A/N: I dunno where this idea came from but yea… been looking for some decent stranded-on-island fics and without warning I got this idea.
Summary: AU! After exploring the old abandoned "Fenton house," Sam and Tucker go with their class on a trip to Hawaii! But the plane malfunctions over a strange island no one knew existed, and they find themselves stranded with the only four other survivors of the crash. But then they meet the natives, a group of secretive English-speaking people who, Sam swears, look exactly like photographs she's seen before.
Note: In this story, Halfas don't age in their ghost forms, and Danny and Dani are twins. Fraternal, obviously, but they look identical except for their genders. And Vlad isn't a villain in this story.
Pairings: Danny/Sam, Tucker/Jazz, Dash/Paulina, Kwan/Star, Vlad/RandomUnimportantCharacter, Jack/Maddie, Lancer/Nobody
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the idea… I think.
"Sweetie, hurry up. We have to go, before anyone sees us and realizes what happened."
"Just a minute, Mother," the boy called back. His family and Uncle Vlad were standing downstairs with a few other people, waiting for him, but he didn't want to leave. He looked around his room one last time.
They were taking nothing with them. Telling no one what had happened, where they were going... Hell, they didn't know where they were going. He ran a hand through his messy white hair and approached the desk, absently straightening the chairs. He caught sight of the photograph in the metal frame he and his sister always kept in the center of their desk. It was such a happy memory, and he almost grabbed it to take with him.
"Daniel, hurry!"
He knew better, though. They were starting over. Such a memory, from the time before everything went wrong- from before that stupid portal was built and electrocuted everyone in the lab… back when they were all normal… such a memory could only cause pain and regret.
"Daniel, you have ten seconds or I'm coming up there to get you, young man!"
It was with a heavy heart that he carefully and gently lowered the frame so that it was face down, hiding the picture from sight. Everything else would rot but he knew this metal frame would protect a most precious memory.
"Five! Four! Three! Tw-"
"I'm coming!"
Ghosts were a well-known menace in Amity Park, ghost capital of the world. No one knew where they came from, or how they got there, but for as long as even Lancer could remember, ghosts would come and go as they pleased, with only the Guys in White and the Gray family to fight them off.
Samantha Manson and Tucker Foley walked down the street towards school. They were polar opposites; she was a rich, individualistic, ultra-recyclo vegetarian, pale, bottle-black haired goth, and he was a poor, tech-savvy, carnivorous, African-American boy who wanted nothing more than to fit in with the popular crowd. No one knew how these two became best friends in the third grade, and even they themselves weren't sure how they continued being friends all the way through middle and into freshman high school.
Though they both felt like something was missing, they couldn't place it, and neither of them would give the other up for the world.
As the two friends passed "the old Fenton house," as it had been dubbed, they felt a chill run up their spines. Everyone knew the story of the Fentons- a family of ghost hunters lived there a hundred years ago, using technology not even the government had their hands on even to this day. One day they had up and vanished- ghosts had kidnapped them, or they had changed sides, depending on whose version you listened to- and no one had bought the house since. It stood there, a testament to the past, windows and doorway boarded up, the lab everyone knew was below inaccessible due to fallen debris. Many times people had petitioned to destroy it, as it was a blight in the otherwise nice neighborhood, but each time something happened to stop it.
Sam stopped walking to gaze at the old Fenton family home. "Hey Tuck," she started to say, "do you think the Fentons would still live here if they hadn't disappeared?"
Tucker rolled his eyes. They had this conversation almost every day. "Sam, a hundred years is like four or five generations. Even if they didn't disappear, two or three generations ago the kids would have left home instead of staying."
"But the Grays didn't," Sam shot back. "They've lived in the same family manor for the last ten generations. You know ghost hunting families are different from normal people."
"Even so, I still don't think they'd still live there. They'd probably move closer to the school, with how often Casper High gets attacked."
