Author's Note: Ahem, okay, so I know I promised faster updates, but I was out of the house for the entire weekend - I actually have a life now, woo! - and couldn't get a minute to finish this chapter. But here it is! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own DP.
Chapter 4
"We have to tell Danny," Paulina was rambling as the girls continued their walk to Fenton Works. "He's Danny Phantom, for Christ's sake; he'll know what to do. Sam? We're telling Danny."
Sam stopped walking, finally coming to terms with a decision. Paulina noticed, and turned to her. Sam looked straight into her own eyes and told Paulina, "No."
"No?" Paulina scoffed. "What do you mean no?"
"I mean, we're not telling Danny," Sam continued walking calmly. "He's my boyfriend and I say whether we tell him or not."
"Are you on crack, freak?" Paulina exclaimed. "We're not talking about telling him whether you're pregnant or not. Jesus, do you even understand the implication of this situation?"
Sam raised her eyebrows, more surprised at the fact that Paulina was able to use more than four-syllable-words in one phrase, but she said nothing.
"Sam, the only person being put on the line of shame and embarrassment is me because I'm the one who made the stupid wish," Paulina grumbled. Then she realized. "Wait a minute. The only reason you wouldn't want to tell Danny what happened is if you're too embarrassed to tell him. And the only way you'd be too embarrassed…"
Sam stared at Paulina out of the corner of her eye, both perplexed and angry at how she was able to figure it out so quickly. When Sam said nothing, Paulina gaped. "You wished for the same thing, didn't you?" Sam didn't answer. "Didn't you?"
"Look, that's not the point now," Sam felt her face heat up with embarrassment and she hated herself even more than she did last night. "The point is fixing this. I don't plan on staying like this for a long time."
Paulina, surprisingly, dropped the subject and instead said, "But now that Danny got the ghost, what's the point of going to his house again?"
Sam then went into the process of explaining to her what happens to a ghost after it is captured as they walked over to Danny's house. Surprisingly yet quite unsurprisingly, Paulina had never even known about the existence of the Ghost Zone until then – "What? We don't exactly take the protocol about how to handle ghosts in school." – until Sam had informed her of it then.
Ever since the Disasteroid, the Fentons spent a few weeks repairing the Ghost Portal. Ghosts had somehow been able to get out of the spontaneous portals that opened up at random with no way for Danny to get them back into the Ghost Zone without Frostbite's map, so his parents fixed the Ghost Portal in order to help him. However, they did not upgrade it so that ghosts would not come out of it. They still did.
Paulina and Sam reached Fenton Works, and paused at the doorstep. Paulina turned to Sam. "If you don't want to tell Danny, what are we gonna do to get in, get to the portal, and get that genie ghost without telling Danny?"
Sam smirked at her, and on Paulina's face it looked as devious as it could be. Sam bent down, removed the edge of their Welcome rug, where a key was placed. She grabbed the key and turned the lock with it, and the door opened with a click.
Paulina raised her eyebrow sardonically. "Isn't that kind of dangerous? And how do you know about it?"
"I'm his girlfriend," Sam said in a 'duh' tone. They entered the house silently, Sam checking inside for anyone first. Once she realized the coast was clear, she signaled Paulina in after her and closed the door silently. She tried to listen to any sounds in the house, but heard only silence, which was odd in the Fenton household, since the house was always bustling with loud noises and the sounds of new ghost gadgets, so Sam deduced that no one was home. Still, she and Paulina took soft steps towards the basement, making sure once again that no one was down there, and headed towards the portal.
Sam saw the thermos on one of the work tables, its cap unscrewed, and she knew they were in trouble. Paulina was gaping at the sight in front of her, taking in the work benches, the scrap metal, the Specter Speeder parked on one end of the basement, and most of all the Ghost Portal, open and swirling in greens, casting bright lights all over the basement floor and walls.
"Well?" Paulina said once she got over her initial shock. "Is she still here or what?"
"Um," Sam rubbed the back of her neck, thinking about their next move. "He ejected the thermos and Desiree is now in the Ghost Zone."
Paulina's eyes widened. "You mean… in there?"
Her eyes were fixed on the portal, the swirling green ectoplasmic entrance illuminating the otherwise dull grey basement.
Sam sighed. "Yes. In there."
Paulina looked like she was about to have a fit, but she took a deep breath and calmly said, "What do we do now?"
Sam eyed the Specter Speeder parked in the corner, and she got an idea. She turned to Paulina and said, "Okay, so here's the new plan. I go into the Ghost Zone in that," she pointed to the Specter Speeder, "find Desiree, and wish for our bodies to be switched back."
