Chapter Seven
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When Sam thought she couldn't hate the GIW any more than she already did, she should have been prepared to eat her words.
As harsh and brittle January waned, it seemed there was never a ghost attack these days where they didn't show up to muck up everything. Even at the school, where they were never allowed to interfere before, there was a temporary squad on constant patrol. Basically they traipsed around fucking shit up majorly for Danny, who was trying his best to capture the stray ghosts without getting captured himself. It was becoming exceedingly difficult. The agency used to put an equal amount of effort into capturing all ghosts, but now it seemed that whenever Danny was there the other ghosts were completely forgotten. She desperately wondered why they were suddenly so hell-bent on capturing him.
Sam watched from classroom windows, from the halls, from atop the tables in the cafeteria, she always stopped and watched whenever Danny showed up in her corner of the school to fight ghosts. Because he always did show up, even though he knew the GIW would be there, trying to capture him. He could just let the GIW do their jobs, but they never did it as thoroughly as Danny. Nobody could. So to keep hunting ghosts he voluntarily ran the risk of getting caught. And Sam would be lying if she said that possibility, however remote, didn't scare the hell out of her.
So, she watched. She couldn't help it. It was for the sake of her sanity, to know he was okay.
She didn't care that the other students considered her a Phantom worshipper now. That they thought she was crazy for following after the battling ghosts instead of running away from the action. Once Paulina Sanchez stopped her in a hallway and said "You can give up on that dream, Manson. Danny Phantom is mine." Sam had laughed heartily in her face before walking off.
Even Tucker started to poke fun, in his own brotherly way. Tucker wasn't blind, he could see straight through Sam's stammered excuses. It was clear Tucker thought she'd developed some star-struck crush on Phantom. Sam was beginning to think it would be time soon to tell Tucker that she had a secret second best friend. The guilt of keeping such a massive secret from him ate away at her sometimes, but in all truth was out of respect for Danny. He'd said he wanted to keep it a secret, so she'd kept it a secret. Even from Tucker.
It also ate away at her to see Danny coming into her room at all hours of the night, worked up into a frenzy over the latest blunders of the stupid GIW. As if the perils of ghost hunting weren't already enough, this added another level of danger to it. To Sam's dismay, he began to come to her with injuries more frequently. She became far more skilled at treating wounds than she ever would have liked.
Somewhere in the last few months their couple-nights-a-week thing had devolved into a nearly-every-night thing. It used to be just fine with her when he was too busy to drop in and visit some nights, but now with the GIW going after him with such vigor, she found that on the nights he didn't show that her anxiety hung so heavy that she couldn't focus on anything, let alone sleep. She couldn't help the pervasive haunting image of Danny trapped in one of their nets, of Danny strapped down on a table in some sterile underground lab. She would think of the frog she was forced to dissect in biology and feel bile rising in her throat.
One night Sam was laying on her stomach on her fluffy purple comforter, trying to concentrate on her English assignment, when Danny floated through the wall with murder in his eyes.
She could tell something very bad had happened.
She'd only seen him truly angry a handful of times. Mostly he was just frustrated, or annoyed, or exasperated. Seeing Danny Phantom in full anger mode was something that might have scared your average citizen. But it intrigued Sam. It reminded her how human Danny's emotions were, how much more human he seemed than ghostly. That he could touch on every part of the spectrum of emotion, and not just one level like so many other ghosts.
Tonight, his neon eyes were blazing in his head. They were always the most outspoken feature on him, but right now they could have outshone a lighthouse. Sam immediately sat up on his arrival, sensing his mood. He began by throwing his thermos heavily at the side of the bed, where it bounced and hit the ground and began rolling away slowly.
Sam moved to the edge of the bed, waiting for him to speak up. It was usually best to just let him rant about whatever the GIW had done that day, because after he did that he usually perked right up.
"They've gone too far," he muttered darkly, catching the rolling thermos with the toe of his boot.
"What did they do?" Sam asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.
Danny didn't seem to have heard her. "I should have realized something was off.. never went this long without fighting him before. Nothing could ever keep him away, no matter how many times I tried... I should have known."
"Keep who away?"
Danny's fiery eyes met hers for a moment and he finally seemed to hear her. "The Box Ghost," he answered. "No matter how many times I throw him back in the Ghost Zone he always finds a way back in less than three days. I should have known. It's been weeks and weeks since I last fought him."
Sam dimly sought through her memories, and couldn't remember the last time she had seen the usually conspicuous ghost. "What happened to him?" she wondered.
