There and Back Again

10

The dinner had been a wonderful and brilliant idea. Danny only wished he could have taken the credit for it. But he was a man who gave credit where credit was due, and as he sat at the dark wood table he'd chosen for his dining room, he couldn't help but smile at Jazz and Sam each in turn. In the days since he'd taken them to Clockwork and given them some, most, of the truth, things had been better and easier between all of them. If Danny still felt the outsider he knew he needed to chalk it up to the fact that these people he was with weren't the ones he'd known for eleven years, had lived with and loved with and mourned with. But they were his, they were really and truly his, and for Danny that was making enough of a difference that it was almost easy to forget the truth behind it.

Sam was to his left, then Tucker and then Jazz, and his mother and then his father to his right to complete the circle. Everyone was laughing as they passed bowls and plates back and forth, even if Sam was threatening to kill Tucker for dropping a piece of the steak on her plate. He smiled at her unrepentantly and simply scooped it up with his fork to gnaw on it before dropping it to his plate in favor of the baked potatoes being shoved at him by Jazz. The only person missing was Valerie, but she'd been honest when she declined.

"It's not that I don't want to, Danny, but you know how things in Amity can be like when you make plans," she'd said as she held the portal alert to his eyes with a wry smile. "It's my night. Maybe next time."

Once a rejection from her would have damn near killed him. Now Danny only wished that another friend could be there.

He'd helped more than Sam and Jazz were saying, and even as Danny complained at their fickle affections (and how he loved the way Sam blushed as he arched a brow at her as he said it) and conceded that all he'd really done was man the grill and make sure that Tucker didn't manage to steal every last steak off of it. Though he did think that Tucker managed to snag one somehow between grill and table. But that was why Danny had made several extra. That and the fact that his dad had already had two pieces and seemed to be making eyes at a third with an appetite that made his mother smile.

The good spirits stayed high through the clean up, quickly done by Jazz and Danny as Sam brought out the dessert. It was a blueberry cobbler that she said was completely vegan, not that he understood how it could be anything but. It was made with flour and fruit and not too much else. Maybe an egg, and Sam didn't eat those either. But whatever she wanted to call it, it was excellent and, like the steak, was devoured quickly and efficiently by the males present.

It was over far quicker than Danny wanted it to be, but even he had to admit that it was late. The hands of the clock were ticking ever closer to the witching hour as Danny said goodnight to his parents and sister with hugs and kisses and blessed I love you's that he gave them like there would be no tomorrow until all that was left was a pile of dishes in both kitchen and on table and two very pleased friends who were sprawling themselves around his living room.

Sam was curled in one of the recliners and Tucker had stretched himself out on the couch, making Danny chuckle as he lounged in the other recliner as the clock finally tolled midnight. "You guys aren't going home, are you?" he asked with a grin.

"Do we look like we're going anywhere?" Sam asked with a yawn as she begin the task of unlacing her boots.

Danny chuckled. "Not in the least. I could just phase them off of you," he offered, then shrugged as she shook her head.

"I'd still have to lace them back on in the morning," she said with another yawn.

"I've got a guest room, you know," Danny said as he glanced between Sam and Tucker both. He did have a guest room. One. And he wasn't exactly feeling charitable to giving up the privacy of his own room.

Tucker laughed at Danny as if he could see the man doing the math in his head. "Dude, I'm not sharing a bed with Sam," and Sam rolled her eyes. "Do you have a blanket though? Because this couch is just too comfortable."

Danny gave Tucker a smug smirk. "Why do you think I bought it?"

"Because I'd have killed you if you'd gotten real leather," Sam interjected as the laces finally came undone enough that she kicked first one and then the other boot off to land with thunks on the wood of the floor.

"And there is that," Danny admitted. "But no, when I tried it out in the store I actually fell asleep on it. That thing is like heaven in my living room."

Sam laughed and Danny couldn't help but smile at the sound as he yawned himself and stood. "Come on, Sam, I'll show you to your room," Danny said and walked past Tucker even as Tucker glared and demanded a blanket.