Sam sighed a bit and continued walking. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Just, wouldn't it be cool to see what's inside that house?" she questioned, glancing one last time at the building.
"We can always try to find a way inside," Tucker mentioned off-handedly. "But after school. Mr. Lancer will ban us from the trip to Hawaii if we're late today!"
"We can just claim ghost attack," Sam pointed out.
"We'll look into it after school. No, scratch that- after six. We need to do it after dark, or else we'll be noticed. Now let's just get to school, Sam- Hawaii awaits!"
During lunch, Tucker sat down next to Sam and spread out a large sheet of paper. "Alright, Sam, here's the plan-"
"Tucker, when did you have time to make this?" Same asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
"I made it during study hall," the techno geek answered simply. "Okay, so, about 6:30 we'll tell our parents we're meeting up at the Nasty Burger and going to see a movie. If your parents ask, we're going to see Alfredo the Grape-"
"Are you serious? That's the stupidest-"
"We're not actually going to see it, Sam! Anyway, as I was saying, we'll use that as an excuse, then we'll scout the perimeter. We can't use flashlights until we find a way inside. From a quick glance over, the building seems secure, but those boards haven't been changed in, like, seventy years, so they're weak and rotting. We can probably pry some off a window in back, break the window if it's not already shattered, and climb in that way."
Sam grinned a bit. "That's pretty simple for such a big piece of paper, Tuck."
"Shut up, Sam."
"Make me."
Before Tucker could respond, a voice called out, "Hey Bad Luck Tuck!" Tucker cringed and glanced over his shoulder at the jock and cheerleader approaching them. Beside him, Sam began seething, and he quickly folded up the paper to hide it.
"What do you want, Dash?" Tucker asked with a scowl.
"My cell phone isn't working, so I thought I'd take yours," Dash laughed, grabbing at Tucker's shirt. Tucker, however, moved away before grabbing Sam's wrist and dragging her out of the cafeteria.
"Hey, I'm not done with my lunch!" Sam shouted.
"Sam, there's plenty of grass to eat outside!"
At 6:45, the two friends quietly slid around to the back of the silent building, staying away from the streetlamps. They located a window that was level with their heads and, together, they began pulling the wood off. The wood practically disintegrated in their hands and came off of the window easily.
"The glass is broken but there are sharp jagged bits," Sam told him. "Let's knock those out and we can climb in with less worry."
"Right." The two began chipping away at the glass. It broke easily enough, and they swept it inside the house. "Boost me up, Sam."
Sam was, unarguably, the stronger of the two, so Tucker, albeit hesitantly, had recognized that despite her gender she could definitely kick his butt and defend herself… and he couldn't pull himself up onto the windowsill. The goth girl laced her fingers together, so her hands made a cup, and Tucker, one hand on the windowsill and the other on Sam's shoulder, stepped up into her hands and was lifted up to crawl through.
Once Tucker landed on the other side, Sam carefully grabbed hold of the windowsill and hoisted herself up. She slid in the window and landed heavily on the floor, the glass shards breaking under her combat boots. She turned on her flashlight and looked around.
"We seem to be in a kitchen," Tucker told her, looking around. "And we chose the one window without a counter below it."
"Why's this stuff still here?" Sam asked, walking through the house and looking around. Everything, though rotting or broken, looked like it had never been moved after the family disappeared. There were rotting frames with broken glass on the wall, though it seemed the photos had long since fallen out. The couches were covered in dust, and the overturned kitchen table was practically turning to liquid on the floor.
Sam hesitated when she reached the stairs. Tucker paused right behind her. "It's probably not very safe up there," Sam started. "The floor could fall out from under us."
"This floor hasn't, and everyone knows there's a basement," Tucker pointed out. Sam nodded a bit and started up the stairs. "Wait- I didn't mean to say we should-"
"Come on, you coward. If I'm going up there, you are too," Sam snapped at him. Tucker reluctantly followed.
