Chapter Rewrite Complete

I hid from Danny for as long as I possibly could, but eventually he found me. It was bound to happen before too long, even with as many hiding spots as the Fenton's had accidentally created over the years. I knew he wouldn't let me hide for long, but I was honestly amazed I got as much time as I did. He probably let himself heal a little more before he even started looking for me.

"Sam, please don't run from me again. I just want to talk."

Running was tempting, but I knew it wouldn't actually help anything. "I'd really rather we didn't."

"I don't want to just ignore this. I don't think I can."

"I know, I'm just not ready to talk about it." Danny probably just wanted to make sure I was okay, but I knew that conversation would turn into so much more than that. I was tired of hiding things from him, but that didn't mean I was ready to tell him how I felt. We usually told each other everything, but this was the one secret I'd been keeping from him for years.

"Okay. I can work with that. We don't have to talk about it now- I can wait until you're ready. Just promise me one thing, please? Promise we'll talk about it when you are ready. I don't want to spend the rest of our lives pretending it never happened. Can you do that for me?"

A part of me really wanted to tell him no, but I found myself looking into those baby blue eyes pleading at me and just couldn't bring myself to do it. "Okay. I promise."

"Good." His smile turned into a mischievous smirk. "So are you going to come willingly or am I going to have to get creative?"

"Creativity? I've never seen that from you before," I teased. I really wondered what he had planned. His mom wasn't too far away. She probably couldn't hear us, but she had a full view. He wouldn't risk using his powers.

"Now that's a little hurtful, Sammykins." He glanced to the side of the room, and I followed his gaze trying to figure out what he had planned. Apparently, it was nothing more than a distraction though as I suddenly found myself thrown over Danny's shoulder.

I heard Maddie start laughing as I playfully struggled against him. As Danny turned to take me back to his room, her laughter stopped and I saw confusion spread across her features. I didn't figure out why until Danny finally put me back down. Just a couple hours earlier, he'd barely been standing, and suddenly he was not only walking perfectly, but able to pick me up and carry me away.

Once I started to think about it, it confused me too. I knew Danny healed pretty fast, but not that fast. I could believe that he could walk just fine, but carrying me up a flight of stairs just fine seemed like a stretch.

"Are you sure you're okay? You looked really bad earlier."

"What? Yeah." He lifted up his shirt to reveal a thin line of irritated flesh. "This was the worst of it and even that's nearly gone now."

I ran my fingers over the line, feeling an icy chill as it started to fade before my eyes. "Damn. I didn't realize you healed that fast."

"It's been getting faster as I get stronger. As long as I keep my strength up, most things heal within a few hours." That was not the comforting statement he thought it was.

"What takes longer?" I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to know the answer.

His hand went to the back of his neck. "I, uh, might have pretty much shattered my back a couple times. The first time hurt like hell. I wasn't even sure it would heal at first."

"Danny! Why didn't you call us?"

He just shrugged. "I didn't want to worry you guys if it was going to be fine. I could feel it healing, it just wasn't as fast as normal."

"You should have called us! The last thing we need is for you to get yourself paralyzed!"

"I was fine. I didn't want to call you guys at three in the morning if I didn't have to."

"You better call us next time. I don't care what time it is. Your ghost half is not invicible and if that goes down, you go down." I thought I heard a gasp come from outside the door, but I was too upset to dwell on it. Danny had promised he would call us if he needed help, and apparently that hadn't been happening.

"Okay. I'll call next time, I promise."

"You better. If you get yourself killed because you did something stupid, I swear I will find a way to ressurect you just kill you my damn self."

Danny laughed a little. "I don't doubt it. You win. No more incredibly stupid stunts."

"No more stupid stunts at all," I shot back.

"Sam, you know me. The only reason I don't do more stupid shit is because you're there to smack some sense into me."

"Fair point."

"If even I know it's stupid, I won't do it. Okay?"

I sighed. "Fine." I yawned.

"You look exhausted, Sam. You haven't been sleeping much, have you?"

