Chapter Nine
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For a second time she found herself reluctantly on the Fentons' doorstep, waiting anxiously for someone to answer, hoping it wasn't him.
Tangible relief washed over her when it was Jack who answered the door, holding a half-constructed ectogun in one hand.
He blinked down at her in surprise for a moment, then burst into a wide smile and gripped her in a massive bear hug. "Sammy!" he yelled ecstatically. "What are you doing here?"
She smiled despite herself at the warm welcome. "I'm here to see Mrs. Fenton, actually," she told him as he ushered her inside. Truthfully Jack could answer her questions as easily as Maddie could, but Maddie was always the more level-headed and objective of the two. So she really wanted to talk to Maddie.
"Oh," he said, and she caught a hint of disappointment. She bit her lip, knowing that he'd been hoping she was here to see Danny Fenton. "I'll go get her from the lab," he assured her. "Make yourself comfortable. There's cookies on the counter if you want one!" he added as he bustled down the stairs.
Sam sat with her hands folded at the counter, and hoped desperately that their son wasn't home.
Maddie came up a few minutes later, holding a wrench in her hand. "Hi honey," she said sweetly. "To what do I owe this surprise?"
Sam chewed on her lip, wondering where on earth to begin. "I just wanted to talk," she began slowly. "I had some questions, and I didn't know who else to ask."
Maddie looked at her curiously and took a seat beside her on the next stool. "About what? Oh, did Jack tell you we have cookies?" She picked one up and offered it to Sam, but she shook her head politely. Maddie shrugged and set it back down on the plate.
"About.. ghosts," Sam admitted, gauging Maddie's reaction.
"Oh?" she said. A look of strange pride came over her, and Sam knew she was feeling triumphant that she'd passed on her interests in ghosts to somebody. "What can I tell you about them?"
"Well…" Here came the tricky part. "I want to know your personal theory. On why they started showing up all at once three years ago." Danny died three years ago.
Maddie raised her eyebrows. "Well… no one knows for sure. One thing we know is that it began happening in the late fall of that year, just after we succeeded in creating our Ghost Portal. We thought at first that maybe they were actually escaping from our portal. Some of them were… but most of them weren't. We weren't sure how they were getting in. There were more natural portals around than there had ever been before. It still mystifies us, although the Guys in White seem to think our portal is the root of the problem." She said 'Guys in White' like it was a swear word.
Sam nodded, though she was disappointed that Maddie didn't have a clear idea why it started happening. She felt for some reason that it all related back to Danny, who'd started showing up right when the rest of them did. But he was the only one that had actually died right at that time.
"Okay… next question," Sam continued. "How much do we know about the anatomy of ghosts?" she asked tentatively.
"Anatomy?" Maddie asked.
Sam nodded, feeling a blush rise unbidden to her cheeks at the word 'anatomy,' thinking of why exactly she was asking the question. Of the curiosity she'd felt when Danny was pressed hard against her when they were kissing. She was sure she'd felt that happen, but she was wondering how it had happened. She reminded herself that Maddie didn't know why, and she tried to stifle her slight embarrassment.
"Well," Maddie began, "ghosts don't really have anatomy, at least not in the same sense that people do. The don't have systems like people do, nervous systems, or circulatory or skeletal systems.. or any of that. When they feel pain it's an auto-response, fabricated by their imprinted memories. If you were to cut one in half, sorry for the crude example, but if you did that then you'd see they were just pure ectoplasm on the inside."
Sam nodded her head numbly. Maddie was just spewing the same nonsense from the books Sam had already read. It was dead wrong. She had seen Danny feel pain and knew it was real. She'd felt the bones under his skin, the way his ribs fit against each other. How could they not be real?
"So.. a ghost wouldn't have any bones?" she asked. "They wouldn't have a heartbeat or pumping blood? Or say.. fingerprints?" They wouldn't be able to get hard? she added mentally, her blush deepening.
Maddie laughed. "Of course not. Ghosts don't need any of those things." She looked at Sam curiously, as if she had just asked if the color of the sky was red.
"Okay," Sam conceded. This was only succeeding in making her more confused than before. "One more question."
"Go ahead," she smiled.
"What are your thoughts on Danny Phantom?"
She expected Maddie to tell her exactly how evil he was, what a menace he was to the town. After all she'd seen Jack and Maddie chasing him down time after time, shouting obscenities at him, trying to capture him themselves. But to her surprise, Maddie just frowned.
"That's a good question," she said quietly. "The truth is, I don't know what to think anymore."
"…What do you mean?"
"We used to think of him like we think of all the other ghosts, of course. But lately I've been rather confused."
