Chasing Ghosts

By: Rookey

Now that you're older are you
Dreaming of the sunshine of your youth?
You know that it's useless looking back
There's no redemption there for you

Cheerleader - "The Sunshine of Your Youth"

Sam thought for sure she saw him. He was a flash of an image, a vague impression of a person branded into the background of the nightclub – someone there and suddenly gone, a hallucination in the flashing strobe lights.

He was something of a daydream – the result of either one too many drinks or an overactive imagination. She thought it the former but with about as much weight as the latter, so perhaps it was both. He looked the same as he ever did: flyaway dark hair absurdly wild around a boyish face, high cheekbones bearing the promise of masculine aesthetics after the grand leap of puberty. Clad in his trademark red hoodie, Sam could recognize him anywhere.

She took off like a shot, pushing past the crowds of obnoxious people, shoving and breathing and yelling just too loudly, she was halfway certain she couldn't hear herself think. Her breaths came out in thick, powerful pants as the darkened bodies pressed in and the lights seemed to flash brighter than normal. Sam's heart was pounding, blood roaring in her ears. She was seeing his face everywhere, on everyone. She thought she ran into him once, but it wasn't him – the club goer pushed her away with a snarl. She returned it, and continued onwards.

Sam really didn't have any idea where she was going. She only had an image to go off of, something of a flash, some kind of pressed afterimage ever-present in her memory like stars in one's concussed vision. She allowed her gut to pull her forward, saying nothing to the group of people she came with – no way of farewell, nothing of a wave or even a "one sec". She was desperate, driven by both the desire to follow the image and her constant repulsion towards people and crowds.

She was antsy as it was - this was her salvation, chasing strobe light afterimages based on gut feeling alone as she dove through the crowd.

The thick turned into thin and the thin turned into nothing and eventually, Sam was outside the club, panting, wheezing, holding her discarded black heels in one hand and her clutch in the other. She was in the back, alone in an alley near the dumpsters. The cold mid-November air bit at her form and she felt it meld into her bones, biting, becoming a part of her.

She looked up, eyes searching, hoping to find something, anything, to reward her chase.

At this point, Sam could have taken his discarded sock and have been this happiest nineteen-year-old on the planet.

But there was nothing. It was dark and damp and cold from the recent Chicago showers, the freezing temperatures biting at her bare legs as she stood before an abandoned dark alley, quivering and suddenly very, very still.

Still to a point.

After a moment, Sam let out a long breath. It was hopeless. He wasn't here. She didn't see him. She had to stop hoping for better, had to believe that he really wasn't coming back.

She had to stop chasing ghosts.

"If you stop chasing ghosts, Sam, how will you ever find any?"

Sam bit back a scream. She whipped around, dancing wildly as her bare feet patted against the cold, harsh concrete.

Then, she saw him. Her eyes blew wide, disbelief and unbridled shock running rampant throughout her form, shaking her to the core. Because sitting there, on top of the closed lid of the dumpster, sat a boy who's crystalline eyes made it look as if he had never missed a beat – as if he had been present, somehow, for the last five years of Sam's life.

As if he had never died.

As if he had never been mourned for.

As if the closed casket funeral hadn't been words enough as the town wept for the boy who's life was cut too short.

As if he were oblivious to it all.

"You were never good at keeping your thoughts to yourself, you know." He continued, waving a hand conversationally as if this were all very normal, as if he hadn't been gone for five years.

"It's not a bad habit, per say," he said. "You just say what's on your mind. You think it and suddenly blah, it just comes out. Not like blah, blah – more articulate than that. It's like… a sophisticated blah. You know? You know."

"You're…" Sam struggled to find the words, heels having long since fallen from her limp and dangling arms. She pushed a hand through short black strands, running along the back of her neck. It was a habit. One she picked up from him. "You're... real happy for a dead man."

Somehow, he had the audacity to laugh. "Me? Happy? Sure am. I don't know about 'dead', though. Ghosts are a little out there, don't'cha think?"

"You'd be surprised, Danny. Some people still believe." Sam's voice had turned into a mutter now, her gaze roaming over him hungrily. She had lost him when they were fourteen. There had been an accident, something horrible and gruesome that had haunted her nightmares to this very day. She could swear to the high heavens she could sometimes hear his scream in the wind as it rustled through the trees, scraping the sides of her dorm room as she ducked under the covers in hopes that her roommate wouldn't see her shocking display of cowardice.

