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“Oh for the love of Satan…Danny,” Sam groans, right after she finishes sliding her hand down her face as slowly as possible. “Danny,” she says with a shake of her head, “come on. You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am!” Danny says with a grin, and tilts his head back up toward the sky. Or rather, up at the sun, to be precise, that’s on its way to getting covered up by the encroaching moon. He makes a show breathing in as deeply as he can through his nostrils and lets it out in a loud, triumphant huff as slowly as he possible can. "Mmm…yes! Just smell that air!"
“Danny,” Jazz says beside them. “I get it. You’re a half-ghost, and that means you aren’t affected by certain things that normal people that aren’t, to use a phrase, permanently one foot in the grave. I get it. I really do—”
“Yeah, I dunno, Jazz,” Tucker adds in, standing next to Danny, whose face looks so innocently, mischievously cherubic. “You sure don’t sound very convinced right now—”
“—but please, for the love of God, put your glasses on,” Jazz finishes, more resigned than anything close to begging and worried, and shoves the tinted shades in Danny’s direction. Danny, who turns around and whose hands come up automatically and catch them before they stumble right out of his grasp. “Having a space ghost core doesn’t mean you should go flaunting it wherever you feel like it. Especially when Mom and Dad can come over here at any second.”
“Oh come on! Let me have a little fun here. Mom and Dad are running around somewhere thinking a ghost is going to pop out; we'll be fine! And you’ve been wanting to know what’s different about me since the accident, right? Well, now’s your chance!”
“Okay, but this is Mom and Dad we're talking about here. I don’t want your secret getting out.”
“I’m with Jazz on this,” Sam says. “How are you going to explain to your mom and dad that you have a higher resistance to going blind looking at a solar eclipse?”
Danny blinks at them, glances down at the paper glasses, then back up. “…Fenton contacts?”
“Danny,” Jazz tells him as patiently as she can muster, “You don’t wear contacts. We don't even make contacts.”
“…Invisible contacts on the black market?”
“Danny. Please,” Jazz says, world-weary and very much sounding like she’s close to ripping the glasses out of hands and shoving them onto his face. “Just put them on.”
“But I have a space core—!” he tries to whine.
“And that’s great. Really! But you’re going to look like an absolute fool for being the only person in Amity Park that isn’t wearing eye protection.”
“At least wear them until the eclipse passes,” Sam puts in with a shrug. “You gotta put on an act for them.”
“A very convincing, very normal, and very boring act,” Tucker puts in. “You know – how humans usually are.”
“Tucker!”
“What, it’s true. Humans are boring!”
“And you don’t think ghosts can get bored, too?”
“Yes!”
“Look at it this way, Danny,” Jazz tells him. “Mom and Dad are crazy enough as it is, and – I mean no disrespect – you’re kind of bit of a loose cannon where it comes to keeping your secret identity under wraps, regardless of where you are throughout the day. It’s bad enough as it is that we’re known throughout the entire state of Illinois and Wisconsin as the children of ghost hunters of questionable moral and ethical integrity, mental health, and workplace compliance.”
“Okay. So what about it? You're not telling me anything new. You gotta do more than give me your standard basic pop psychology, Jazz.”
“Danny," she levels with him. "Do you want to be lobbed in the same group with Mom and Dad? By yourself?”
Danny stares at Jazz. Jazz stares back, one eyebrow raised. Tucker and Sam lean over the railing, watching and waiting.
Danny makes a face and grimaces. “…You know what, point taken,” he says, and slides the shades over his eyes.
Jazz smirks. “That’s the spirit!”