Sing to Life
By JadeRabbyt
Chapter 24: Made for Life
"Come on, Danny." Sam hugged him closer as they stumbled along the skirt of the mountain, neither injured physically, both aching internally. It hardly seemed possible to Sam that everybody had gone. It sucked the strength right out of her, and it didn't help that she'd been feeling weaker since this whole thing started. More and more she'd been starting at the shadows and depending on Danny's support, transforming into the easily-frightened Barbie girl she had shirked from for years. Now with the two of them stumbling for footholds, she didn't dare look Danny in the eye.
She fixed her gaze on the dark horizon. "We have to get away from Alex. He's always been bad news for us. Then we'll rest for a little while and start—"
"Rest now." His breathing, formerly staggered and irregular, began to slow, normalizing itself. "There won't be a later, and we've gone far enough anyway."
He let go of Sam and dropped to the ground, reverting to human form, splaying out his limbs and glaring at the sky. Sam lay down beside him. "What do you think we should do?"
Danny squinted up thoughtfully. "We have to try something." He clicked his fingers on the ground, rustling them in the dry grass. "Maybe that black stuff has some kind of weakness... Something we don't know about it."
"Like what?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Nobody knows anything about this stuff except Alex, and he's not exactly a big help. Either way—" Danny sat up to face Sam. "It means we'll have to get close to it."
Sam tried to keep her voice calm. "Isn't that sort of a bad idea? Like, a really bad idea?"
"I'm open to suggestions, but we can't just sit around out here." He paused. "At least, I can't." There was no way Sam was letting him go alone, and she told him so, but she didn't say that there was an even smaller chance of her allowing Danny to abandon her out here with a psycho for company.
They didn't move for a while longer. Sam reassured herself that she could do this—yes, she could do this. And at least they were doing something, after all. If they died... she wasn't going to think about that, but at least they would go trying to do something good for the world. Her hand wandered into Danny's. From the way he squeezed it, she guessed his thoughts ran along roughly the same lines.
"Alright." Danny stood and brushed himself off. "Let's go." He to ghost and took them both into the air. The wind swept by her hair, the fields passing silently beneath them. The breeze massaged the tops of her ears and froze the tip of her nose. On a vague suspicion, Sam glanced behind to search for Alex, but she didn't see him. The matter vaguely disturbed her.
"He's there," Danny muttered. "But he's not going to bother us. I don't think."
She looked at him dubiously. "Oh. Okay." Sam didn't know if it was right for Danny to be able to track Alex so easily.
They crossed into the forested area, growing closer to the black cloud of Amity. Danny ducked beneath the trees, presumably to avoid giving advance warning. He had to slow down. The trees were thick, obscuring the sky above, but they did smell pretty good. Earth and dampness mixed with fresh, tingling smells from the trees and warm decaying matter below—it was a welcome relief from the dead hillside. They swept through it, and Danny was careful not to hit anything, at least, he was until Sam felt him faltering. "Danny?"
Their flight continued to decay. Danny's eyes drooped, on the verge of nodding off in mid-flight. "Danny!"
He blinked. "Wha-aah!"
The tree rushed at them. It caught Danny in the chest with a thick branch. Sam hit a thick cluster of branches and leaves that scratched angrily at her face before letting her drop to the forest floor. She landed with a thump on something smooth and bumped, striking pain into her backbone. She groaned and rolled off the bumpy tree root, unable to sit up for the sharp pain. "Danny...?"
"I'm here." There was a crash as he stumbled out of a nearby patch of weeds and bushes. He had a few scratches and bruises, but he was otherwise uninjured. "Are you okay?"
"I hit my back on something, but I should be okay in a minute. Why did we crash?"
He toed the ground, embarrassed. "I got kind of... distracted." Sam didn't ask what had distracted him.
"Is there something I can do to help?" he offered. "I've heard back rubs can sometimes..."
"Danny." Sam managed, with difficulty, to sit up and smile at him. "I'm not going to die from a back injury. The world is ending. Do you really think we should be goofing around giving each other back rubs?"
He raised his hands. "Right now, I'll go with whatever works. And I have heard that back rubs help this kind of thing."
And Sam's back didn't exactly feel spectacular. She rolled her eyes. "Alright then." Danny zapped to human, and she let him come around to take a seat behind her. She leaned back into his hands. "Whatever works."
"That's the line."
Almost immediately Sam started to feel better. His hands squeezed and massaged her collarbone, the back of her neck, warming them with friction and making her own eyes droop sleepily. "Mmm..." Naturally, she was very careful to remind herself that this was what 'worked' and this was being done to help her recover from her back ache. Sort of.