"The Guys in White captured him," Danny growled.
Sam paled. Every terrifying image she'd ever had of the GIW experimenting on Danny was instantly juxtaposed on the Box Ghost. While he was annoying, he was always fairly innocent, a harmless threat. She didn't want to ask what they did, but Danny answered anyway.
"They only captured him to get at me." Sam could practically hear the self-loathing dripping in his voice, and she wanted to slap it out of him. "They just wanted information, about me."
"How do you know all this?" Sam asked cautiously.
"Because I found him," he said bluntly. "They let him go. Apparently they got what they wanted, or else didn't think they were going to get it. He was all but completely torn apart. He could barely form words, but he told me they took him… I just, I put him back in the Ghost Zone. He'll accumulate energy and heal much faster there than he would here...
"He didn't deserve this," Danny barked loudly, and Sam was grateful her parents were sleeping on the other side of the house. "No one deserves that, no matter what they've done. It's cruel and unusual, but of course the Constitution doesn't protect people who aren't considered people."
"Danny…" she wasn't sure what to say. How would you comfort someone about something like this?
"Those bastards," he growled, kicking the thermos away violently. "Seriously, who the hell do they think they are? Why do they get to make the rules?" His fists clenched as he paced her room and flickers of ectoplasm swirled around them. "How can they look at a creature that's so obviously sentient and classify it otherwise? I feel like I'm living under the fucking Nazi regime. This is my honest to God worst nightmare.
"They're never going to give up," he despaired, and stopped pacing momentarily, his eyes oddly glazed as he looked at Sam's window at the streetlamps below. "They're just going to keep coming after me until they have me. And who could blame them? I mean look at me! I am a ghost. All people ever see is a ghost. All I am is a ball of ectoplasm. I'm a Class 8 Spectral Entity. I'm Target A-1. I'm fucking nothing to them! Do you understand what's going to happen to me if they actually catch me?"
Sam blinked numbly at him, assuming it was a rhetorical question. She was watching his eyes and hands blaze trails of green against her dim room as he stalked back and forth. It was so strange watching him pace. He was always floating around, defying gravity just for the sake of it. It was almost scary to see him so grounded. With a start Sam realized what was so human about his emotions - he was feeling many of them at once. He wasn't just angry, he was confused and lost and he was scared.
Suddenly, without warning, he sank to his knees. "I just don't know what to do anymore, Sam. I don't know if I can keep this up," he whispered. "Sometimes I wonder what will happen when they catch me." He fell into a hoarse whisper. "When they cut me open. If we'll all find out that I really am just a ball of ectoplasm, just a Class 8 Spectral-" his breath caught in his throat, and Sam had had enough, and she said so.
"Enough," she snapped sharply, causing him to abruptly look up. "Danny, come sit over here."
Something like annoyance flashed in his eyes, so she patted the space next to her gingerly, giving him a smile.
Warily, he floated up and settled next to her on the bed, giving her an odd look. "What?" he snapped back. God, he always got so testy if she interrupted his GIW ranting. She forced down any annoyance she felt at his tone.
"Danny," she said, more softly this time, and the green in his eyes softened a bit as well in response. Her heart fluttered inexplicably.
She picked up his hand from its place on the bed and tentatively removed the tough white glove. He was looking at her curiously but she focused on his hand.
"The first time you asked me to bandage you up," she said quietly, "I noticed it. I was wrapping this hand right here, and I saw that you had fingerprints."
Sam pulled his hand close to her face, and sure enough she could see the faint swirling spirals on the tips of his fingers. She flashed him a smile and saw that he was staring at her and not his hand. Her eyes flickered back downward, her thumb tracing along the thin scar crossing his callused palm.
"You have a little scar right here," she noted, "from the cut you got that day. And here.. there's bit of a callus here. Probably from all the manual labor you do," she joked. She looked up and saw that he was still looking at her like she was speaking a foreign language, and not at his hand like she'd hoped. Was he not grasping her point?
She let his arm rest on her lap but didn't let his hand out of her hands. She wasn't done with this metaphor yet.
"I was reading this book about the history of the paranormal in Amity Park, and they had this whole section on ghostly manifestations. You know, the way ghosts present themselves. It's supposed to be a subconscious choice. They fashion themselves after their obsession in a sense. But the one thing it said was that ghosts' appearances were skin deep. Like if you take off their hat, there's just going to be a glob of ectoplasm underneath. Or of you look at a cross-section of them, you won't find bones or anything you'd expect. Just ectoplasm. They only need to fake their outer appearances."
