Yay! Another Danny Phantom Fic that I wrote! Woohoo!
This takes place just after the episode Doctor's Disorders. I was watching it the other day, and I started cracking up when Carl came on and I realized how awesome that old man is. So I wrote a fic about him.
I hope this turned out well...
I don't own Danny Phantom. Dur. It'd still be on the air if I did.
GENERAL POV
Tucker Foley was ready to beat his head on a table; throw himself out the window and hope that Danny would just happen to be flying by; break his leg again.
But noooooo. He was stuck here, in this get up, with the most obnoxious old man the fourteen year old had ever met.
After having the window barricaded by the nurse, who said that Tucker needed to stay in bed and not be "playing around outside the window" (how she had missed what he was trying to do, Tucker would never know), Tucker had been stuck in bed with nothing to do for the last three days.
Even his beloved PDA gave him no amusement anymore. He couldn't monitor ghost activity for Danny and Sam because the nurses checked on him and Carl every half hour.
So Tucker just leaned back in his hospital bed and cursed Sam quietly under his breath. Why, oh why did she have to fall on him? He had been so close to getting out of that place unscathed.
Tucker sighed and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses wearily. Well, this wasn't helping his mood. Carl was asleep (amazingly, in his time they DID have sleep), so Tucker figured he should make the best of his quiet time.
He reached over to the side of his bed and pulled out the TV remote. Before he could hit the power button, however, a soft tapping came at the door.
The teen glanced up to see Danny leaning in the doorway, a plastic grocery bag clutched in one hand. "Hey, Tuck," the half ghost said with a small smile as he stepped into the room.
"Thank goodness you're here," Tucker said throwing the remote down as Danny walked over and perched on a chair that was pulled up next to Tucker's bed. "I was about to go insane."
Danny raised an eyebrow and glanced over at Carl's bed. "Um, Tuck, your roommate is sleeping."
Tucker rolled his eyes. "Well, right now he is, but for the last three days he's been going on and on about how things were in his time."
He looked up to see Danny looking at Carl with furrowed eyebrows. "Uh, Danny, did you hear anything I just said?"
Danny turned back to Tucker slowly, his eyes looking confused. "What? Oh, right. Uh, how things were in his time? Yeah, I was listening."
Tucker frowned and crossed his arms. "What's wrong? You look bewildered."
The halfa opened his mouth, and then shook his head. "I don't think it's anything. I haven't gotten a whole lot of sleep lately. It's like all the ghosts know that one of my team members is lying in a hospital bed, and so they're trying to take me out all at the same time. Thank god for Sam. I might've been captured like ten times if she wasn't helping me."
Tucker winced. "I wish I could help, man."
Danny gave a small laugh. "Hey, it's ok. Just get better. By the way, Sam is still really sorry about breaking your leg."
Tucker waved a hand at Danny. "Nah, tell her it's ok. But if she ever does it again, I might have to break her leg as payback. By the way," he said, interrupting Danny's laughing, "where is Sam?"
Danny rolled his eyes. "I left her at my house, keeping an eye out for ghosts while I came here. Tuck, you never told us how obnoxiously difficult some of these ghost monitors are!"
Tucker shrugged. "For me it's easy. I can teach you guys some things when I get back."
"Sure," Danny said with a nod. "When are you getting out of here, anyway?"
Tucker sighed. "Not for another week. They want to make sure the bone is properly set before I do anything else. But hey, what's in the bag?"
Danny chuckled. "I was wondering when you would ask," he said, pulling the bag up and setting it on the side of Tucker's bed.
Tucker watched curiously as Danny pulled out a few items, including a different PDA (he was so happy to see that!), a few bags of potato chips (the nurses would have a fit if they saw those), a few pairs of socks (probably courtesy of his mother), a Fenton lipstick blaster (THAT one was a surprise), and a few comic books.
Danny crumpled up the bag and tucked it into his jeans pocket before leaning back over and explaining everything.
"So, your mom sent the socks, obviously, and I brought the chips and comic books. But I couldn't find the ones you normally read, so I grabbed some of your dad's old ones."
Tucker shrugged. "Any comic book is better than nothing."
"The PDA was a no brainer, and I brought the lipstick because I don't want you caught off guard if a ghost decides to attack you while you're down. They know you well enough now to know that you are always with Phantom."