"Me and sleep have not been getting along lately." It wasn't for lack of trying and the nightmares were only part of the problem. Even when I manged to get to sleep, I was waking up constantly from Danny running off to fight some ghost. I knew he was losing sleep, but I had no idea just how bad it was. He was getting up at least once an hour, and sometimes he'd be gone for a while. Just like the injuries, Danny had told us part of the story, but it was nowhere near the whole truth. I was almost afraid to find out what else he'd been hiding.

"Take a nap. I promise I will still be in one piece when you wake up."

"You damn well better be," I muttered as I curled up in bed. A nap did sound nice. Maybe I would get lucky and get a couple hours of solid sleep.

I felt his hands grabbing at me and I couldn't tear my eyes away from his face. I didn't want to see the joy in his eyes, but I was more afraid of watching it happen.

He had me stripped down and pinned against the wall, his hands in places they definitely weren't supposed to be.I heard myself scream as pushed my legs apart and forced himself into me. Why was he doing this? I didn't want any part of this, but I couldn't stop him, no matter what I did.

"Look up, Sam." I heard a voice whisper. "Look up and find me." Danny. He could save me from this and make it stop.

I forced myself to look away from Dash and found the lights dancing in the sky.

"DANNY!"

I woke up screaming Danny's name. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. "It's okay. I'm right here. You're safe. I'm not going anywhere." Danny kept repeating the same thing over and over again until I started to calm down. I barely registered that he lightly kissed the top of my head before he finally let me go.

I started looking around the room, desperate to be entirely certain of where I was and what was going on around me. My heart was still pounding and images from that nightmare kept flashing across my mind. Nightmares sucked because the kept messing with me even after I woke up. They wouldn't be so bad if the effects would stay in the damn dream.

Even though I'd thouroughly scanned the room, it still took me a second to notice Maddie. I wasn't even sure if she'd been there the whole time if she came in because she heard me scream.

"Are you alright, sweetie?"

My brain was not working right, still trying to catch up with reality. It took a second to process what she said. "Yeah. Just nightmares, I'll be fine."

"Okay. I'll leave you kids alone for a little while."

We sat in silence for few minutes, my mind switching back and forth between the nightmare and images of the actual event.

"You sure you're okay, Sam?"

"Yeah." I wasn't really, but that wouldn't change if I kept focusing on the images flashing across my mind. "Why was she in here?" I needed something to focus on. Something to keep my mind off the nightmare.

"She was asking about my injuries. You're right, Sam. She's getting close to figuring it out. I have to tell her soon, I just don't know how."

"Yeah, that's a rough one. You start by telling her you're ready to talk about everything. I don't know where you'd go from there, though. You've kept this hidden for so long, even I don't know how to help you.

"I don't think 'that portal accident turned me half ghost and you've spent the past few years hunting me like an animal because I never got around to telling you' would go over too well."

"Definitely not. But at least you know what not to say."

"Why is it always easier to find the wrong answers than the right ones?"

"Because life is complicated."

Danny sighed. "Alright. I vote we've done enough thinking for today and it's time for mindless video games."

I laughed. He always was the expert at avoiding things. "Agreed."

We stayed up playing games for much longer than we really should have, but we needed it. Staying up late to shoot zombies felt normal, and we both needed a sense of normalcy. There hadn't been much of it since Danny got his powers, and we needed it then more than ever. Despite the constant breaks for ghost fights, for once we got to feel like normal teenagers making terrible decisions for the sake of having some fun.

Maddie dragged Danny out of bed bright and early the next morning. She'd bribed Jazz into being his personal tutor for the week. Maddie hoped some one on one time would help him catch up on his studies. Danny was banished to Jazz's room until the normal school day ended.

As soon as he was gone, I rolled over and went right back to sleep, praying my brain would let me have some peaceful sleep.

I awoke to someone stubbornly knocking at the door and pulled the covers over my head.

"Sam, sweetie? You still alive in there?"

"Yeah," I groaned.

"It's almost one. You should probably get uo before you conpletely screw up your sleep cycle."