The stairs creaked under their feet as they climbed. Just like downstairs, there were rotting frames hanging on the wall, and faded photographs below on the floor. They stepped into a hallway and slowly made their way down, Sam testing the floor before taking a step.
By every right, they knew, the floor should be falling. The wood was rotted, the house unattended for a century. It should be falling apart under their feet.
Soon they made it to the first bedroom and looked in. The walls were a faded sky blue, which surprised Sam. There was a single bed that looked like it may have once been a four-poster bed with a curtain, if the rotting curtain covering the blanket was anything to go by. There was a desk whose legs had collapsed years ago, and a single candle nearby, broken in half and partly melted into the ground. A closet door hung off of its hinges, and old-fashioned clothes hung rotting in the closet.
"You'd think ghost hunters with 21st century technology would have light bulbs," Tucker commented, glancing at the candle.
"They probably never had time to wire the entire house," Sam pointed out, moving along down the hallway. Tucker decided to investigate the first room instead of following.
The second room she peeked in had faded navy blue walls. There were two twin beds, shoved into the two far corners, with rotting blankets on top. In the halfway point, situated in front of a boarded up window, was a desk that was, miraculously, still standing, and two chairs sitting side-by-side. In the open closet were more old-fashioned clothes, but one side had boys' clothes while the other had girls' clothes.
"They must've been brother and sister," she mused, gingerly stepping into the room. There were lighter spots on the wall, as though there used to be posters- were there even posters in the early 20th century, she asked herself- and sitting on the desk was a metal frame. It was turned so it was facing down, but she could clearly see the gleam of the metal in the beam of her flashlight.
She approached the desk and reached out to pick the frame up, being careful not to put much pressure on the rotting desk. The metal was cool on her fingers as she picked it up. The glass was intact, so she knew the frame had been purposefully turned like that, probably to protect the photo inside from the light.
The photo was faded only slightly from age, but there was no light damage to the photo. The colours were really good for a hundred-year-old photo, probably from their advanced technology she thought.
In the picture there were three adults and three non-adults, dressed in formal clothing for what was undoubtedly supposed to be a serious family photograph that ultimately failed. In the middle of the adults was a large man dressed in an orange suit, losing his balance and accidentally pulling a beautiful woman in blue with him. The third adult, dressed in a black suit with immaculately groomed hair, had started laughing, raising his hands to try and catch his friend. A lovely red-haired teenager in black, who Sam predicted was about fourteen or fifteen, had covered her mouth to hide her amusement. The younger two children, probably twelve or thirteen, did no such thing to hide their laughter. In fact, the black-haired boy in cobalt was nearly falling over, using his black-haired sister in red as support as they laughed together.
Sam couldn't help the small smile that alighted her face. It was just such an innocent moment between a family. She glanced around the room again, wondering what had happened. It hadn't been as sudden as everyone thought, clearly, if there was time to gently set the photograph down on its face.
"Sam!" Tucker called to her. Sam glanced over her shoulder. She could hear his careful steps making their way down the hall. "My parents just called. They said they need me back at home."
"What about the so-called movie?" Sam questioned, only feeling slightly guilty as she slid the family photo into her spider backpack.
"Sam? We've been here for over an hour, the movie's done by now," Tucker announced as he stepped into the room. "We should probably head home anyway, it's almost eight fifteen. You know that's when ghost activity practically quadruples."
"I know," Sam sighed, turning around and walking towards the hallway. She briefly wondered if the spirit of one of those children would follow her because she took the picture, but she pushed that out of mind. "I should get home to stop my parents from replacing all of my packed clothes anyway."
Tucker snorted a bit as they walked back down the hall and downstairs towards the kitchen. "You should let them pack that Hawaiian skirt they showed you when I was over yesterday."
"No."
They both climbed out of the window again, careful not to cut themselves. Once their feet were securely on the ground, they left.
As they walked away, the clock struck 8:15, and unknown to them, a portal below the house opened.
"Hawaii, here we come!"