Without a second thought Danny reached through a wall and tugged a blanket from whatever had been on the other side. He threw it at the other man and grinned when it pegged Tucker right in the face, making Tucker yelp even as he began curling himself around the blanket. "Lights off," Tucker demanded, and Danny just smiled at Sam as he palmed the switch sending the living room into darkness.

"It's this way, he said softly, suddenly very aware that this Sam had never been in his house and wouldn't know from experience where the room was.

"It's nice," she said as she followed Danny inside, violet eyes taking in the way he'd chosen to decorate, the colors and the warm wood of the furniture. Danny's eyes found hers and he looked away.

"You'll probably want something to sleep in, right? Hang on a sec," and he slipped back out into the hall before disappearing through a door a little farther down and on the other side of the hall. Moments later he was reappearing with a neatly folded pile of clothes in his arms that he shoved at her before pulling his hands back and folding his arms across his chest. "So, um, goodnight. I'll see you in the morning."

Sam could only watch him in confusion as he disappeared again, this time closing the door behind him, and Sam shook her head. "I guess it's a guy thing," she muttered as she shook out the clothes he handed her. She almost laughed. The pajama pants were fine, they were completely normal, but she couldn't help but chuckle at the shirt. It seemed that, no matter how much time had passed, she'd rubbed off on him.

With a smile that stretched into a yawn Sam stripped off her own shirt and jeans, folding them neatly and laying them on a chair that was angled in one corner, then tugging the pants up and shaking her head as she tied the drawstring as tight as she could get it. They still hung at her hips, but it was better than nothing. She quickly slipped her bra off and tucked it under her folded clothes and pulled the black shirt on, fingers brushing across the raised test that read Bite me, with another grin before tugging the cover from the bed and tucking herself beneath it.

She yawned yet again, sighed, and then snuggled her head down into the pillow before closing her eyes. She was very nearly asleep when she realized that the shirt smelled like Danny.

---

He wasn't a morning person and she knew it. Hell, Danny had never even tried to pretend that he could get upright without a pot and a half of coffee in the mornings. She'd known him long enough to know that, too. He'd suffered through high school without the caffeine rush until Tucker and Sam had introduced him to it during midterms of senior year. He survived on it from then on straight through college and into the working world. And that was why Danny couldn't even begin to understand why she was even trying to get him out of bed without coffee.

Or sex, because that always woke him up to, and Danny rolled to his other side to try and escape the poking and prodding she was putting him through.

"Danny, come on," she whispered softly into his ear. He twitched at the way her breath tickled him. "Sweetie, please get up. We have the day off and I want to spend it with you."

He smiled and reached behind him to pull her closer, trying to convince her without saying anything to crawl back under the blankets and snuggle back into sleep. "Mmm," he managed as he rolled over again, eyes still closed. "It's too early, babe. Let's just go back to sleep."

She laughed and it was music to his ears. "Come on, Sleepyhead. It's time to wake up."

"I don't want to," he said again, still refusing to open his eyes. It was so nice just to have her back with him, and he knew that opening his eyes and waking up would ruin the dream.

"There's not much time left, Danny. Please, please wake up," she begged. "Please wake up and stay with me today," and her voice was so soft, he nearly couldn't hear it.

He shook his head as he slipped an arm to her waist. "Just a few more minutes, Sam. I'm just so tired. Okay, honey?"

There was no answer and it sent Danny shooting upright in his bed, eyes startled wide as he realized that he was alone, that there was no one else there and that he was clutching a pillow much as he would a lover. There was a blur of movement at the corner of his eye and Danny's head whipped to the right hoping against hope that she was there. He had a moment where he saw a hint of violet eyes, and graceful smile, and then it was gone even as he reached a hand out towards the shadow where Sam had stood moments before in nowhere but his mind.

