Sam Manson was pacing outside Fenton Works. The moon was high overhead and the bright stars peeked out of the blackness of the night. They were both very cold, she and Tucker, but neither of them said so as they waited for Jazz to arrive. Tucker sat on the stone steps which led to the front doorway, hugging his knees to his chest and trying to move as little as possible. The snow was falling lightly, and the pristine white flakes collected in the folds of his red hat. His teeth were chattering, and he was shivering. Sam, however, was not. She was too focused on the matter at hand, and who, if put in the same position as she, would not have been? Nothing could possibly distract her from this; Danny was her best friend, but she knew he was more than that. If she was honest with herself, it would have been so easy to recognize how much she loved him. She had found herself lusting over him without cease; her sexual fantasies becoming an awkward fourteen-year-old boy rather than a tall, dark, troubled man well past the prime of his life who found nothing but bleakness and sorrow in life. She thought now that maybe Danny would always be her fantasy but nothing more because he would be dead by the time they finally tracked him down, for last she had seen of him, he had been laying, his body dripping blood and horribly marred, in the arms of his arch enemy, unconscious.

Sam did not need to think about this; she was aware, without any deliberation whatsoever, that this was entirely to be blamed on Vlad Masters himself. She believed wholeheartedly that it had been Vlad who had beaten him like that and who now planned to do something inexplicably horrendous to him. She did not consider the possibility that perhaps it had not been Vlad who had beaten him and was merely helping him. In fact, she did not even recognize it as a possibility. And why should she? Vlad had beaten Danny and taken him before, on at least three separate occasions. He had lured Danny and Mrs. Fenton to his home in the Rockies with the false promise of a science symposium in an attempt to coax them into becoming his new wife and son. He had attempted to create a clone of Danny to gain the perfect half-ghost son, and instead created a half-ghost named Dani who he used as means to correct the mistake that had created her in the first place—that being that he had not had Danny's mid-morph sample. Sam had tried to comprehend many a time after they had rescued Danny and Dani from their demise at his hands how one man could be so completely fucked up, to take such desperate but inhumane measures simply because he was lonely. This had been the point when she had decided that Vlad was really as dangerous as Danny had described. The line had been crossed then, and she did not think he anymore sounded deep and mysterious, a troubled soul doomed to wander the earth endlessly just as she, as she had on hearing Danny's first depiction of him. But the line had been crossed further, and she thought no better of him. She could not forget the time he had taken in Jazz, and while Danny said that it was because he probably actually cared for her, she believed he had only done it to use her as means of achieving his ultimate goal—getting Danny to become the son he so desperately wanted. Yes, he had pitted them against each other, telling Jazz to destroy Danny or else he would destroy her, but had he really believed Danny would not be able to defeat the Jazz while in the Ecto Suit? Sam thought not. While Danny always insisted that Vlad had wanted Jazz to kill him so he could have her as a daughter, Sam was confident on her theory. She believed that Vlad was not testing Jazz, but rather, testing him. Vlad loved to insist that he was evil, and perhaps he had wanted to push Danny to prove that he was right himself by killing Jazz to defend himself when they were forcibly pitted against each other. Sam thought Vlad must have known he would have enough power to defeat her, even wearing the Ecto Suit. And once Danny had taken care of her, he would see that he was meant to be Vlad's son because they were so alike in their evilness, and because he could not go back to his parents after what he had done, he would have to let Vlad father him. Sam knew she was right, and she knew Danny knew it too. They both knew that Danny hated the idea that Vlad might actually care for him, and that he always had some explanation or another why Vlad didn't in every situation even if it was clear he did. Danny had recalled Vlad asking him on multiple occasions as well to join him with the justification that they were so alike they should be together. But he rarely just asked, and they all knew well enough just how…persuasive he could be, and just how far he would go to be able to call Danny his own. So why should this time be any different?

Sam knew it wasn't. It was obvious that he had another scheme to force Danny to join the Darkside—it was terminology only Tucker would have used—and he was being just as vehement and inhumane as ever. But now she was acutely aware that something was different. She knew Vlad's measures were always extreme, but she had never thought they could be this extreme. Because if she was truthful when she thought of how Danny had had looked laying in Vlad's arms, she would have admitted that of the many fights he had had with Vlad, she had never seen Danny come out looking so…dead, because she was being honest with herself and was thus unable to put it in any lighter, less oppressive way.

She knew what a dead person looked like. She had been to enough funerals, some of which she had not even known the occupant of the coffin. It sounded quite stereotypical but it was the truth. She liked going to them. And perhaps she had not learned much while going to them, had not been able to communicate with the deceased, but if she had learned anything it was that most of the dead people that had lain there on display looked eerily similar to Danny as he had in that moment. So she began to wonder—was that Vlad's new plan? To kill Danny?

