Disclaimer: This is a fan work created at no profit and for entertainment purposes only. The author acknowledges that Danny Phantom and related characters are property of Nickelodeon and many concepts used here are the creation of Butch Hartman.
The Phantom Reboot
Episode 3: All You Desire (Part 3)
"Maybe we should try looking at this rationally." Sam was sitting with her knees folded under her, beneath a tree in the courtyard, contemplating if her salad was still both safe and ethical to eat after it's transmutation into meat. It wasn't exactly the same salad she'd picked up off the lunch line. It looked to have much higher quality ingredients.
Danny sat beside her, sprawled out, back against the tree. His tray, like his appetite, forgotten. "I really don't think there's much logic to be had here, Sam. Tuck's been blinded by greed and," He huffed, "hormones into a hopeless deal with this ghost. You saw how she messed up his wishes."
Sam prodded the salad with a fork. "I don't know, Danny; that was pretty weaksauce tampering. We got off pretty easy over breakfast: just a little embarrassed by the 'lovebirds' thing, and that was mostly Tucker's fault. And the only one upset by the steak wish seems to have been me, and Desiree fixed it... I think."
She took the plunge and brought a forkful of salad to her mouth. It was only out of interest not to upset Danny more that she didn't make yummy noises, but something still slipped through the bond they shared.
"That good, huh?" Danny asked absently.
"It's... pretty good." She said with careful diplomacy after she swallowed the bite.
Danny gave her a look. "'Pretty good' isn't what I'm getting. I'm not even sure what I'm getting is the kind of feeling we should be talking about in polite company." He teased.
She tried to resist. She really did. But that little nudge was all it took the break the dam and send the words tumbling out. "Oh my god, this is the best salad I've ever had. It's the best food I've ever had! Danny, you have to try this. I will feel like a terrible friend if I don't share this with you." To drive the point home, she speared a bit with her fork and offered it to him.
He shied away. "No matter how good it is, Sam, it's a Salad of Evil. Don't forget that."
"Maybe that attitude is why Tucker thinks its okay to make Desiree do his bidding." Sam thought aloud.
"What attitu—" Danny started, only to have his words cut short by Sam putting the fork in his mouth. He sputtered for a second, then relented and chewed. Sam pulled back the empty fork and raised an eyebrow at him. "Okay, that is really good. But still: Salad of Evil."
Sam grinned in triumph and sat back to eat. "Tucker might be right though: maybe not about Desiree specifically, but about ghosts. What makes you think they're all evil?"
He sighed and pushed himself back against the tree so that he was sitting up more. "You're still new at this, but me and Tucker have been doing this for a year. My parents did this for longer than I can remember. The ghosts keep showing up and they do nothing but attack, endanger, or annoy people. And they never stop, Sam. Three or four times a week we hear about another one: some animal ghost harassing people in the park, or a poltergeist breaking or sabotaging things. I used to be a pretty solid 'B' student before I started and had a pretty good record. Now I'm barely holding on to D's, and I get detention at least once a week because I have to cut class to protect people from some ghost nosing around school."
Blue eyes looked back at the school building. "It's been a year, Sam. And I haven't met a single ghost that wasn't a monster, one way or the other. So I'm not going to give her any benefit of the doubt, or any kind of chance, because trust me, I'm an authority on this: all ghosts are evil."
Sam looked down at him, at the intensity of his expression while at the same time feeling the hot buzz of the same intensity in her head and felt a well of sympathy. "Danny..." She started, unsure of what she was going to say. Could she really press the argument after what he'd just said? While he was feeling as raw and upset as he was?
She didn't have to answer that, because just then, a flood of students came rushing out of the doors. They were flecked and spattered with various bits and pieces of food and screaming at the tops of their lungs about a ghost.
Danny's mood lightened instantly. "That didn't take long." He jumped to his feet and shot Sam a cocky grin. "See? All ghosts are evil. They can't help themselves. So now all I have to do is go in there, thermos her, and collect my apology from Tucker." He didn't even bother with his battle cry, just twisted the dial on his belt and transformed.