"Why?"
Maddie was playing absently with the wrench in her hands. "Well, a while back we actually managed to capture Phantom briefly."
Sam's breath caught in her throat. Danny never told me that!
"He escaped fairly quickly, but we did manage to get an ectoplasm sample from him for the first time."
Sam listened numbly.
"I was studying it under the microscope, and it wasn't behaving like any other ectoplasm I'd ever seen. It was coalescing in patterns, similar to cellular structures. It was beyond baffling. It was the biggest discovery we'd seen since our portal became operational. I wanted to break it down to a baser level, to examine the structures themselves. So I put it under our destabilizer, which is supposed to blast it with a range of frequencies until it finds the correct frequency that breaks down the matter. There's a magic number – it's different for all types of ectoplasm. But.. when it hit the right frequency, instead of breaking down, it turned red."
Sam's eyebrows raised and Maddie shrugged.
"I know, it's strange. I was completely baffled. But when I put it back under the microscope, I knew what I was looking at. It was blood."
"Blood?" Sam repeated incredulously.
"Yes," she said flatly. "I don't understand…" Her lips pressed into a thin line. "Phantom is a complete anomaly. I'd always been suspicious of his nature, because he never really followed the behavioral patterns of other ghosts. But this just raised more questions than it answered. I don't know what's different about him, but something is. Which is why we've stopped hunting him," she added sadly. "I'll not hunt something that I'm not even sure is a ghost."
"That's… incredibly fascinating," Sam forced herself to say.
"Yes, it really is," Maddie agreed. "But it's too bad that I can't study the sample further."
"Wait, why not?"
Maddie's absent expression turned into a harsh glare. "Because that stupid government agency came in and confiscated all our research weeks and weeks ago."
Sam's heart tried to leap out of her throat. "Like.. how many weeks ago?" she squeaked.
"December," she replied, and Sam felt an odd weight in her chest.
December was when the GIW captured the Box Ghost. What did that have to do with anything? She couldn't shake the pervasive feeling that it had everything to do with it. They captured him because they wanted information about Danny. They had just gotten this information about Danny… But they needed more? She could practically hear the Box Ghost repeating "I'm sorry," again and again to Danny in a dark alley. The Box Ghost had told them what they wanted to know.. Had told them what exactly?
Sam bit her lip and tried to remain calm. It was hard, as just being in the Fenton household was upsetting. All it did was remind her exactly how much her Danny reminded her of Danny Fenton, and it was still as painful as ever. I did not replace one Danny with the other, she told herself for the millionth time. She only wished she could believe it. Now it seemed this Danny was keeping secrets from her too, just like the last. She wanted to scream.
"That agency is corrupt and useless," Maddie fumed, "and now they stole years of our research! The only thing they didn't have a warrant to take was our actual equipment. Although they're trying to get that now too."
"They are?"
"Yes, they're applying for a warrant to get their hands on all our equipment, including our Ghost Portal, in the name of trying to stymy the ghost attacks. They still believe our portal is the cause of it, even though we've proved that the majority of the attacks are coming from other naturally occurring portals in the area. They want to completely shut us down," Maddie breathed, her shoulders hunched over.
Sam's other thoughts immediately stopped, as she realized what Maddie was saying. If the GIW succeeded in that they would be ruining the business that Maddie and Jack had built from the ground up, that they had built their entire lives around. Their whole life's work.
"I'm so sorry," Sam murmured, and rested her hand on Maddie's hand.
Maddie smiled warmly at her. "Don't worry, Sam. It'll be fine. We're always fine. Now then, did you have any other questions about ghosts?" she added amusedly.
"No, I suppose not," she admitted, but she suddenly felt reluctant to leave.
"Well, I'm glad you came by to talk with me. You know you're always welcome here, if you have any more questions about ghosts. Or if you ever need anything. You know we love you, Sammy. But.. I simply won't let you leave until you eat a cookie," she told her, pointing to the chocolate chip covered cookie pile in the center of the counter.
Sam laughed, ready to refuse her again politely. "Are they vegan?" she joked, knowing full well that ninety-nine percent of cookie recipes included eggs.
"Oh Sam, you know we always make a couple of them vegan," she replied quietly, turning the plate around to show that on the other side there were three of them stacked, set off to the side. "These are the ones without eggs."
Sam picked one up numbly, and fought the sudden urge to run far away.
The idea behind the changes in Danny ectoplasm was inspired by yet another author (again, heheh. sorry I just love people's ideas?) - lunarmothim's Green Jacket, Red Sleeves (which btw if you haven't read you are seriously missing out).