"Okay." I really didn't want to. I felt rested, but the whole "getting up" thing felt like way too much effort. The bed was comfy and warm. My stomache was growling, though, demanding to be fed. I slowly rolled my ass out of bed and shuffled down to the kitchen ten minutes later.

I dug through the fridge, searching for something that wouldn't bite back. The living food was an accident at first, but it had turned into an expieriment all it's own. In my groggy state, sorting predator from prey was a struggle. It brought a smile to my face though, bringing back memories of all the rants I'd heard from Danny about it. He would periodically misidentify things and end up getting bit. He always swore that one of his greatest accomplishments was winning a fight with the hotdogs and eating them afterwards.

The apples looked safe. No glow, no movement, no lines vaguely resembling a face, and most importantly, not meat. I joined Maddie at the table, where she was tinkering with one of the ectoguns. Jack had probably blown out the lights in the basement again.

Maddie greeted me with a smile. "Welcome back to the land of the living, dear."

"I finally got some good sleep."

"That's good. You needed it. The last few days have been rough."

I spotted the first aid kit on the table. It didn't belong there and Maddie didn't appear to have any need for it. "What's that doing out?" I had a sinking suspicion that Danny needed to have his ass reaquainted with my boot.

"I was hoping you could tell me. I think Danny pulled it out last night. Is he okay?"

"He better be or I'm going to kick his ass."

"I guess he doesn't tell you everything either."

"Apparently not." It was scary to think about how much I'd found out over the past few days. Tuck and I had suspected Danny was keeping things from us, but not to this extent.

"Sam, I'm not going to ask you to outright betray Danny's trust, but can I ask one question and get and honest answer?"

"Okay, I don't know how much of an answer I can give you, though."

"Does any of this have to do with the portal accident?"

"Yes," I replied instantly, not even thinking about the possible repercussions. I realized a moment too late that might have been way too close to Danny's secret. It probably didn't matter, though. Maddie probably already knew and was just checking her theory.

"Thank you." I watch Maddie start to puzzle over the information I'd given her. She was on a war path. I knew her and I knew it probably wouldn't have mattered whether or not I'd answered her. She was dangerously close to putting the pieces together and Danny had been making mistakes left and right ever since he'd found me in that alley.

It was then that I realized how much the event was affecting him. Neither of us had been acting like ourselves, but I'd been too focused on my own problems to really see what it was doing to Danny. His powers had gone haywire in ways that I hadn't seen since freshman year. Things were falling through his hands constantly and some of the things he managed to hold onto were frozen solid by the time he put them down. He'd been too distracted to keep himself firmly in control of his powers.

And I'd gone and made things worse when I kissed him, then refused to talk about it. I'd given him one more thing to worry about. It was one thing for him to risk blowing his secret at home, everything would turn out fine in the end, but if he was having that much trouble then he was at risk for exposure out in public, too.

Fuck. I had to talk to him about the kiss. It was the one part of the mess I had caused and I needed to clean it up. My heart started pounding as I thought about that conversation. Talking about it meant telling him why it happened and that meant telling him how I felt and that came with a solid risk of rejection. It would permanently change the course of our friendship, no matter how it ended.

At best, we'd start a relationship that I might not be ready for. I could probably handle the emotional side, but the physical stuff would be way too much. Danny was a good guy, but how long would he be willing to wait? There was no telling how long it would take me to heal enough to be ready for any of it. Honestly, that two second kiss was probably my absolute limit for the time being.

If he rejected me, things would be awkward. There was no way he'd let me keep staying in his room at night, sharing a bed with him. Even if he already knew how I felt, things would change the second I actually told him. He could choose to live in denial up until the moment I told him.

No matter how that conversation went, things would change, and that was the scary part. I could stare down a ghost with no fear, but change terrified me.

It had to happen though. Even if it went poorly, I had to do it to help Danny. After everything he'd done for me, I needed to repay the favor in anyway I could. I owed him that much.

Change was inevitable, but all I could do was hope it was for the better. I did have a little hope. The little kisses Danny had been leaving on top of my head felt like more than just a friendly gesture meant to comfort me. Maybe I was reading too far into things, but maybe everything would be okay.

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Invisible One