"You really shouldn't be so happy about that." Sam said to his retreating back, then smirked at her own bit of schadenfreude. "Serves Tucker right, for buying a person though. Even if she is a ghost." She got up, checked to make sure her ghost fighting gear was in her backpack, then started to follow. Only at the last second did she hurriedly go back and grab her salad.
DP-DP-DP
Danny Phantom flew in through the wall, the image of heroic fury. The cafeteria was already mostly deserted, so he didn't bother with niceties. "Alright, Desiree; the jig is up! I'm here to put a stop to your..." He petered out as he got a look at what was actually going on. "...protecting Tucker from a ghost I've never seen before?"
Sure enough, Desiree had raised a quarter-dome of crackling, green energy as a shield against the ballisticly launched meatballs, forks and knives being sent her way by a ghost that looked like a middle aged lady in a cafeteria worker uniform.
"Um..." He looked at the other ghost, confused as to how to proceed. "Who are you?"
The Lunch Lady paused in her barrage to look up at Danny and spoke sweetly. "Oh, hello young man. I'm just here because that young lady right over there changed the menu." And here her demeanor became demonic. "AND NOW SHE MUST BE DESTROYED!"
She punctuated this by summoning a stove from the kitchen and having it unleash a gout of green fire on Desiree's shield.
For a moment, Danny stared blankly, then burst out laughing until he was floating helplessly on his back in stitches. "You twisted a wish so hard that it backfired on yourself?"
"I'm not trying to twist them!" She shouted up at him, tossing her hair so she could glare at him with both eyes. "I think maybe I've been sabotaging wishes for so long that I'm actually kind of bad at doing them the right way." She admitted, her face darkening with an embarrassed blush.
Tucker poked his head over her shoulder. "Dude, are you going to help or not?"
Still snickering, Danny pretended to wipe away a tear. "You've got a point. This lunch lady is attacking the school."
Before he could even right himself, Danny had earned the Lunch Lady's ire. "Oh dear. You're going to try and stop me? MAYBE YOU SHOULD DO SOME CARBO-LOADING FIRST!" The previously ignored spaghetti that went with the meatballs suddenly animated on a dozen plates around him and slithered into the air, wrapped his legs, and slammed him into the floor. With a flick of the Lunch Lady's wrist, they whipped him into the air to slam into the overhead lights before dropping him unceremoniously on a table.
She grinned with unmistakable malice. "My, my my. You look a bit underdone. No worried though." She raised a hand and the stove rose into the air to aim its green flame at him.
Seconds before she could order it to fire, a blast of ecto-energy burst right between her eyes, breaking her concentration, and causing the stove to drop to the floor. Sam stood at the door, ecto-pistol in one hand, ecto-saber in the other.
"Nice shooting, Sam!" Tucker called out.
Sam decided not to tell him that she was aiming at the stove. "What's going on here? Where did this one come from?"
"A little wish mishap." Desiree said. "Apparently she didn't appreciate changing the menu, and now she wants to kill me. Re-kill me."
"Wait. So the wish backfired on—whoa!" Sam didn't get to finish, because strands of spaghetti had wrapped her gun arm and waist and whisked her up into the air. "Typical." She complained bitterly. "Whenever there's something tentacle-like, it always trie to grab the girl in the skirt." Igniting the ecto-saber, she sheared through the offending pasta, only to realize too late that she was five feet in the air and fell painfully on her face.
"Urg." Danny said as Sam's pain shot through his head just as he was recovering. He struggled to his feet and set his fists ablaze with ghostly energy. He was completely thrown off his game to see the Lunch Lady proffering a platter of cookies.
"Cookie?"
"Um... no thanks?" He had no idea what her deal was, but it was creeping him out.
She shook with rage and charged the entire platter with ecto-energy. "THEN HOW ABOUT A HEAPING HEPING OF DOOM!" The cookies launched at him like shuriken embedding in the floor as he dodged.