His hands moved lower, rubbing circles along either side of her spine. She could feel the hesitancy in his movement, and that Danny had clearly not performed many backrubs. Sam thought it was cute. It made her feel sneaky—sneaky and very, very relaxed. The strain drained out of her arms and legs. "Okay, I think I'm fi-innne..." The word fell from her lips as Danny stopped to kiss her neck. His warm, soft breath and the touch of his lips both brought a very different kind of tension into play. Sam was fairly certain that this no longer qualified as 'whatever worked.' She let him go a bit longer, during which time his hands slid up and held fast to her upper arms, moving himself closer to caress her.
Sam scooted around to face him and treated him to her best fake glare. She definitely enjoyed the anxious awkwardness it gave him. "Was that part of the plan?"
He shook his head desperately, but he didn't look totally certain. "No! I mean, sort of..." He shrugged. "Did it work?"
With a laugh Sam threw her arms around him and kissed him. He caught on quickly as Sam made it eminently clear that this did indeed work for her.
Sensations raced faster. Everything came to Sam as smells and touches, caressing hands and wet lips against her flesh, bolts of pleasure as her freshman crush and sophomore boyfriend put a hand beneath her shirt and went where no one had ever gone. Fabric rustled against the soft earth beneath as somehow her shirt came off, the cold wind crashing onto her panting chest. Next to go were her shirt and leggings, and still everything held in a fog, a scarlet, suffocating cloud of the instant, of the tactile, and of the sensual. She turned her head, leaves crunching beneath it. Through the haze she saw somebody a little way off. Sam shrieked and shot out from under Danny.
It was Alex.
She grabbed her clothes and frantically cleared her head as she leaped into her leggings and shirt, forcing the fog away. She looked over at Danny and felt a whole new kind of panic. His pants were down around his ankles, and he still didn't seem to know quite what was going on.
"Sam, what's--?"
"Shut up!" she yelled, gesturing to Alex. Danny saw and scrambled to his feet, pulling up his jeans. Sam clutched her head. "Oooh, I don't BELIEVE this..." She had all her clothes on by now. So did Danny, but he still didn't totally get it.
"What, wait, Sam?" Danny had the good sense to keep his distance, but he clearly didn't know what to make of the situation, so he started with Alex. "You shouldn't have, um..." His strong start faltered as Sam shot him a look that could have vaporized granite.
He just didn't get it. "We're FIFTEEN YEARS OLD!" Danny remained mute. "We're not SUPPOSED to be DOING that!"
"Sam, I swear I didn't mean to. I swear!" He hadn't, either. Danny couldn't remember half of what had happened, and neither could Sam, for that matter.
She groaned. "You don't get it. I don't get it, either—but that thing has ruined us!"
Sam was furious, and Danny wished he could understand why. "What do you mean? I thought it was just—"
"Danny, did you do that because you loved me or because it would make you feel better?"
"I… Well what does that have to do with anything? You—you're not making any sense, Sam. And it wasn't all my fault."
Sam cried. Her face contorted in hopelessness and she wrung her hands, making one last appeal for him to see what she saw. Danny didn't or couldn't, but he was sorry. She turned away and raced off into the forest.
"Sam, wait! I—"
"Women." Alex leaned against the back of a tree nearby, a slow smirk growing on his face. Danny struggled between Alex and Sam.
"Relax. I'm sure she's not too keen on seeing you again too soon." Alex chuckled as Danny glared daggers at him. "You should see yourself right now. Teenagers! You guys are nuts."
Danny pursed his lips. "I'm nuts? I'm nuts? What are you, the standard for sanity?"
Alex sighed and dropped the smile. "You're also not very appreciative." He rolled his eyes at Danny's startled skepticism. "You think you're in trouble with her now. What do you think would have happened if I hadn't dropped by? If Sam had let you fuck her?" The smile reappeared. "Answer me that."
"We'd have done just fine."
"Yes, and if you'll excuse me I've got to go check the stock prices NO YOU MORON YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN FINE!" He shook his head, kicking idly at the earth. "You can never underestimate human intelligence."
"Don't yell at me, and don't call me a moron," Danny snapped.
"Or what. You'll punch me?"
He sighed. "Just don't."
"Fair enough."
Danny stood there, unsure of what to say or do. "What do you mean, 'a favor', anyway? Since when do you think of anybody but yourself?"
"There are, you know, some kinds of pain even I can't enjoy."
