom in the morning, lest she fight for her right to pee first.

It feels familiar, but she doesn’t know why.

The second week of having a sister, Jazz learns Ellie is great at math, but has trouble focusing in class.

She tutors the girl, and the way she rolls her eyes makes her heart clench with a fondness she doesn’t understand.

The third week of having a sister, Jazz catches Ellie sneaking in through her window after midnight. She takes one look at the skateboard in the girl’s hand and makes the promise not to nark, so long as Ellie tells her where she’s going beforehand.

Ellie hugs her tightly and Jazz has no idea why it makes a single tear leak out of her eye.

A month of having a sister, and Jazz is regularly making two lunches in the morning. Peanut butter and jelly with a snack baggie of pretzels and a note saying she’s proud of Ellie’s grades.

Jazz feels complete in a way she’s never felt before.

Four months of having a sister, Jazz finds the Mars rover model under her bed while she’s packing for college in a few months.

She dusts it off and puts it together. Ellie walks in on her attempts and takes over. She is able to tell Jazz everything about it as the two work in silence.

Jazz makes a note to retrieve the rest of the models from the attic that weekend.

She wonders why both of them look like they’re about to cry.

After six months and two weeks of having a sister, Jazz walks in on Ellie working to open the mysterious crate that had been in the attic.

Both girls look at each other, Ellie like she’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Ellie hands it over to Jazz, the girl’s hands covered in burns from something the box is radiating.

Jazz panics and tosses it on the floor before gripping Ellie by the wrist and bringing her to the bathroom, running cold water over the injury as she looks for the number to poison control.

“Jazz! I’m okay! Mom and dad’s tech just hurts me sometimes, okay?!” she takes her hands out from the sink and the reddened flesh is angry against her normal pallor. 

“Keep that under the water until I can find the number, okay?” Jazz feels her heart racing, but she was able to find a scarily heavy duty first aid kit in the bathroom between her’s and Ellie’s bedrooms. “I swear I had that number somewhere–”

Just as Jazz finds the number, it’s being snatched out of her hands by her sister. 

“Ellie!” Jazz watches in disbelief as she rushes off to her bedroom and slams the door shut. She brings the first aid kit and knocks on the door rapidly. “Ellie!! You’re hurt! Let me in!”

“No! I’m fine! Go away, Jazz!!”

The knob is locked and Jazz pulls a hairpin out to start picking the lock. “No, it’s not fine. I will not go away. Open the door or I’ll break your lock!”

“Leave it! Just forget you saw anything!! Ow!” Ellie yelps from inside the bedroom as something clangs to the floor.

“You’re hurt! Stop shutting me out and let me in!” Jazz snaps her hairpin and grabs another to keep working. “I don’t wanna call 911 cuz they’ll ask more questions, so just let me in! Really, Danny why don’t you ever just let me fix you up without a fight??!”

The racket behind the door stops suddenly and Jazz hears her hairpin drop as the door is unlocked by her sister.

“Don’t call me that.” Ellie stands in the crack of the door, face pale as a ghost with intense eyes. “Don’t ever call me that Jazz…”

Jazz feels the hurt in her small voice and stands from where she’d been attempting to pick the door. She feels dread in her gut at just how hurt Ellie sounds and scrambles to explain herself, sweat beginning to bead down her spine. “Sorry, I don’t know– what even came over me?” Jazz feels a chill descend upon the both of them. “I… you’re Ellie, I’ve never called you anything else before? So why did I?”

Ellie moves and motions for Jazz to come into the room.

The strange crate lay on the floor, open and toppled on its side. A photo album spills out on top of what looks like one of their parent’s research folders.

“So you don’t remember?” The sadness in Ellie’s voice is thick as she stands, holding a much less burned hand behind her back. “I thought you might, especially with me in his room.”

“This room has always been empty… right?” Ellie sniffles, her eyes fall to the box on the ground and Jazz’s follow.

“Tell me, Jazz. Do you always feel like something’s just… missing? That there’s a part of you that’s gone and it won’t ever ever come back no matter how you scream and cry? And that it’s always going to be missing forever and ever and ever?”

“I did, for a long time, yes. And then you came along and the feeling was a lot less.”

“And did you, I don’t know, ever think about why that might be?” Ellie looks at Jazz and rubs her eyes with an angry expression.

“I did all the time, especially in this bedroom, but I always just assumed mom and dad lost a child, so it wasn’t my place to ask– don’t dig up those awful memories if it was a long time ago.”

“Jazz, do babies like model rockets? Do they like space books and horror movies and the stars?” 

“No, no they don’t– that stuff was left from the previous owners… no wait this was an office before it was a house, so then why–”

Jazz looks at Ellie and it’s as though her eyes flash an inhuman color for a second as she rages.

“It’s not fair! It isn’t! Why is it that everyone else gets to go on living like they were and yet I’m stuck here in this place, in this body, forced to remember everything and wonder WHY everything happened?”