Tucker smiled and slid the lipstick under the covers so that no one would see it. "Awesome, thanks, man."
Danny grinned. "Hey, I feel partially responsible for getting you in here. I figured that I should at least give you something to do until you get out."
Tucker was about to respond, but a blue wisp of mist flew out Danny's mouth. The boy rolled his eyes. "Great. Better keep whoever this is away from the hospital."
He glanced around, casting one last uneasy glance at Carl, and turned into Danny Phantom, hovering a few feet off the ground. "See you later Tucker!" he called as he phased out the wall.
Tucker waved and chuckled when, a few moments later, he heard from out the window, "I am the Box Ghost!"
"That shouldn't take long," the boy muttered to himself.
Regardless, Tucker picked up a comic and took a look at the cover. "Hmm," he murmured. "The Fantastic Four. Haven't heard of those guys in a long time."
He shrugged and leaned back, flipping open the front cover and starting to read.
Twenty minutes later, Tucker was startled from his reading by a familiar voice. "Hey! When I was your age, I read those comics all the time!"
Tucker glanced up from the comic book to see that Carl was awake and sitting up, looking at him curiously. "Oh really?" Tucker said in slight annoyance.
Carl nodded and slowly moved from his bed and into the wheel chair next to it. Tucker rolled his eyes behind the pages of the book, but tilted the book so that Carl could see it.
"Yeah! They were some of the best superheroes of my time! Oh, have you gotten to the part with Doctor Doom yet?" the man asked in excitement, leaning over the page eagerly.
Tucker was surprised at the man's interest. He didn't know old people were so into comic books. "Well, no, not yet, but I'm not very far into it yet."
Carl flipped through a few pages with a smile, his thumb marking the spot where Tucker had left off.
The excitement in the old man's face reminded Tucker of a little kid on Christmas morning; it was as if Carl had just been waiting for him to pick up a comic book. "Do you, uh, want to borrow one?" Tucker asked, holding up one of the other ones Danny had brought.
"Can I?" Carl asked, his gentle old eyes twinkling.
Tucker nodded with a small smile, watching in amusement as the man took a comic and settled back into the wheel chair with it, reading quietly but intently, often cracking a smile when a character did or said something funny.
Tucker hesitated, and then went back to his own comic book. Maybe Carl wasn't so bad.
Over the next week, the old man and Tucker got as close as two hospital roommates could.
Danny brought more comic books for the two, and whenever he could, he sat down and read them along with the two incapacitated people, often jumping up and acting them out.
It got to the point where the three male occupants of the room would start to read out loud and act out the scenes as best they could, only to collapse in laughter later or be scolded by a nurse.
Even Sam got in on it every time she came over, and gradually they moved from the Fantastic Four to more recent comic books, and the foursome had just as much fun, Carl acting like everyone's grandfather more than some old coot they had disliked from the moment they met him.
Once Carl finally stopped talking about what life had been like when he was younger, the kids got along with him much more than they had before.
Tucker, who was often stuck alone at the hospital because everyone else was either working, at school, or fighting ghosts, got extremely close to the old man. He never learned the reason Carl was in the hospital, but he was the most grandfatherly person Tucker had ever met, even more so than the boy's own grandfathers.
But every time Danny came, whether as himself or as Phantom, he would always look uneasily at Carl as if he couldn't quite figure him out. There was just something about the man that made Danny have to pause and do a double take.
He never told Sam or Tucker what it was, but as the days slipped by and the three grew closer to Carl, he looked more and more worried, as if he had heard something that he didn't like.
Tucker had one day left to go in the hospital, and he wasn't looking forward to when he was let out, which came as a surprise to him. He normally hated hospitals with a burning passion. But…well, he would miss Carl, if anything.
Speaking of…
Danny was standing up off of the floor, where he had just pretended to get shot (he was really good at acting out those parts; after all, he had had a lot of practice) when a nurse came in. "Ok, Carl, time for your MRI."
Carl sighed and handed Tucker the comic book he had been reading from. "See you when I get back, kid. Bye Danny."
Danny nodded, the uneasy look back in his eyes as Carl was wheeled out of the room by a nurse.
He sat alongside Tucker for a few more minutes, both boys silent. Finally, Danny stood up and stretched. "I should probably go," he said, glancing at his watch. "Sam and I start patrol in an hour and I want to eat something."