Perhaps he had gotten tired of trying to force Danny into being his son, enough so that this objective and its values became meaningless to him. Perhaps Danny had also become meaningless, or perhaps he had had all of Vlad's hatred, hatred which consisted of emotions Vlad did not want to admit existed in him, loneliness, sadness, desperateness, directed at him, because he had not become that which he had wanted so badly, enough so that he had found Danny insufferable enough to kill. Perhaps he had adapted that attitude of "if I can't have you, no one can!" to himself. If he couldn't have Danny, he would simply kill him so no one else, especially Jack, could try to take the role of father from him. That seemed to be his right. But, Sam wondered, why would he be taking the corpse with him?

She shivered then, and realized how literally untouched she was by the thought of Danny's death. Perhaps, like the cold, dry air, it was just starting to affect her, making her shiver as chills snaked up her spine. She was aware of this possibility but she was not yet fully aware of what it meant.

But if she thought about it more closely, she realized it did not make sense. Vlad had invested so much time, money, and effort into trying to make Danny his son, and did she really expect herself to believe he of all people would throw all his hard work away and give up just because he had been unsuccessful the first few attempts? And, aside from his persistence, she knew how much Vlad actually cared about him. Danny himself may not have believed it to be true, but would Vlad really go through all that effort to make such intricate schemes if he did not? It did not make sense to her.

And she did not know what to believe.

"Sam!" Tucker, administrator for the Darkside, called to her through chattering teeth. Sam was standing a little ways into the road and he had been calling to her for a good five minutes from where he sat on the stone steps leading to the front door of Fenton Works.

"What?" she hissed, turning abruptly toward him.

"We've been standing around out here in the freezing cold for about two hours!"

"Actually, you've been sitting, genius."

"My parents are going to kill me when I get home, Sam!" Tucker said. "It must be about one in the morning!"

"Do you care about Danny at all, Tucker?"

"Of course I do, but—"

"Then shut your fucking mouth and stop complaining." As Sam paced in the street in front of Fenton Works, Tucker quieted. Slowly, the icy air was taking affect just as the swelling fear inside her. She found herself longing for a cigarette like the one she had smoked with Gregor—or Elliot, she was unsure of what to call him—on one occasion they had spent time together. Ever since that first one, she had been smoking regularly, but no one she was aware of, not even Danny or Tucker, knew about it. She was never sure if she should tell, but, as of right now, she was quite tempted to, because she knew she could not simply pull one out and smoke it in front of Tucker without some kind of explanation and she was very desperate to ease the tension and dread that racked her body. And she was about to give him one, when Tucker spoke up.

"Where do you think Jazz is?" he asked distractedly, staring past her and into the darkened houses and buildings. "Do you think something happened to her while she was driving?"

"Maybe," Sam sighed, and started to walk back to the steps. She sat down next to Tucker. "Tucker, I'm sorry I told you to shut your mouth. I'm just so worried for Danny."

"I know," Tucker said, his eyes unmoving from the blackened silhouettes of houses and buildings against the sky which seemed lighter in comparison. "Me too."

Sam sighed again, and reached into the pocket of her plaid skirt and fumbled for her pack of cigarettes and her lighter. She touched the oily plastic of the lighter and the cheap cardboard package of cigarettes. She did not pull them out, but asked, "Hey, Tuck, you wouldn't mind if—"

She stopped when the front door behind them opened and yellow light spilled out of the house and onto their backs. They spun around and found themselves staring into the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Fenton.

"Hello, kids," Jack said monotonously. His face was somber, and his eyes were cold and distant but had an unnerving sort of psychosis as they stared at Sam and Tucker. The eyes of his wife were quite similar. "Is there something we can do for you?"

"You must be our son's friends," Maddie said in the same dull, distracted way as he. It might have appeared that she was looking at them, but on closer speculation she was looking past them, similarly to her husband. "Come in. We have a lot to talk about, don't we?"

Tucker and Sam nodded slowly and uncertainly. Sam's fingers let the lighter and the cigarettes fall back into her pocket disappointedly. They hesitantly stepped forward and into the seemingly empty home of the Fenton's. Maddie and Jack lead them into the darkened kitchen. Jack flipped on a light and Maddie indicated to two chairs at the kitchen table.

"Have a seat."

Tucker and Sam sat. Maddie and Jack then walked to the other side of the table where two unoccupied chairs were but did not sit down. Maddie placed her hands on the table and leaned forward.

"Now, just a few questions, Sam, Tucker."