Chapter Text
Jazz Fenton is not blind to her social reputation in the ever-evolving food chain of Lemures Middle School.
Why would she be?
She’s curated it since the second grade, when she was sick and tired of being picked on by her classmates for reasons involving her parents’ occupations, and the teachers wouldn’t help her. Just like they wouldn’t — and didn’t — help Danny.
It was armor for herself. Fighting back physically or verbally wouldn’t do anything, since she already knew the teachers wouldn’t take her side. She’d seen it happen to the other kids that were disliked like she was. She was at a natural disadvantage that her classmates were free from.
Fighting openly only got people in bigger trouble and their tormentors more to work with.
So she took the opposite approach.
The “kill em with kindness” approach.
Make everyone like her to the point they won’t feel the need to be mean to her anymore. Not without feeling immense amount of guilt for it.
If that fails, make enough friends that any of her enemies will risk tanking their own relationships by trying to cross her.
If everyone, even the teachers, think she’s a delight to work with; nice to be around; someone who doesn’t stir the pot, then they’re always going to take her side when someone else tries to start something.
Quite smugly, Jazz is happy to say it worked.
What she’s trying to say—
Is Jazz knows she’s popular. Very popular. And while she couldn't care less about the “celebrity rankings” that followed everyone around school like a stain, that didn’t mean she didn’t know she was solidly in the “S-List” in the eyes of most everybody else.
(A list that her baby brother’s “popular” bullies will never— and could never —even reach, on account that they’re only popular because they’re mean and have the backing of the teachers. While the S-Listers like Jazz are popular because they’re nice along with that same backing.)
It suited her just fine.
It meant she got away with everything, could talk to anybody regardless of their own standing, and that anybody who cared about the rankings would listen to just about anything she said, regardless of the request or reason.
It also meant that she knew just about anything, and everyone told her everything. All she had to do was ask the right way, or sit and listen.
Which brought her to her latest problem.
“Weston’s creeping again?” Spike asks, frowning as he leans against the wall beside her. His jewelry jangles against his arms pleasantly, and his presence is almost a soothing balm to Jazz’s soul.
Keyword: Almost.
The simmering, protective fury bubbling up inside her chest burns just a liittle too hot to be appeased by anything less than Wes Weston’s weaselly little head on a pike.
Jazz promptly pulls her mouth back into a hiss, and spits out a quiet, vitriolic: “Yes.”
Wes Weston: a fourteen year old, ginger-haired boy in Jazz’s 8th grade class that’s been stalking her twelve year old baby brother for — to her knowledge — the last few weeks.
Where Jazz is standing, she has a clear view of Danny and his friends huddled in a little alcove. Danny’s hiding a bruise on his cheek that he couldn’t get to heal fast enough this morning, when an impromptu ghost attack occurred during breakfast.
Jazz had distracted their parents to give him the time to run off, and when she ran into him at the school gate a few minutes ago, she stuffed a few snacks into his hands that she snagged from the pantry. He didn’t get to eat.
He’s leaning into Tucker’s side, some of his curls squishing against his friend’s shoulder, and he’s laughing at something Sam said.
The sight makes Jazz fond beyond words. Danny deserves his pockets of joy, he does so much for the city and never gets acknowledged for it.
What doesn’t make her fond, however, is being able to see the back of Weston’s head, peering around the corner — because Lemures is built strangely and asymmetrically, and Jazz is at a diagonal that allows her a great deal of sight across the quad — and watching her little brother.
There are other students around, coagulating in groups with their friends, but they’re hardly paying him much mind.
There are no teachers. They’re all inside, watching the kids in the gym, waiting to be dismissed for first period.
Jazz digs her nails into her palms and folds her arms into her chest, forcing some sort of pressure on herself so she doesn’t go up behind Weston and drag him to the ground by his stupid hair.
(It’d be the only fight Jazz Fenton would get in, and she has plenty of get-out-of-jail free cards to get away with it. It’d be only a slap on the wrist for her, and utter social death for Wes Weston.)
(All she would have to do is tell the truth anyways: Weston has been creeping on her little brother. Her closest friends can confirm it for her — she asked them to keep an eye out for it on school grounds once she became aware of the problem — and even more friends willing to lie for her.)
(But if she did that, word would get out. “Danny Fenton has a stalker” would blaze through the grades like a grass fire.)
(It’d reach Danny’s ears, and it’d reach his bullies’ ears too. He’d be horrified and ashamed that something like that was found out, and they’d have material to attack him with.)
It’s a very near thing.
From the corner of her eye, Spike side-eyes her. “Do you want me to get him for you?” He asks, a displeased lilt in his voice.
Jazz’s eyes narrow; she tries to blow up Weston’s head with her gaze alone. “No.” ‘Not yet’ she almost says, because she’s terribly tempted.
Spike’s not as popular as she is, and he’s been in fights before. He can’t get it on his record, and she’d need to gag-order him not to tell the teachers why he did it. It’d be a lose-lose all around, with Spike taking flak for it while giving Weston a pedestal to stand on.
She needs to figure out what to do, and fast. She’s been trying to take it slow ever since she found out about Weston’s stalking habit; asking around and watching him herself; plotting with her best friends on what to do.
But she’s not sure how much more of it Danny can take.
He’s trying to hide it, but it’s fraying on his mental state. She can tell.
(Jazz is not blind, and there’s a reason she picked up psychology after he died in their HOUSE had his accident. It was to help figure out what was wrong.)
(Like all the times before, it was coming in about as handy as Cassandra’s curse.)
And he has so much to deal with already.
(Jazz peeked into his room once. It was 3am and she woke up sweating from the heater. She’d gone to mess with the thermostat in the hallway, and saw Danny’s glow from beneath his door.)
(She’d laid down flat on the floor to peer underneath, too nervous to actually knock and offer her assistance.)
(They’ve been getting close again ever since Danny told her about dying his powers. But there’s still a glass wall there that Jazz can’t climb yet.)
(She misses the way their relationship used to be, the grief gnaws in the pit of her chest like a gaping wound some nights.)
(But she’d peered under the door one night anyways, and saw him bleeding out across the carpet. Green, viscous, with Danny staring blankly at the ceiling like a corpse in his ghost form.)
(The same way she found him in Mom’s arms the day of his accident. This time, he wasn’t breathing.)
He looks so tired these days when he thinks nobody’s looking. Jazz is always looking out for her baby brother.
So she has to do something soon, before Weston breaks off more of whatever’s left of him.
(Vlad’s doing enough of that already. She’s never forgiven herself for giving their parents the idea to take her and Danny with to the college reunion, and she's forgiven herself even less for encouraging them to stay in that house; allowing Masters to get his hands on Danny.)
(She should’ve stayed close. Shouldn’t have left him alone. She wants to snap Vlad’s neck some days.)
(Jazz doesn’t know when she became so violent. Probably around the same time she found out her brother died.)
Her thoughts trail off as she sees Weston shift, tilting to the side — for a fleeting, glorious moment, she thinks he’s going to leave — and reaching into the pocket of his jacket.
He pulls out his phone — Jazz’s stomach twists — and taps his thumb across it briefly. Turning back towards Danny, she catches, even from a distance, the familiar buttons of the camera app.
Her blood runs cold.
Wes Weston is dead meat.