'Broke the sissy boy's teeny toy heart in two.' The sounds of the Birthday Massacre blasted in Sam's ears as she annihilated yet another enemy in Doomed. Lasers shot out from her gun and she annihilated FriarTuck again. Ha, she thought triumphantly. She stole a glance at the clock, which told her it was more morning than it was night at that point. Oh, well, it was a Sunday anyway now, she could always sleep in.
She took out one more enemy before logging off for the night. It was late, even for her standards and what had become her new normal since the incident.
Sam ran a hand through her hair and grimaced at the greasy feel. Making a mental note to wash her hair in the morning, or afternoon, or really whenever she woke up, she threw on her pyjamas, chucking her day clothes into the corner.
She wished she'd fallen asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, but life was never that easy. A shiver ran down her spine and green and blue light poured in through her eyelids. Tears welled up in Sam's eyes and she cowered under the duvet, goosebumps prickling over her skin.
She didn't know how long she lay there before she fell asleep, and to be completely honest she couldn't recall when exactly she'd fallen asleep - some time between the time the time the eerie whispers and wails started and her mother throwing open her curtains to let the sunlight stream into her room.
"Come on, get up Samantha!" Pamela Manson screeched, like a deranged canary, ripping the covers off Sam's head. "I won't have you sleeping through the day like this!"
Sam groaned and shot her a glare, rolling out of bed. "Fine! I'm up!"
Pamela huffed and left the room, but not without telling Sam to wash her hair - like she needed to be told that.
Sam was half-tempted to go back to going back to playing Doomed, but the pile of homework on her desk convinced her otherwise. Mr Lancer may understand her sudden decline in work recently, but her parents definitely didn't, and she really didn't want to fail this year.
Working on homework only went so well. Before long her eyes became unfocused and she gazed blankly at the mess of words on the page, pen tapping against the largely blank piece of lined paper she'd intended to write on.
Sighing, she pushed herself up from the desk, catching a glimpse of a shadowy figure in her peripheral vision, and went to shower, spending extra time on the bird's nest that had become of her hair. At least she didn't see the figure here - apparently this ghost respected privacy to an extent. That was just like him really - barging into her bedroom, but still being mindful of the fact that he couldn't follow her everywhere. Sam was tempted to spend the rest of her life in the bathroom if it made the figure leave her alone, but there was no way she could justify that in any sane manner. This was really her fault, so she might as well live with the consequences.
Sam left the house for a walk, clad in a puffy coat, concluding that homework was not going to happen. Baby blues glimmered from the dark alleyways and storm drains. If this spirit was trying to communicate with her it was doing a pretty shit job of it - she still had no more idea of why it was tormenting her than the day she first saw it, the day of the accident. Sam really tried not to think about that. Her mother was talking about getting her a therapist to talk about it with, but Sam highly doubted it could help to talk about something like that. Or rather, she didn't want to talk about it. She could take the trauma to her grave for all she cared, no one would hear a word about it from her.
Sam stopped abruptly once she realised where she'd been walking towards, the neon of the Fenton Works sign towering over her, taunting her. Of course she'd unconsciously walked here, it was just fitting.
The Fenton household had never felt so empty, the sign the only reminder that it was supposed to be a madhouse. Jack Fenton had lost his usual cheer on that day, and Maddie and Jazz both grieved in less obvious, but still noticeable ways, drawing away from the outside world and focusing on their respective studies. Sam had half a mind to tell them that Danny's ghost had been following her ever since the accident, but it could just as easily be a hallucination born from guilt as an actual ghost.
She'd just wanted to look at the portal, it was truly teenage stupidity. She got her goddamn photo of him in the portal, but at what cost? His soul shaking screams, pure agony and anguish continued for minutes, and still rang in her head, not unlike the cries that tormented her at night. Then the corpse, oh God the corpse. It looked like something from one of Junji Ito's horror illustrations, the skin flaking and scorched, the jumpsuit melted and burnt. The worst part of all was what the medical examination at the hospital revealed - his heart had beat erratically in the start of the shock, the muscles tearing from the strain.
'Broke the sissy boy's teeny toy heart in two.'