"Sorry. He pulled out his thermos. "I'll just get some take out!"
The thermos emitted its usual blue light, but the Lunch Lady saw it coming and produced a whole ham, which she hurled into the aperture hard enough to wedge it in, jamming the thermos. Danny paused to look at it in disbelief, which gave the Lunch Lady ample time to close with him and deliver a brutal hit with a stale baguette, sending him flying across the room.
"Oh man." Tucker stared in shock. "This looks hopeless! I wish I could do something to help." He noticed Desiree giving him the same look Danny or Sam usually gave him when he was missing the point. "What?" There was a beat. "Oh. Right. I wish the Lunch Lady Ghost was sent to the Ghost Zone."
Desiree smiled and dropped her shield. "So you have wished it, so shall it be."
The Lunch Lady was closing in on a punch drunk Danny when a swirling green portal opened behind her. "What?" She squawked. "But the menu hasn't been fixed! I can't go yet! Noooooo!" Scrabbling at thin air for purchase, she was sucked though the portal and disappeared from the Earthly Plane.
Tucker let out a whoop of victory. "Looks like ghost hunting is going to be way easier from now on!"
From where he was sitting, Danny growled under his breath.
DP-DP-DP
The rest of the week went downhill from there, at least from Danny's point of view.
"And then, she like, flew into the computer and started playing the game from the inside." He was grousing, running his fingers roughly through his hair. He and Sam were in the living room at Fenton Works, ostensibly to do their meditation exercises, but it wasn't working out that way.
Sam sat cross-legged in front of him. "How does that even work?"
Danny shrugged. "It's a power we've never seen ghosts use; she says most of them can do it. They call it overshadowing, but I call it possession."
"Look at it this way: at least you're learning lots of new facts about ghosts you didn't know before." She'd been trying to bring him out of his funk for three days to no avail. It was getting hard keeping the frustration out of her voice.
"Oh yeah, Tucker knows a lot of 'ghost facts' now. Like her favorite food, favorite clothes. She died a thousand years before the first camera was invented, but hey; now Tuck knows her favorite movies and TV shows too. Did you know that she's been asking him to wish for things for her?"
"Yeah, and I approve." said Sam. "It makes this whole twisted arrangement they've got going a little more equal."
Danny gave her a gravely serious look. "Sam, just about the only check on how powerful this ghost is comes from the fact that she can't grant her own wishes."
Realizing that no meditation was going to happen today, Sam sat back and braced herself with her hands behind her. "I'm not saying we should trust her completely, or that anything ever will make what Tucker is doing here okay, but stop and think about what she's actually asked him to wish for that I know of: clothes, food—which she's shared with us, and enough knowledge of the modern world so she'll fit in. That's hardly dangerous."
"I think that salad's been going to your head." Sam glared daggers at him. "No, I mean literally. It's a magic salad, Sam. A Salad of Evil!"
She continued to give him a look while reaching up and tapping the side of her head. "If I was under mind control, don't you think you'd know about it?"
"Oh." He rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Right. But there's still something unnatural about dating a ghost."
"Yeah, but they're only pretending... right?" She made a face at the idea.
Danny scowled. "That's what I'm worried about. They played Doomed together all night last night. There was giggling."
"You and Tucker play Doomed all night all the time." Sam said plainly, then smirked. "There's also giggling."
"Men chuckle!" Danny defended. "And anyway, remember how I told you this stupid idea of his is working and girls are taking notice?" Sam nodded. "He doesn't seem to care."
Sam's jaw dropped open and it took her a moment to gather her thoughts enough to respond. "T-tucker? Our Tucker? Mr. Wannabe Casanova doesn't care that girls might actually fall for his terrible lines now? Okay, you're right; this is serious. We need to stage an intervention."
Just then, a throaty laugh could be heard from the foyer. It was followed into FentonWorks by Tucker and Desiree, arm-in-arm. Desiree was holding up a hand glowing in ecto-energy. "So how it works is—"
Danny reacted instantly to the sight of a ghost charging a ghost ray. With not time to turn into Danny Phantom, he turned, pulled Sam behind him defensively, and grabbed her ecto-pistol off the coffee table. One squeeze of the trigger; one shot.