Ellie shouts at Jazz, she screams at the sky, she gesticulates wildly.

“Ellie, you aren’t making any sense! You aren’t doing your explanation any justice–”

“I don’t have to do it justice, Jazz! Just look at it!” Ellie yells in frustration, pointing up to the specific spot Jazz has always spent time pondering.

She could see the imprint of one glow in the dark star that had been missed, painted over in landlord white. The thing she’d always wondered about, pointed out by someone nearly a stranger but yet not .

“I don’t understand–” 

“Of course you don’t! Nobody does! I’m the only one who remembers!!”

Ellie’s eyes were wet with furious tears, but before Jazz could offer her comfort the small girl pushes her way out of the room and runs down the street towards her favorite skate park.

Jazz takes the moment to breathe as the warmth returns to the room. Her eyes follow the mess of things spilled out of the weird crate once she notes Ellie’s taken her phone with her.

There’s several photo albums and a single file spilling out of the container, so she quickly dons rubber gloves before taking them in hand to the bathroom to investigate.

Jazz Fenton feels her entire world crumble more with each photo album she reads.

Ellie mentioned a ‘him’ that Jazz didn’t remember, and this Danny kid seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

The first time she sees a baby picture of herself and Danny, she ruins it with her tears. 

She shakes with her sobs as she moves from album to album, asking herself why.

She won’t have to wonder for long. Not when she gets to the classified document labeled ‘Phantom’.

Her parents' research on ghosts was apparently successful years ago and nobody remembered so. All Jazz knew was that the portal they’d been building suddenly exploded when they turned it on, and the duo had spent the last few years trying to fix it.

Jazz didn’t like the fact this file was in the same box as the albums about Danny. Every new entry about this Phantom speaks of the ghost boy as though he were nothing more than a creature– a being of nothing deserving of hatred and contempt.

But each entry was biased, even with her unscientific eye, terribly biased. Even lab rats are treated with more respect than this Phantom.

Jazz scanned every inch of the thick folder, turning more green in the face as she read the various things they wanted to do to the poor boy.

It turns out her parents somehow managed to capture Phantom.

Her parents kept him for an entire year, and interrogated him on where Danny had gone, it seems.

They interrogated him until he wasted away to nothing in their clutches. 

They may not have had their son back, but they had the perfect research specimen.

Jazz’s hands shake.

It turns out they discovered human-ghost hybrids can exist when they tested his DNA.

The same test revealed a mitochondrial match to Maddie.

Jazz nearly pukes.

The last entry in the file states as such.

They realized too late that Phantom and Danny were one in the same. The two were overcome with grief, which Jazz felt neither had the right to feel despite her obsession with psychology. The two also managed to know about a ghost that could grant wishes.

They stated these notes and photos of their son would be kept in a ghost-proof container, memories they were in too much pain to ever fully destroy, and the record of the horrible tests and murder of their own son needed to be kept as a warning, should they ever think to do something so sinister again– noted by both to be likely should they fall down the same path.

The last entry in the file is an apology to Danny.

How sorry they are.

How Desiree only granted them the wish in pity.

But not a single apology to any of the people they’d be changing the memories of.

Not a single apology to her for murdering her brother and making her feel empty.

Jazz stands tall and gathers the albums, the file, and shoves them into her suitcase. She grabs her parents’ suitcases as well and packs everything of hers and Ellie’s.

She’s not about to live with a pair of murderers, not when Ellie might have something similar to Danny, although Jazz isn’t sure what.

She leaves her house keys behind on the note she hastily scribbled on the table and doesn’t look back.

Jazz’s van pulls up to the skate park as the sun sets.

Ellie waves and jogs over with an apologetic grin before noticing the tension in Jazz’s shoulders.

“Did you remember?”

“I don’t remember him, but I know what happened to him. You’re safer with Vlad.”

“I doubt that, but since he also doesn’t remember, he’s been a lot more tolerable to deal with.” Ellie shrugs and buckles herself in. “Is it as bad as I could feel?”

Jazz starts driving and glances over to Ellie as the girl pulls her knees to her chin. “What do you mean?”

“I could feel how much pain he was in somehow, and then it stopped, and I’ve felt alone and lost ever since.”

Jazz pats Ellie on the head and keeps her eyes on the road. 

“It’s bad, but we’ll talk about it once I get you some ice cream. I was kind of a shitty big sister earlier and I think you could use a treat.”

“Aces…”

Dear Jack and Maddie,

Ellie wanted to go back to being home schooled due to intense bullying at Casper High. I’ve taken it upon myself as a legal adult to drive her back to her uncle’s home. I have also decided to stay with Mr. Masters until the fall semester starts for me, since to drive back home with so little time between now and then is a silly idea. 

Do not contact me.

Jasmine Fenton.