Neighbourhood
Disclaimer: must we rehash this same old statement every time we wish to be creative? We do, oh fine. I don't own Danny Phantom or any of the characters or anything recognisable from the show. That's all Butch Hartman's. Anything you don't recognise I probably made up. Vonda Shepard sang the version of the song that is included in this story (and by some bizarre coincidence it's called Neighbourhood too), not sure if it belongs to her, but it definitely isn't mine.
A/N: How about that, two stories within two days of each other and they're both songfics. I give up, I'm not going to be able to write a story that isn't a songfic. This is my sixth story on and only one of them isn't a songfic but that only resulted from a challenge I took up. Anyway, hope you like, yet again it was written at stupid o' clock at night when I should have been sleeping. I had just finished dong 8 hours of biology homework and needed to get away from facts about alternative energy sources and how we could make ethanol from pig slurry. I needed to have fun, so I wrote this.
Blah is song words 'Blah' is thoughts
Sam was sitting alone in her shared dormitory in collage. She was packing to move out as she had managed to find a place she could live on her own for the rest of her time there. As she was rooting through her stuff, organising it and packing it neatly into boxes she found something she had almost forgotten about. When it was new, it was a brilliant shade of baby blue 'just like his eyes' but that was a few years ago now. Now the beautiful pale blue color was slightly faded and the corners had become slightly dog-eared from being happily flicked through constantly in its early life before being unceremoniously packed up in her room in Amity Park and rudely taken halfway across the country, then left in the box under her bed for the past year.
It was a photo album that had taken many years to accumulate. It chronicled her friendship with her two best friends that had also packed up and left not long after they had graduated from Casper High. All three of them had the exact same album with the exact same pictures in because all of them agreed they wanted to be able to share the memories but they couldn't agree upon a rotation system they could implement for who could look after it and when. Then the problem of when one or all of them left arose, who would keep it? So they had decided as soon as they saw the album that they should buy one each and since then whenever they had gone anywhere and taken any pictures they would always develop them in triplicate and share them out. She had missed this album. After she had moved to her collage she had just forgot to unpack it and then forgotten all about it.
With a smile on her face she opened it and began to wonder down memory lane. There were pictures of them at school, pictures of them in the park, at each other's houses, at the beach 'damn, he looked good in those trunks'. Some taken by one of the trio of the other two, some taken by a noisy parent or sibling who snuck up on them. There were some of them posing, some of them taken when they weren't looking and some taken when they were looking but weren't expecting it.
She smiled when she found the one she had taken at the zoo of Tucker and Danny hugging when they were asleep, and laughed out loud when she found the one of him in that dress when he ruined her save the frogs protest (someone had had a camera with them and taken a picture to embarrass him. Sam had seen the flash and tracked the picture down. She had managed to 'convince' the person to give her the photo and the negative and had had it copied to give to both of them. The look on Danny's face when she had presented him with it had been priceless and well worth the effort to get it)
She found a picture of her and Danny hugging. It must have been taken after he had defeated Ember at her concert. She assumed it was Tucker who taken it on some piece of technology that seamed to be omnipresent with him. She never found out if it was, she had just opened her album one day to put some more pictures in it and had found it in there.
Here's a photo I've been looking for
It's a picture of the boy next door
Somewhere near the end of the album was her favorite picture. It had been taken the day they had graduated. They had gone back to Danny's house for a party because his parents had offered to host it and they couldn't think of anywhere more fitting to have it since they spent most of their free time there anyway. Jazz has insisted that she wanted a picture of the three of them together despite the protests from the three of them. They had eventually relented and posed for her photo. She had said that she wanted them to be natural but cute so for some reason Danny had taken Sam into his arms, rested his forehead on hers and looked into her eyes for a second before turning his head toward the camera and smiling lovingly. Sam had put her arms around him and smiled at the camera as well, a hint of a blush evident on her cheeks (after getting over her initial shock of being in his arms). Tucker had stood behind them and given them both bunny ears while standing on his tiptoes and looking over their heads grinning at the camera.
And I loved him more than words could say
Never knew it 'til he moved away
While she was flicking through the pages, she found her eyes were always drawn to one particular person whenever he was present in the picture. Danny. It wasn't until he had left to go to collage that she had figured out that she was madly in love with him and had been for many years.
Faded pictures in my scrapbook
Just thought I'd take one more look
And recall when we were all
In the neighbourhood
It wasn't long after that picture was taken, maybe a mater of weeks, before the trio spilt up. Tucker was the first to pack up and ship off to collage. Danny went about a week later and Sam was the last to leave. They had all agreed to meet up during holidays but they had all managed to be busy during holidays and hadn't quite managed to see each other in about a year 'has it been that long!' It was only while looking at that album that she realised just how long it had been since she had seen them. They had all kept in contact via e-mails and long distance and obscenely long and overpriced phone calls but they hadn't all talked face to face since they had left. She found that this stroll down memory lane was making her feel homesick and lonely. She had managed to find herself some friends in collage but no one was as close to her as Danny and Tucker were. No one could possibly be. She found that despite the constant threat of (and practical) ghost attack, she missed Amity Park.
Here's a photo of the neighbourhood
Here's the corner where we stood
She continued to flick through the pictures. Not all of them were of people, some of them were of the town in general. Favorite places, each other's houses, places in the park that had a special meaning for them, even one of the school (she knew they would miss it one day and want a picture, though at the time they doubted it).
Here's a snapshot of dad's old car
Never got us very far
For some reason they had even taken pictures of their and their parents cars. Not that they had really driven anywhere, they preferred to walk because the scenery was nice and it was much more convenient for Danny to transform and take off from the ground than to try from a moving vehicle (that wasn't common sense talking, that was the voice of experience. He had tried to leap from Sam's convertible while it was still in motion one time and she had had to swerve out of the way before she ran him over)
Faded pictures in my scrapbook
Just thought I'd take one more look
And recall when we were all
In the neighbourhood
And all those friends
Where did they go
Oh I don't know
Now that she thought about it she couldn't remember where they had both gone. She knew they were still in the country but she had no idea what collages they were both at. She missed them badly and made a decision right then and there. She was going to e-mail them both and get their addresses. If she had to buy them plane tickets and send them herself they were all going back to Amity Park that summer and they were going to bum around, catch up and just be fiends.
And all those friends we used to know
Oh oh oh in the neighbourhood
She glanced at her watch and realised that she had been looking at the photo album for over two hours now and she should have gone to sleep at least an hour ago. She wondered briefly why her room mate hadn't come back yet but assumed she would either stumble in at gone midnight after going to yet another party or she wouldn't return at all, opting to stay somewhere else for the night, not that Sam cared, 'as long as she doesn't disturb me she can do what she wants'.
Sam placed the photo album on the top of the box she had been packing, changed and crawled into bed. She glanced at the photo album once before she shut the light out and smiled. She put her head down, closed her eyes and thought about the meeting she would be arranging for them in the next couple of months before falling asleep, dreaming of seeing her best friends again.
The End
What do think? Good? Bad? Should I stop writing at stupid o'clock at night and get some sleep instead? I hope you liked it.