Paulina blanched. "What? No way. No way are you going in there."
Sam, at first, was a little bewildered and touched that Paulina was capable of showing concerns for Sam's wellbeing, when Paulina added, "You're not going into creepy ghost terrain in my body, Goth freak. No freaking way."
Sam rolled her eyes. "I've done it a million times before; it's no big deal."
"And then what, Sam?" Paulina said. "You wish for your body back, and then it's going to be me out there in that Ghost Zone. How the hell am I supposed to get back?"
Sam inwardly cursed. She hadn't really thought of that. "You go in there with me," she decided. "We both go into the Ghost Zone, and once we make our wish, we'll switch back, and I'll still be there to guide us back. There. Problem solved."
Paulina paled even more, which was quite impossible on Sam's pale skin. "I'm not going in there."
"It's not so bad," Sam tried to convince her by smothering her with kindness, which was very hard yet very necessary. "We'll be in and out in no time."
Paulina was shaking her head vigorously. "I. Am. Not. Going. In. There."
"God, fine!" Sam exclaimed, getting tired of Paulina's scaredy-cat attitude and again wishing it were anyone else but her. "I'll go in there, find Desiree, bring her back here, we make our wish, and then I send her back into the Ghost Zone."
"Sam, I won't let you go into that thing in my body," Paulina had an annoyingly determine look on her face. "What if something happens to you? Then what? Not only will I be stuck in your body, but my body will be gone."
"Nothing is going to happen," even though Sam knew she was lying a little bit, she wanted to get her body back as fast as possible, even if it meant facing the dangers of the Ghost Zone alone. "Would you chill out?"
Paulina and Sam kept arguing, Paulina not budging about agreeing to send Sam into the Ghost Zone and getting Desiree. Sam thought it was the most ridiculous thing ever, since Paulina would only have to stand and wait and all the hard work will be done by Sam, but the Latina wouldn't budge.
"Okay, okay," after a while of useless arguing, Paulina raised both her hands in a surrender gesture. "I will agree for you to go into that thing in my body." Sam was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when Paulina briskly added, "If Danny went in with you."
"I thought we agreed that we wouldn't tell Danny," Sam exclaimed.
"No, you agreed that we wouldn't tell Danny," Paulina folded her arms across her chest with a triumphant look. "Not me."
Sam wanted to scream, especially because she saw the logic in what Paulina was saying, which only made it worse. Paulina stayed in the same stance, knowing she'd won the argument, and even though it was Sam's own body, she still felt like wiping that stupid smug smirk on her face.
"Fine," Sam growled angrily. "I won't go in there, but I won't tell Danny. What do you expect we do then?"
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Sam echoed Paulina from earlier, horrified at what she was hearing. They were currently at Paulina's house, since Sam suggested that Danny could easily walk in on them through her window had they gone to hers.
"No, think about it," Paulina was trying to convince her something that was not going to happen in a million years, no matter what. "You said yourself that ghosts can find their way out of the Ghost Zone, so all we have to do is wait for Desire to get out."
"Desiree," Same corrected automatically.
"Whatever," Paulina was about to have a BF with the stupid Goth freak's attitude, but she refrained, knowing that it would do more bad than it would do good. "This way, you won't have to tell your stupid boyfriend, and I won't have to watch my fabulous body lost in a place full of ghosts forever."
"So what you're suggesting," Sam was fuming, but she tried to talk in a calm, cool tone, "is that we play along to our bodies, me pretending to be you and you pretending to be me, until Desiree finds her way out of the Ghost Zone and then we make our wish?"
Paulina grinned. "Exactly."
"Do you understand what you're saying?" Sam was growing more frustrated by the minute. "You want us to spend even more time in each other's bodies, pretending to be one another when we don't know a thing about each other? Oh, and have you forgotten that we kind of hate each other's guts?"
Paulina hated her alright, that was undeniable. "What else do you suppose we do?" Paulina got that defiant look in her yes again. "Unless you want me to go find your boyfriend…"
Sam sighed, finally tired of all the bickering. She pursed her lips, milling the idea over in her head. Then she looked back up at Paulina. "You really want to do this?"
"You see any other option?" Paulina folded her arms across her chest and raised her eyebrows at her, and Sam hated the fact that she looked convincing in her own body.
Sam sighed for the umpteenth time that day. "Fine."
A/N: Yay. Fun. Hahahahahahahahahaha I'm going to enjoy this.
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