Tucker nodded. "Thanks. See ya later, Danny!"
Danny grinned, turned into Danny Phantom, and flew out the window. The nurses could never figure out how Danny managed to sneak past them.
Tucker sighed and lay down in bed, trying his best to shift his leg. They had taken it out of that obnoxious contraption, but it was still in a giant cast and it hurt to move it.
The warmth of the room and the small buzzing of the air conditioner in the corner made Tucker slowly drift off to sleep.
He woke up almost an hour and a half later to the nurse shaking his shoulder. "Mr. Foley?" she said softly.
Tucker sat up and rubbed his eyes. "What time is it?" he mumbled.
"Almost seven," the nurse said. "Come on. We're moving you to a single person room until you leave tomorrow."
Tucker frowned and shook his head slowly, putting his glasses on. "Why? I can just stay here with Carl, can't I?"
The nurse didn't respond, and Tucker slowly took in the room. Carl's side was empty, the bed neatly made and the lamp shut off.
"Is Carl not back from his MRI yet?" Tucker asked nervously, a bad feeling starting to sink in his gut.
The nurse sighed and shook her head. "I'm afraid that Carl was suffering from major heart problems," she said softly. "He had a massive heart attack right before his MRI. I'm sorry, honey. No one could save him."
Tucker felt his breath catch in his throat. "What?"
The man who he had hated, been annoyed by, and then grown to like, even think of as family in the week he was there….he couldn't be dead.
Tucker groaned and sank back into his bed, burying his head in his hands.
Neither Tucker nor the nurse noticed Danny Phantom hovering in the darkest corner of the room, a tear sliding down his cheek.
Carl's funeral was a week later, and Tucker, out of the hospital for almost as long and wearing a walking cast, attended with Danny and Sam at his sides.
Danny had been avoiding him all week, and Tucker couldn't figure out why. When the funeral was over, and the trio had expressed their sorrow to Carl's widow, he finally confronted him, after asking Sam to go home and let them talk.
The girl nodded and waved, sliding into her car and letting her father drive her home.
Tucker turned to Danny, leaning heavily on the wall at his side to hold himself up, as much from weariness as from the pain in his leg. "Why have you been avoiding me?" he asked Danny. "All week, man. I needed someone to talk to!"
Danny opened his mouth and Tucker held up a hand. "Don't you dare say ghosts. I've been watching the monitor, and ever since I got out of the hospital they've been few and far between."
Danny sighed, his shoulders slumping. "I've been avoiding you because…I think I knew Carl was going to die."
Tucker frowned and cocked his head slowly, his mind flashing back on all the weird looks Danny had given the man. "How?" he finally asked.
Danny shook his head, glancing anxiously at the heavy cloud cover above them, threatening rain.
"I don't know. It was almost like there was a glow around him. I only realized after you called us what it meant. I'm sorry, Tuck. I should have told you."
Tucker gulped and sank slowly to the ground, stretching his leg out in front of him and ignoring the dirt he was getting on his suit. "Did you…you didn't see him, did you?"
Danny shook his head rapidly, his black hair swinging as he knelt next to his friend and put a hand on his shoulder. "No. I swear if I had, I would have told you."
Tucker shuddered as a clap of thunder rang overhead. "Still…my best friend can see when someone is going to die. I'm sorry man, that's freaky."
Danny chuckled nervously. "Don't I know it," he mumbled, rubbing his neck as rain started pattering to the ground, sizzling on the warm cement.
Tucker slowly stood up, with minimal help from Danny, and the two started walking home in the rain. Danny offered to turn them both intangible so they wouldn't get wet, but Tucker refused.
He shivered as he walked, looking sidelong at Danny every now and then. "You saw his death," he finally mumbled.
Danny sighed. "Tucker, if I had known what it was, I would have told you. But I didn't. It stinks that he passed on in a hospital, though, huh?"
Tucker shuddered and leaned against the side of his house, finally letting hot tears mix with cold rain. Danny winced and wrapped a friendly arm around Tucker's shoulders.
Tucker gulped and looked over at the halfa.
"Did I ever tell you how much I hate hospitals?"
Seriously. Probably the only depressing story I've ever written...well, and posted. *Evil chuckle*
IDK, I liked Carl. He was a cute old guy and made me laugh in the forty five seconds we saw him for. I always thought that Tucker couldn't hate him for forever.
Review please!