The ghost in question saw and also reacted instantly, pulling Tucker behind her and transforming the burgeoning ecto-energy into a kite shield in front of her. The blast struck the shield and ricocheted around the room before finally destroying a lamp.
"Intervention, not insurrection, Danny!" Sam reached around him and grabbed his arms, forcing them and the ecto-pistol down.
Desiree watched Danny with a carefully arranged expression of boredom to hide what was really going through her mind. Then she forced a smile and looked back at Tucker. "It's a good thing I was explaining ghost shields to you, or that would have... hurt slightly."
Tucker, however, wasn't hiding his shock. "Dude! What is wrong with you?! You're turning into one of those crazy old guys that sit on their porch with a shotgun."
"She looked like she was going to blast you!" Danny said, straining against Sam to try and bring the ecto-pistol back up and at the ready.
Desiree flipped her hair. "He's right, you know. There's no way to tell the difference between a ghost ray and a ghost shield before they're used."
"Yeah," said Tucker, "but he's a terrible shot with anything that's not part of the Danny Phantom suit. He could have hit me while he was trying to save me."
Danny stopped fighting Sam and looked down at the floor dumbly. "Um... well, yeah? At least I'm not dating a ghost!" He said like a five year-old who didn't want to be the only one in trouble.
"We are not dating!" said Tucker and Desiree at the same time. They glanced at each other, then looked away.
Danny and Sam's minds touched with a mutual 'yeah, right', then noticed that Sam was still reaching around him and forcing his arms down. Sam quickly took the ecto-pistol from his hands and backed away.
"So." Tucker said with a nervous little cough. "How about a subject change."
"God yes." said Sam, far too quickly. She snuffed the candle they were using for meditation and threw herself on the couch. "You were saying something about ghost shields that has nothing to do with massive awkwardness?"
Tucker flopped down in an armchair with Desiree opting to simply fold her legs under hr and float in place. "Yeah. Apparently, ghost shields use the same energy as ghost rays, so with a few minor tweaks, I can make it so the Ghost Battlin' Belt can generate them too. I've noticed that Danny's actually done it by accident a few times already."
"Oh no." Danny sat down in front of the couch and leaned back against it. "She is not allowed to mess with our ghost hunting gear."
"Did you hear me make a wish?" Tucker asked indignantly. "She's not: I am, after studying how she does it. It you haven't noticed, I am still being careful with my wishes—no offense, Desi." She shrugged, which caused her to bob in the air. "But yeah, I haven't wished for anything that can fail catastrophically, like a million dollars, or super powers or anything else television has taught me will always end up bad."
"Well goodie for you." Danny said sourly.
Tucker rolled his eyes and decided to ignore him. "Speaking of ghost gear; Sam next time you take stuff home, can you tell me? I set that Fenton Bazooka out so I could see if I could miniaturize the tech or upgrade the thermoses."
"I didn't take it." Sam said.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm pretty sure I would remember lugging a thirty pound gun home." She pointed out.
Tucker frowned. "Weird. Huh. I guess this place is so cluttered, I'm loosing track."
"I could find it." Desiree volunteered. "All you have to do is wish."
"Stop telling him how to use his wishes!" Danny shouted, sitting up.
She glared at him. "It was just a suggestion. Just like my suggestion to wish that other ghost away the other day. It's just an idea to make everyone's life easier."
"Yeah, to make your life easier when you turn on Tuck, you mean." He stood up, fists clenched.
A fire lit in her eyes and she dropped to the floor, hands firmly planted on her hips. "You know, I've become incredibly tired of all of these accusations and little quips about how much of a 'monster' I am. If ghosts are so bad, why are you trying so hard to be one." She stabbed a finger toward his belt.
"Desi..." Tucker reached up and grabbed her arm.
"To even the playing field." Danny spat. "Because you ghosts have all these tricks and powers you use to make humans' lives worse."