"Sam," he whispered, and raised a hand to wipe his eyes of the burning in them. Much to Danny's surprise his cheeks were already wet, and when he looked back he realized so was the pillow. Like he had known even as he dreamed that it wasn't her, that she wasn't here, that she was nowhere to be found now, lost to a timeline that he had destroyed when he came back to the time he'd left more than a decade earlier.

"Oh god, please, it hurts," he said into the dark even as he lay back and rolled so that his face was buried in the pillow before he said anything that might be heard. He was coherent enough to realize that neither Sam nor Tucker needed to hear him grieving for a girl who had never existed anywhere but here, a girl that was sleeping ten feet and a million miles away from him. And this time when he pleaded for the pain to stop, he was almost sure that no one heard him.

If Sam hadn't woke at the first plea it would have worked. Even with an entire hallway between the room she slept in and the room he obviously wasn't asleep in, Sam could still hear Danny. It was painful, heartbreaking to hear it and know that there was nothing that she could do. She had a strong suspicion that whoever he'd married had died, and most likely at Vlad's hands given the murderous spree that other halfa had been on in that life. She pulled the blanket up over her head, eyes hot and burning as she closed them and tried not to hear it as Danny cried.

She knew he didn't want to be heard, the way he tried to stay quiet was enough that she knew it. But there were some things that seemed to be louder in the middle of the night than if done in the silence of the day, and grief was one of them. Sam knew, she'd cried for her mother and her father in the dark peace of the night, and then for her grandmother too when she finally admitted that there was no other alternative that to admit that she was slipping away mentally.

Oh yes, this was something Sam could relate to far too well. Especially in those long, cold, empty months after Danny disappeared. That had been grief, and she never wanted to live through that aching and wrenching pain again. Even now, just hearing him, she could feel the gasping breaths in her lungs as she tried to remember how to breathe when nothing else mattered, not even her own life. The pain as he nails dug into her palms and cut bloody crescents there.

With a frantic breath Sam sat up, flinging the blanket and sheets from her as she stumbled out of the bed as quietly as she could. She felt her way across the floor blindly and when her hands found the knob she turned it and fled into the dark of the hallway. She could hear him better now, for all that he truly was being quiet. A pillow, she figured, over his head, or face buried in it. Just as she had so many nights three years ago.

Sam bit her lip and stumbled as she found the open space that was the living room and tripped onto the couch making Tucker reach out, startled, but unsurprised, to steady her. Sam's eyes adjusted to the dark much more quickly that she expected, but her mind moved enough to realize that she could see Tucker because of the glow of his PDA where it lay on the floor in front of the couch. She watched him look at her with pity, send the same sad expression down the hall towards Danny's room, and then he opened his arms.

She didn't want for a second invitation but flung herself into them with a muffled cry, burrowing her face into the warmth of his sweater and snugging her hands tight to her ears so that she wouldn't' hear. There was no point to it, she realized as a shiver shook her, and she felt Tucker shudder, too. Her face lifted and she saw the faint telltale flash of silvery-white light slipping from beneath Danny's bedroom door to light the hallway for a moment before disappearing. No matter that it made no sound, they both knew when he left, seconds after the change and shooting up through the roof.

All they could do was turn bleak stares onto each other.

---

He looked for a fight, not caring who it was so long as he could release some of the pain, some the burning ache where his heart was. He found it at the docks first, with the Box Ghost, who crumpled like one of his cardboard boxes when Danny showed him no mercy. He found it second with Johnny and Kitty and Shadow, and none of them stood a chance against him as Danny unleashed the raw emotion inside of him with a cry, a scream, a blazing glory of ectoplasm that withered everything in its path.

He found it third with a ghost he didn't know and Valerie. Dear, loyal, dangerous Valerie who was almost getting her ass handed to her on a platter as Danny jumped in and took a blow that was meant for her. And all she could do was scream at him and draw another ectogun to train on him. The sheer nerve she had at turning fire on him only seconds after he'd saved her from a blow that would have really injured her made his eyes flare with sickly green light that lit its way across his shoulder and down his arms. It flared out into a shield just in top to stop the blast she'd fired at him from hitting him dead in the face, and Danny glowered at her knowing that the look he was giving her was never going to help his case as the friendly and helpful ghost he always tried to be.