Danny highly doubted that, but Alex looked sincere for once. He wished Sam was around. She would have had an idea of what that meant, at the very least.
"I'm not going to say thank you."
"I'd be mortified if you did." Alex tilted his chin into the air, almost sniffing it. Satisfied, he turned back to Danny. "You might want to go after Sam. If I'm not mistaken, she was heading towards town, and I think my partners in crime have caught wind of her. Or, at least, I have caught wind of them, which probably means..." Alex stopped talking.
Danny had gone. Obviously the little hero wasn't quite as thick about that consideration as he was about the truncated screwing session. Alex put his hands in his pockets and strolled in the general direction of Amity.
XXX
Danny shot by the trees, and after a short burst of flight he spotted a road snaking along the ground, then a few scattered houses. Alex had been right. They were right on the edge of town, but he hadn't been able to see it for the trees. With any luck the goo hadn't reached this area, or at least it might be thinner. Danny touched down, keeping an eye out for the goo. Alex had also said that it was lurking around, and Danny was willing to bet that as snide as that jerk was, he definitely knew his black goos.
"Sam! Sam, I'm sorry!" Silence. Somewhere, a stick cracked; a leaf fell. A trickle of water leaked off the road from a busted main. Looking around, Danny saw that several of the houses and their surrounding underbrush had been burnt black. His breath caught. Those houses could be soaked in the goo and he'd never know it until it was right on top of him.
"Sam, if you can hear me, you have to come here. I've got to get you out of here!" He waited, standing stock-still for a reply.
Danny clenched his teeth, wondering why he'd ever wanted to go back. He couldn't take this stuff on directly, and now things were worse than before. A half hour ago, Danny would have honestly sworn that such a thing as 'worse' was impossible. "Sam!" he hollered, but not even his echo bounced back. Danny looked back at the burnt houses nervously, and he brightened. If he could sense Alex, then maybe through Alex he could sense that black stuff. Danny focused on the terrain, willing himself to see something. It didn't work. He could only sense varying concentrations of dread in every direction. Acting on a hunch, Danny chose the direction that gave him the most irrational fear and plunged on ahead.
"Sam!" Where there was darkness, there might be life.
"Danny?" A distant reply, but a blessed reply nonetheless.
Danny jumped into the air and bolted forward. "Hold on, I'm coming!"
"I think you'd better hurry..."
Danny caught up with her in the middle of a road several blocks over. The area still had houses and trees thoroughly intermixed, but almost every house had been burnt to the ground, the intervening hedges and shrubbery untouched. Each house had burnt by its own fire, leaving the skeletal remains to glare down at the two survivors like stern judges. A sky the color of dungeon shackles shed hard, sour light on them, and the road, cracked and pitted from the heat of the fires, rustled under their feet. A shiver rippled up Danny's spine. When the two of them spoke, it was in whispers.
Sam moved closer, but she was careful not to touch Danny. "I didn't see exactly where I was running, and I got... Here."
"That's okay. I don't think we should fly out of here, though." Danny didn't like the way the naked cinders reached upwards. "We have to walk a ways, first. Stay close, and walk very slowly."
Danny led the way, the two of them glancing every way, as they began to back out of the street. "Easy..." Danny muttered. One house, formerly a two story but now a skinny stick-frame that lorded over a pile of blackened wood, almost looked like it was bending. Danny didn't take his eyes off it. The brick fireplace rising from its front had pieces missing at the top, and as Danny watched, the brick-and-mortar fireplace groaned, stretching itself into an arch to point its gaping, black-stained crumbling mouth at the two of them.
"S-Sam, RUN!"
"Danny!" Sam screamed as a limb of blackness swept her up off the street. Danny ignored the chimney and jumped up after her, grasping for her hands.
"Let her go!" Danny fired beam after beam into the blackness, cutting it into holes to make his way after Sam. "Don't worry, I'll get you." Sam nodded mutely. The blackness had multiplied from a single stringy tentacle into a virtual lake of roiling fury that covered the width of the street and extended far down its length. The blackness swept Sam along in it, always keeping her just out of Danny's reach. It flew up at him time after time and Danny always burned away its strokes, repulsing every one of its attacks as his body glowed with plasma. His evasions were no victory, for as he lunged after Sam, her eyes began to glaze over.
"Sam, no! I'm sorry. I didn't mean for any of this." He could see her struggling behind the mask of apathy, fighting as bravely as she must have fought that first time Alex had caught her.
"We have to get through this, and you have to come out of there. Sam, please!"