She could tell from Danny's expression that he was getting lost, so she came in for the homestretch. "What I'm saying, Danny, is that obviously people are wrong about ghosts. About everything they think they know about ghosts. Look at you, if you only went skin deep then I would have found pure ectoplasm under your glove. There wouldn't be scars here, hidden where nobody could see them. There wouldn't be fingerprints."
She stopped idly tracing the scar on his palm to steal a glance at him. He still wasn't looking at his hand. Just her. And he had the oddest expression on his face.
"Do you understand, Danny?" she whispered fiercely. "Don't ever say to me again that you're 'just a ball of ectoplasm' or I'm gonna have to kick your ass, alright? You're so much more than that, and you know it."
She was suddenly struck by how distracting the glow of his eyes was, and for some reason she tried for a moment to envision his face without it. It was fairly impossible. The hazy candle-like glow coming off his skin blurred his features, almost like she was trying to look at him through thick fog. Without knowing why, she was hit with a desperate wish to see his face, without the glow and without the glowing eyes – she just wanted to know what he looked like, to truly see him.
"Sometimes I wish I could see your face more clearly," she breathed, though she didn't know if he would even know what she meant. Sam wasn't even sure she knew what she meant.
All she knew was that now she was seeing his eyes much more clearly.. in fact they were just a few inches from her, blinking curiously, and she could see the pattern in his irises, the way the ectoplasm rippled outward like liquid fire from his pupils. She was so paralyzed by them that she didn't actually realize what Danny was doing until he was already doing it.
The green light was suddenly gone; his eyes had closed. The fingers of his hand curled around hers, and his nose was gently nudging against the side of her nose.
He lingered there for a long moment, his forehead pressed lightly against hers, his messy hair spilling over and mixing with her hair, his frosty breath coating her whole face. She felt her own breath hitch and her lips part slightly in surprise as she finally, finally understood what he was doing. His lips pressed against her parted ones so softly that it might have been the brush of a snowflake for all she knew.
Everything stopped, including her thoughts.
Then the cold was gone, and she opened her eyes as her brain functions rebooted slowly.
His blazing half-lidded eyes were staring down at his hands, looking weary. "I'm sorry," he muttered.
That brought her speech back. "Why?" she managed to say.
He closed his eyes instead of looking at her. "I shouldn't have done that."
"Or… maybe you should do it again," she murmured, faintly wondering who on earth was saying those words.
He blinked at her, the smallest of smiles gracing his face, before reaching his free hand up and touching her softly on the rim of her jaw. She could actually feel his smile when he kissed her again, and this time she had the wits about her to actually kiss him back. It was like pressing a kiss into a solid slow breeze. Fingers snaked into her hair and his lips continually lifted and came back again delicately, tracing her mouth softly, like he was afraid he might shatter her.
When his thumb brushed her cheekbone she sighed, and he pulled back. "Sam," he whispered, and she was surprised to see that his frown was back, even more pronounced. "We can't do this."
Her heart, which had been racing, plunged to the bottom of her stomach. "What are you saying?"
His eyebrows scrunched, like he was in pain. "Sam… I'm a ghost."
"So?" Her fingers, which still clutched his ungloved hand, dug into his skin. It was solid and real, and didn't feel like a ghost to her.
Despite his misgivings his hand still hadn't left her face. He seemed to have forgotten that his thumb was still tracing the edge of her cheek. "What do you mean so?" he asked. "I'm dead, Sam. Doesn't that bother you?"
"No," she said flatly, and it was true. She couldn't believe what he was saying. She was clutching his hand and wrist so tightly she worried faintly that she was hurting him. "Do I need to show you your fingerprints again?" she asked sarcastically.
He looked dismayed. "This isn't about…"
"Yes it is," she interrupted. "This is about you thinking you're less than you are. Look at me, Danny. It isn't about what you are, don't you get it? It's about who you are! Maybe you're dead, but you're alive to me. You're sitting right here, I'm touching you, we're having a conversation. Isn't that enough?" When he didn't answer, she swallowed and said, "It's enough for me."
He sighed softly, and the defeated look on his face pained her more than she could say. So, without really thinking, she leaned forward and kissed him for a third time. She fully expected him to pull away. But he didn't. Instead he melted against her like a flood, and there was nothing delicate about it.
She wasn't aware of much else besides the feel of his breath on hers, a warm front and a cold front meeting like a storm, but dimly under it all she could feel her hands still clutching his hand and wrist tightly, felt the impossible faint throb of a steady beat against her fingertips, beating to a different rhythm than her own heart.