"What," he bit out as he shrugged the shield off and let a tendril of ectoenergy knock her gun from her hand, "the hell is wrong with you? I come and help you and you shoot me?!?" He knew he was dangerously close to a wail with the intensity he'd put into his words and immediately reined his power back in and tamped it down as harshly as he could without turning human.

"You're a ghost," Valerie ground out at him, holding her wrist and clenching her fingers where he'd stung her when he'd disarmed her. "I hunt ghosts, especially ghosts as dangerous as you."

"Oh, Val," he said mockingly. "You have no idea how dangerous I am."

He dove then, losing altitude as fast as he could until he was close enough to the ground to make out individual blades of grass. In the blink of an eye he'd pulled up, impossibly up, his legs long since having blurred into a ghostly tail that trailed yards behind him. Danny knew with the speeds he was moving at there was no chance for Valerie to lock onto him for a shot, even as she held her uninjured hand out and a trio of swirling red boxes rose from the confines of her suit to try and aim at him. He could almost hear her cursing when she realized that she wouldn't be able to aim and he slipped to the side as she began firing random shots into his flight path. She missed, every one of them, and Danny could only smile in a cold baring of teeth as he barreled in to the ghost that Valerie had forgotten about when her tunnel vision for Danny had taken over.

The ghost shrieked as he drove it up and up and up into the air with a sudden flaring of energy around him to sear and sting at the other ghost's form. It struggled and Danny let it, turning himself intangible and flying through the ghost to turn in a blur of shadow, one hand whipping behind his back to grab the Fenton thermos he habitually kept there. Then the ghost was gone in a blindingly bright vortex and a glare of swirling blue. He gave a satisfied growl and capped the thermos, hooking it back on to his belt before taking a moment to pause and look down at where Valerie last was. She wasn't there and Danny only sighed in exasperation and he stopped his heart and halted his breathing to listen.

The whine of the jet sled was faint even from such close range, but Danny had never denied that Valerie's equipment was top of the line, then and now. He felt rather than heard the guns in her suit charge up to fire and flipped himself up, feet flying forward and then up and over until he'd landed lightly just behind Valerie on the sled.

"Checkmate," he snarled as he yanked her arms back and dragged her back to tumble from the jet sled.

He gave her credit for pure nerve and an iron stomach. A lesser woman would have screamed the entire way down, but Valerie didn't. It was habit more than anything else that saved the sled from crashing as she clicked her heels together and retrieved it back into her suit, but he knew that there wasn't anything that was going to save her the way he'd locked her arms behind her as he exerted his power and brought them to a slow stop as he corrected their trajectory. Once righted he let go of her wrists and turned her around, slamming her back into a wall as he pressed one arm to her throat and glared at her with an intensely burning green gaze.

"I've never offered to hurt you, Valerie Gray, and I'm not going to start now, but you need to accept that I'm not the enemy," he ordered her. He could see her angry eyes behind the transparent face mask and bit back the sudden and undeniable urge to shake some sense into her as her lips twisted in a snarl.

"You ruined my life, you're evil," she insisted. "You destroy the town, put good people in harm's way."

"So do you."

Her retort was fast and sharp. "You're the reason Danny Fenton was gone," she choked out in fury. "You disappeared the day he left and come back the day he returned. You took him and you came back to take him."

Danny gave a choked laugh before looking her in the eyes. "You know the sad thing is you're almost right." He let go of her and stepped back, watching as she raised her arm and let loose a shot. It was blocked by another shield before it could hit, and Danny shook his head. "I'm not going to let you kill me right now, Val. If I die it'll be in a fair fight. But if you want to kill me so damned bad," and Danny sighed and let go of his ghost, "well, now you know where I live."

He watched her face as she got her first real look at him, and almost smiled at the shock and horror. Then he let go of his humanity and disappeared completely.