Something in her eyes sparked. Her hand shot out and his shot forward. Danny caught her and held tight. No matter how the blackness shook him, he would not let her go, but no matter how much Danny pulled or burned with his plasma, neither would the blackness release its hold on Sam. From her dimming eyes, Sam watched him fighting his first losing battle. "Danny," she whispered.
He jerked toward her voice and their eyes locked, and then came something that no amount of supernatural evils or hormonal impulses could ever re-create. Without saying a word, Danny told her he was really, truly, sorry. The emotion spilled through his eyes and into her mind. Without a word Sam said that it didn't matter, that it wasn't his fault, and that no matter what happened to either them or the world, she loved him and wanted him to persist. For an instant each of them caught a glance at eternity in the diamond of the other's mind, and before the blackness ripped Sam away from him, before it struck her down and before Alex came out to give his own dreadful commentary, Danny and Sam exchanged heart's words.
Danny wanted her to know he was sorry. He wanted her to see how he'd tried and that he knew that he'd failed, failed completely, and that now it would be death for them all. He showed her everything he'd fought for, the fun times when they'd go to the movies with Tucker, the cool times when something amazing or astonishing would happen, things like salvations and resurrections and truces with enemies and laughter with friends and the secure, confident place as a member of a family or among best friends. But Danny had failed to save his family, his friends, and his city. He had failed, and those things had now left him.
Sam wanted Danny to know that such things were still alive. She conjured a brilliant white orchid in her memory and made him see its dew-dropped petals, then a sunset to show him the pink and gold brilliance of the heavens. She showed him the form of a little brown spider in the middle of a spiraling web that she used to keep in a corner of her bedroom, and she gave him the emotion of love without lust, as it had started in the beginning between the two of them. Such things she framed and took down off Memory's walls, packaged them carefully and gave them to Danny, and she gave him a true paradox: that as long as he loved these things and those like them, never would he lose them.
Then the blackness took her and the instant had gone, and Danny came to himself flat on his back on the ground, holding the hand of a corpse. He heard Alex padding up the road behind him, but he didn't feel it necessary to move.
"You hear that screaming in your head? That's the last of your idealism dying."
Danny paid no attention to him. He looked at the sky, really looked at it, searching for the beauty that Sam had brought to light. Alex came into his field of vision, but Danny didn't look at him.
"Hey. You brain dead?" Alex bent forward to wave a hand over Danny's face. He caught it and shoved Alex away. "As interesting for me as it would be to find you brain dead in a violent way, I'd rather have a response from you. I suppose I'm going to get the blame for this fiasco, too."
Alex was reading from a script, speaking hollow words relevant to nobody. Danny stood up and brushed himself. "You really don't have any idea about anything, do you?"
Alex merely glanced pointedly at Sam's body. "I know people die."
"You mean you know how to kill people."
Alex nodded. "That too."
Danny paused, digesting that, considering it in terms of what Sam said. "I don't think that counts. Can you make anything?"
"When that thing dropped you, did you land on your head?" Alex chuckled uneasily. "You sound like you've got some kind of screw loose."
"No... I'm okay. I just don't feel so bad anymore."
Alex laughed. "Ah. So you are nuts, then."
As he looked down at Sam, Danny's hand moved automatically to brush away her hair. But he stopped himself. She was gone. He turned back to what was, so far as he was concerned, the only other living thing on the planet. "Could you have prevented this?"
"Of course not!" Alex snapped. "I mean, probably not." He paused. "Maybe."
Danny looked up at him. "Can you try?"
Alex scowled, lost and a little indignant. He waited for more specifics, but none came. "I guess I could try. For all the good it'll do."
Danny looked back at Sam. "Thanks."
With a final anxious pause, Alex moved away, disappearing into the forest. "I'll find you," he called. "If or when I finish." Danny nodded. After a time, he left Sam's body where it was and floated back up over the forest and the grass, landing at the bottom of the hill where Alex had cracked his thermos. Danny dropped down and changed to human, continuing up on foot. The hill sloped up gradually, not too difficult, but the scattered rocks and tall, gangly weeds made it a fair challenge. Danny reached its round, bare top and sat down, looking over the landscape, up at the iron clouds and over at the swirling blackness. The fields' sharp gold colors were muted by the dim light.
Danny felt like he was ready. He still couldn't admit to himself precisely what he was ready for, but the fact that it was necessary to be ready made him sad. He'd miss this place, but at least wherever Sam was, soon, he would be there too.
A/N: Thanks to all reviewers; you guys keep me on track with this thing. Opinions (both good and bad) are welcome.