His body had been burned beyond recognition. Black and charred and laying bloody and raw on the basement floor after the accident, she saw a paramedic retch at the sight of the body. He was dead at the scene.

But here he was, all lean muscle and skin as if he had never left. Time seemed to have treated him the same as it treated her and the rest of the world, looking at him now he almost wasn't recognizable.

In the nightclub, she saw him as he was. A combination of memory and flashing lights distorted his image into something different. Now, this was almost a completely different person. He was taller, leaner and masculine like his bear of a father before him. His hair was the same as ever – flyaway and unconstrained by gravity. His eyes were just as blue, just as shocking as she remembered. The bags beneath them were heavy and defined, his cheekbones high but his face gaunt and hollow.

Sam felt a pang of sympathy for him. And for once, she was at a loss for words.

Danny let out another laugh. It was more of a bark than anything else, the sound croaked and harsh on the ears. "Last time I checked that place out, you'd never know."

"…How." Sam finally decided, the word a hard statement rather than a question. She had a million questions firing through her head, her thoughts breaking from their paralysis and driving up her heart rate in her chest. The one word though, was all she could get out.

"How'd I get to Amity Park?" Danny asked with a playful smile. "I walked. Took a bus or two. Didn't find you guys anywhere, so I moved on. I didn't take you as the Chicago type, Sam. Always thought you'd end up in college somewhere in Colorado. Somewhere nature-y. You've changed, Sammy."

"Speak for yourself," Sam bit out, put off by the fluidity in which he dodged her question. Dodged her accusation, more accurately. "Last time I saw you, you were dead. Burned black, blood everywhere. I don't think you had any skin left on your body."

Danny winced, cringing as she described the scene of the accident. "…Surprise?"

"Danny, how are you back?!" Sam suddenly shouted, her previous sympathy suddenly drowned out by a stroke of red-hot rage. "You were dead! I saw it. We had a funeral, Daniel Fenton. Your family mourned for you. Tucker mourned for you. I mourned for you. And you just show up, five years later? In the middle of some nightclub in the middle of Chicago? Explain this, Danny." She sighed. "Please."

"I…" He started, faltering as his words shook, his previous confidence gone. "I… I don't know what to tell you, Sam. It was years ago. One minute I was in my parents basement, and the next I'm somewhere in Mexico. I don't know what happened." He shook his head, struggling to remember. "My hair was white. My eyes were green. Sam, I wasn't myself. I wasn't human."

"You're a ghost." Sam stated, heart sinking. She wanted to believe that he was real. That her best friend was really alive and kind-of well, sitting on a dumpster before her on some random weekend in the middle of November, outside some random nightclub not too far from her college campus. Sam desperately wanted to believe it was a coincidence, them running into each other.

But she wasn't that naïve.

To her great surprise, he shook his head. "Sam, listen. I don't know what you saw that day. But whatever it was, that wasn't me. Maybe some parallel-universe-kind-of-fucked-up version of me, but that wasn't me. I dunno who you buried. I don't know if it's a Schrödinger's cat – some dead version of me – but whatever it was, it was a lie."

"Then why didn't you come back?"

"What, come back some mutated half-ghost freak?" His tone was bitter, now. Biting. The words hurt like a physical force against her. He scoffed, rolling his eyes. "No. You know how my parents would have seen me? They would have shot me on the spot."

"Danny, they're your parents."

"They're ghost hunters. I'm not dead, Sam. But I'm not alive either."

"You look alive to me."

Now his laugh was three times louder – high pitched, barking and wailing. He shot her a look that sent chills up her spine, his iconic blue eyes a piercing, eerie shade of deathly toxic green. They were glowing, all consuming; something of a nightmare, something out of a horror movie. But at the same time they were flat, haunting, dead. "Does this look alive to you, Sam?"

Choking down her initial response to get the hell away, to retreat back into the nightclub and utilize her fake ID to drink away her sorrows, Sam instead resolved to look Danny straight in the eye and shoot him a grin. "Looks a little goth, actually. Didn't realize I was rubbing off on you."