She turned intangible to slip Tucker's grasp and folded her arms over her chest. "I've done nothing to make anyone's lives worse... in a while. And I don't plan to." She pretended to have an epiphany. "Wait! I know what this is about. Maybe you wouldn't have such a problem with me if you just asked Tucker to make the one wish you really want: to have your parents back."
The room turned silent and colder than Desiree's ghostly chill could account for.
"That was too far." Tucker whispered into the void of silence. "You need to apologize like now."
Sam jumped up off the couch and grabbed Danny's shoulders. "Danny, please don't." She was too late. Danny turned the dial on his belt so hard he almost pulled I off its mounting. The flow of ectoplasm washing over him stung Sam's hands and made her let go with a yelp.
For her part, Desiree's mouth moved, but no words came out. She knew she'd really done it this time. Even without twisting one wish or hurting one person, she'd confirmed to him that she was something to be hated, hunted and hounded until she was either back in the Ghost Zone, or destroyed.
She shot an apologetic look at Tucker, then flew sharply to the right to keep him out of the line of fire.
Except Danny didn't go for her. Instead, he launched himself at Tucker's backpack, phased his hand through, and came up with the pink crystal bottle. He wasn't wearing his goggles, so it was easy to see the hurt and rage in his eyes.
"Now I've got the bottle." He said, voice hard. "And I've got just one wish:"
"Danny, no!" Tucker leapt at him and grabbed the arm holding the bottle. "What she said was stupid, but you can't!"
"Tuck, let go!" Danny tried to wrest the bottle back, forgetting he could go intangible. "This is for your own good. You thought you could game this whole genie thing, but you can't! She's using you for whatever plans she has!"
"Dude, stop and think a second." Tucker said, pleading now as he fell into a tug of war with his best friend. "You're just angry about what she said; you're not thinking straight!"
They both gave one last, mighty tug, and that was that. The bottle fumbled out of both of their hands and hit the floor, shattering into a mess of pink crystal and green haze.
"That's... not good." Sam said, looking on.
Tucker looked from the broken bottle to Danny. "That's very not good. Babazita even had a sign about not doing that."
A phantom wind kicked up and blew the mist over to Desiree, where it took the form of the manacles she wore in her ghost form over her arms. There was a tinkling sound, then those manacles shattered and vanished.
Desiree stared down at her arms and dark skin became green, and her legs became a ghostly tail. Her expression was mixed. "I-I'm free." She said quietly, then looked up, first with a sad look toward Tucker, then a hard one at Danny.
"I suppose there's no point of me staying around here anymore." Lifting her head, she flew straight up through the ceiling and was gone.
DP-DP-DP
A/N: I'm frankly shocked at the support people have shown for a 'real' Desiree/Tucker relationship. That honestly wasn't part of the plan; this was originally going to be a one and done story that might have gotten a callback later. In deference to people who like the idea, I've added some TxD (Wishshipping?) luff to this chapter, and since apparently 'the pairing absolutely no one demanded' is in demand, I guess I can tun this into a story thread. Expect Desiree to be more of a guest star though, as she is way too powerful to be a permanent part of Team Phantom.
Anyway, I seem to have forgotten the title card. It's being edited into Part 1, but here it is for those of you who don't want to backtrack:
All You Desire
Tucker lounges in a deck chair. Desiree is behind him, her ghostly tail wrapping around him as if to tie him there. She's smirking and feeding him a bunch of grapes while her shadow on the wall looms threateningly. Nearby is a door that's being kicked in by an irate looking Sam and Danny. Danny is in Phantom mode with hands blazing, Sam is duel wielding ecto-pistols.
Tagline: The episode you WISHED for.
There ya go, folks :p
Next Chapter: Episode 3: All You Desire Part 4 – Desiree is on the loose and Danny is on the hunt. Can Tucker and Sam catch up to them in time to keep them from going too far against one another? It's the moment that challenges Tucker's friendship with Danny; will they still be best friends after this?