Disclaimer: Inevitably not mine

A/N: I set a challenge on Livejournal: if you would provide me with a piece of fanart, I would write a short ficlet for/based on it. Myaibou requested something for dannyxsam-club (dot) deviantart (dot) com (slash) gallery (slash) 2886559 (hash slash) d4hum2e.

Miracle Cure

© Scribbler, December 2011

"Sam!"

Sam rolled over in bed and pulled the pillow over her head. "Mrrf … five more minutes …"

"Sam!" The call came more insistently. "Sam, wake up!"

She clamped the pillow against her ears, trying to block out the voice, but that did exactly nothing. Eventually she sat up, muttering, "Okay, okay, I'm up, I'm …" She paused. "What the hell happened to my bedroom?"

It wasn't that the Tidiness Trolls had come in and cleaned up in the dead of night, or that her dirty laundry was missing, or that all her CDs were suddenly in alphabetical order. Her room was gone. Literally. Sam stared around her, bewildered. The back of her head hurt, so she rubbed it as she tried to peer into the darkness and make her things magically reappear.

No such luck.

"Sam!"

"Danny?" She crawled to the edge of her bed, but since it was floating in a sea of black nothingness, she thought better of getting off to wander around looking for the origin of the shout. "Where are you?"

"Wake up!"

"I am awake!" she yelled back. "Danny, where are you?"

"Sam! Sam!"

"Right here! Me Sam, you Danny. Me confused, you not helping." She tried a different tactic. Disappearing bedrooms were not the strangest thing ever to happen to her, but throughout all the most bizarre events of her life, there had always been a few constants. "Tucker? Are you there?"

For a moment she heard nothing. For some reason, her breath came shorter and the back of her head throbbed a little more. Dread crept up her spine. What was going on here? Had her whole house been zapped into the Ghost Zone? Had she? Or was this something more insidious? At this stage, she would not have been surprised if little green men had beamed down into the school office and given everyone a test in thermo-nuclear physics. Dismayed, but not surprised.

"Danny?" she shouted again. "Tucker? Guys? Can you hear me?"

"Sam!" Danny's cry was fainter than before.

"Danny!" Sam got onto her knees, filled her lungs and gave her best Protest Rally Bellow. "DANNY, I'M HERE!"

A spot of light appeared in the darkness.

"OVER HERE!" Sam roared, waving her arms wildly. "I'M OVER HERE!"

"Sam!" the light called.

"DANNY!" Her throat hurt, but she kept yelling. "DANNY! THIS WAY! I'M HERE!"

The spot grew larger, but didn't reform into anything more than a fuzzy patch of brilliance until it hovered directly over her bed. Sam stared up at him. Her face felt like it should be warm, but wasn't. She swallowed a suddenly dry throat.

"Danny?" she croaked.

"Sam!" it shout-whispered, like someone only doing an impression of a yell while telling a story in a quiet library. "Sam, please …"

A piece of the light extended, forming fingers and a recognisable glove. Sam hesitated. What if this was some sort of trap? Where the hell was she? What was going on?

"Please," Danny's voice begged. "You've got to, Sam."

Resolve hardening in a knot of steel, Sam grabbed the outstretched hand. The instant she did, the rest of the light coalesced into a black torso emblazoned with a stylised D, messy white hair, thick dark eyebrows he had always hated and a pair of worried green eyes. Those eyes turned surprised for an instant before the world exploded around them.

Even though Sam was awake, she was sure she felt her eyes snap open again. She blinked, willing away the spots clouding her vision. She was on her back, lying on what felt like her bed again. Had anything changed, or was she still adrift in a sea of Big Fat Nuthin'?

The stringent smell of antiseptic told her no.

"Sam? Sam!"

"Doc!" A voice that could only be Tucker's yelped. "She's awake! Someone! Quick, she's awake!"

"Of course I'm awake," Sam said, or tried to say. Her words came out slurred and her mouth refused to work correctly. Instant panic gripped her. She tried to sit up, which sent the melee of wires and tubes attached to her body clattering like a gamekeeper's gibbet.

"Calm down." Someone took her hand. "It's okay, Sam. You're safe now."

"Huh?" She peered at the speaker, who once again coalesced into messy hair and dark eyebrows, although this time the hair was black and the worried eyes were blue. "D-Danny?"

He smiled wearily. "Welcome back."

"I went somewhere?"

"Dude, you've been unconscious for, like, three days!" Tucker appeared at Danny's elbow. He looked tired too, although nowhere near as much as Danny. Both wore matching expressions of old stress and fresh relief that couldn't quite cancel out the worry lines in their foreheads.

"I have?" Sam said intelligently.

"Don't you remember? Big ghost, big chase, big rock, big fall and big head injury?" Tucker mimed falling backwards and smacking his head off an invisible boulder. "Any of this ringing a bell?"

Sam recalled her throbbing head while she sat on her floating bed – although, she now realised, that must have been a dream. She touched the back of her skull to find it tender and sore. "Three days?" she echoed.

"Uh-huh." Tucker nodded vigorously. "And Danny didn't leave your side once. Well, except for pee breaks, but you gotta give a guy that, right? Because peeing into a dish would be all sorts of yuck. He totally didn't move the rest of the time. I had to bring him candy bars to keep him from passing out and practically had to shove them into his mouth myself. He spent the whole three days just watching you and talking to you, trying to make you wake up. I was here too, but I did the sleeping for both of us and told the right cover stories to the right people and - whoops!"

As the room began filling with adults in white lab coats and green nurse scrubs, Sam had eyes only for Danny. He looked abashed at Tucker's recount and elbowed his friend as they were pushed aside.

"This is rather miraculous, young lady," said the head doctor as he examined her. "Rather miraculous indeed."

Sam's fingers curled into a fist, remembering the feel of a ghostly hand gripping hers and pulling her back into the light. "Yeah," she murmured. "Miraculous."

Fin.