Obviously not expecting the response, the green faded back into blue in a second as he raised an eyebrow in confusion.

"But alive or dead or not," Sam said, "why didn't you come back? At least tell us you were around? Why come back now?"

"I…" He swung his legs off the side of the dumpster and landed on the ground soundlessly. He drew closer to her, his form dwarfing hers by several inches. She felt suddenly exposed in front of him, as if his gaze could tear holes through her. "I wasn't ready, Sam. I couldn't face everyone. Not you or Tucker or mom or dad or Jazz. Ghosts, they… they follow me. Wherever I go, they pop up. I couldn't bring that to Amity Park."

"Then why find me now?" Sam asked, her mind going numb at the events that had been transpiring before her.

"Because you weren't in Amity Park." He admitted simply, tearing his eyes away from hers. "I was finally able to go back. Five years later and I finally had my… my powers under control. If the ghosts followed me, I could fight them off. I could protect everyone. I just couldn't keep staying away, but…"

"We were gone." Sam finished.

"You were." He said. "I tracked you and Tucker down, after finding out that everyone thought I was dead. I didn't want to face my family after that, after so long... I didn't want them to see me like this – so I let them be. I found out that you went to the University of Chicago, so…."

"Here you are."

"Yeah."

"Now what?"

He chuckled, bowing a chunk of dark hair out of his face in the process. "Honestly? I don't know. I didn't think I'd make it this far."

Finally, Sam laughed. She found the irony of it all hilarious. "Typical."

He stuck out his tongue, at a loss for what to do. Sam could see it written all over his face.

She didn't know what to do either. She was stuck, gutted, and it seemed as though this moment were frozen in time forever – two friends, reunited after five long years of mourning and loss.

She wanted to tell him to find his family and tell them he was alive - they've mourned for far too long. She wanted to tell him to find Tucker, who was a freshman at MIT in Massachusetts. It was a few states over, but Tucker took the loss pretty hard - they were best friends for the majority of their lives. They practically shared the same crib. Sam's measly six years of friendship with Danny couldn't hold a candle to that.

But she didn't do any of that. Instead, she just stared at him, jaw hanging slightly agape as she truly took in the sight before her - Danny in all his glory. Before she knew fully what she was doing, she had grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down into a tight hug, clinging to his form like a lifeline.

"... I missed you, Danny. I missed you so much."

He was hesitant at first, but his hands found their way to her back and he lightly held her back, his grip tightening as he realized that she wasn't going to let go. Danny returned the hug with full force, burying his head into her shoulder, his breath light and cold as it ran down her back with every exhale.

"I... missed you too, Sam. God, you have no idea... I-"

His words broke off in a gasp and he stiffened suddenly, his form going rigid, muscles taught as he gripped Sam. She felt a rush of cold send chills down her spine, raising the hair on her arms and blowing her eyes wide.

Danny broke the hug, hands on both of her shoulders. "I... I have to go. I'll be back, Sam, I promise. Just... please forgive me."

Just like that, he was gone. Vanished in a twist of smoke, like the ghost of a person Sam once knew.

And Sam was left to wonder if she really did have too much to drink.

So she was left staring at the place Danny once was, the memory of him fading like a strobe light afterimage in the dark, wondering if he were ever there at all.

idk where this came from. I was kinda having a shitty day and wanted to stretch my writing legs a little bit, but couldn't think of anything to write. So I kind of just started writing and this came out. Just a oneshot, possibly a set up for a possible maybe AU where the portal accident went in a totally different direction? I was thinking schrodinger's cat, where the cat is technically both alive and dead, but what if we took that to the next level? What if Danny left an afterimage in the portal, the dead and burned body, while at the same time he was thrown through the portal and kind of spit out wherever? (In this case Mexico but idk). So he discovers that he's half ghost and is so ashamed of the whole thing that he doesn't go back to Amity Park until he can control all of his powers and feels capable enough to defend the town. By the time that happens, Jazz, Sam, and Tucker are in college and everyone's moved on from Danny Fenton. Idk, it's late at night. Y'all free to do with this bunny what you will. I own nothing mentioned.

Have a nice day/night, please leave a review on ur way out.

Peace,

Rookey