Author's Introduction:

This might be my "thank-goodness-Valentine's-Day-is-over" fic.

Okay! Last time, promise—I promise I'll listen to a little less Duncan, and write less angsty, mushy fics.

….I hope!...

I'mrunning out of cute ways to say I don't own Danny Phantom or any song lyrics belonging to Duncan Sheik. Lost On The Moon actually can't be found on any of his American albums—it's on the Japanese release of Daylight. For some reason the record companies didn't want to release it on the American version of the album—I don't know if they thought the fans wouldn't like it or something? Naturally when we heard it live we all went mad and loved it and had to go buy the Japanese version anyway. Capitalism ahoy!

Lost On The Moon

A Danny Phantom fanfiction by Firestar9mm

Without you, I'm lost on the moon…

(Duncan Sheik, Lost on the Moon)

He hadn't had to do it for a few nights now. Last night he was even able to fall asleep right away—although he had woken up in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which Valerie Gray had gleefully performed bloody, brutal surgery on him, removing his heart from his chest cavity and handing it almost dismissively over to Sam, the reluctant scrub nurse. Well, her hair had been under the cap and most of her face had been covered by the surgical mask, but he'd known it was her—he'd know those violet eyes anywhere. She could just about talk with them.

He'd been awake the rest of the night, trying to ignore the symbolism of the dream, but he'd forced himself to at least stay in his room, huddled in the blankets, staring at the wall with wide, bloodshot eyes.

Tonight, he didn't think that was going to be an option. His blood had been hissing in his veins all day, needing something, needing anything, but he forced himself to try to sleep anyway.

The dream came almost immediately. He was battling Valerie in a Casper High hallway. Well, she was battling. He was trying to reason with her, trying to tell her that he wasn't her enemy, but it was too late. Aiming her blaster, she shot him with a plasma burst that knocked him into the wall, where he shattered into a thousand pieces. From one broken eye, he could see the aftermath unfold at a crazy angle.

Her work done, Valerie absently blew a plume of smoke away from the barrel of the blaster. Sam wandered closer to them, her movements slow with resignation. Kneeling carefully amidst his remains, she started to gather the broken pieces. She and Valerie exchanged a look, and then the ghost hunter walked calmly away.

Nothing was calm about the way he woke; he started up in bed just like the night before, wheezing, clutching at his heart. Damn it. They wouldn't stop. He couldn't sleep. The red LCD display on his bedside clock bled 3 AM. Time to go up there again.

Since his last battle with Technus, Danny had managed to keep one secret from everyone, even Tucker and Sam. He'd lost the jet pack that he'd borrowed from Axiom labs in the fight, but he'd managed to hang on to the helmet. As for the jet pack itself...when you could fly at a speed of 112 mph, who needed it?

Now he took it out from beneath his bed. Not a very smart hiding place, but he wanted it within easy reach these days. Making sure the it was secure, he faded into intangibility and slipped through his wall, out into the night.

3 AM was a godforsaken time of night. Having spent a lot of time in it, Danny could testify that the night was always blackest and dawn was always an unsure thing at 3 AM. He was pretty sure that people were only reminded of that dark hour because they had insomnia, or they were working late on term papers, or their babies were crying for attention. Otherwise, everyone would sleep through it.

The trip up was uneventful, except for the feeling of heat and pressure as he broke through the atmosphere. He was grateful for it, grateful to feel anything. Every so often he would glance back over his shoulder and watch the streets, the houses, the occasional car get smaller and smaller until they were lost in a swirl of landmass and he was too far away to distinguish shape, color, individuality.

Space.

It had been a joke in the beginning, when he'd first started doing this. He'd needed some space. Where better to go? But after the first couple of times, he'd stopped cracking the joke. No one but him was around to hear it, anyway, and it had sort of stopped being funny when he was confronted with the sheer, vast vacuum of the actual place.

The first time he'd ever been up here, a thrill had rippled through him—unable to believe he'd actually done it, even just this far, "I'm an astronaut"—but he'd been otherwise occupied with both Valerie and Technus and hadn't had too much time to stop and take in the scenery. Once his feet and heart were both firmly on the ground again, that had seemed a shame, so one night he'd thought, what the hell, and come up here again, much more slowly, much more attentively.

Now sometimes he felt he had to run up here, just to escape. And you could escape anything up here.

Cartoonists seemed to be fond of depicting space as a deep blue ocean where stars swam in schools. Danny knew better, especially now. He knew the nearest fixed star was thousands of light-years away, and space was nothing but a black wasteland, lit only by the glow of ghost powers and the haloes around Earth and the moon.

The metaphor of the moon had fascinated Danny the first couple of times around. He could relate to its desert grey, how its surface looked so scarred and tortured. He could understand its phases, and he wondered if the moon sometimes hated changing all the time as much as he did, if it was sometimes resentful of looking like one thing and being another.

Tonight he only had eyes for the Earth.

It was bright amidst the blackness, the only color among the monotones of space and moon. He stared at it and wondered, not for the first time, if it was even worth it to go back. He often thought of just laying back and letting the vacuum take him, of just drifting further and further out in the dark until there was no one to miss him anymore.

The memory of Sam's eyes stopped him, just as they always did. That dream had scared him, because those eyes had been so hurt. He had a sneaky feeling that he had something to do with the pain in those eyes, and he could not—would not—do it again.

He held his arms up in slow motion, the illusion of holding the world in them finally making him smile. It was only out here, away from everything, that the world made sense.

He chuckled silently at his own joke, but once again no one was there to hear, and he was tired of being alone. Time to go back.

There was always fear in the falling, in the heat of breaking back through for the return. He was never sure if he'd make it, or if he'd just burn away completely and solve all of his problems by accident.

When the swirling colors separated back into cities, then streets, then individual houses, he breathed a sigh of both disappointment and relief. Still alive...such as it was.

No one was there to greet him, naturally. He turned languidly over to stare at the sky, at the cold impersonal light of the stars that seemed closer now than they were when he was actually out in space.

This wasn't working. He felt worse now than he had before, and there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Or was there?

By some stroke of weird luck, he'd come down on a block he was vaguely familiar with, even though he'd only been on Paulina's doorstep once, to take her to a school dance that seemed as far away now as those stars were. Her trash can presented itself to him as he dropped to the street, and he cast a quick glance around to make sure he was alone. When the street proved to be empty, he yanked the lid off the can with one hand and pulled the trash bag out with the other. It twisted open as he dropped it on the sidewalk; maybe Paulina was as lazy about her chores as he was about his.

Actually, she probably didn't do chores—at least not chores that involved trash. She might break a nail or something...

Whatever. Removing the helmet from his head, he quickly stuffed it in the trash bag, which wasn't quite full. Knotting it tightly, he put it back in the can and replaced the lid. He knew he should probably have returned it to Axiom Labs, but this felt a lot more like something a normal fourteen-year-old would do—a lot more selfish, a lot less heroic. Two hours from now, it'd be crushed in a compactor and no one would be the wiser. Let the Grays get in trouble—they were causing him enough of it already.

Standing back and surveying his handiwork, he was even able to smile. The trash can sat innocently on the curb, and there was no indication that his intrusion would be noticed. He felt a little better, but not enough to go home yet.

Tucker's window was shut against the chilly night, but a light was on. Danny muffled a laugh behind his hand at the sight that greeted him—the techno-geek was seated in his desk chair, but the chair had tipped backwards onto the floor. The computer screen was still insisting "Game Over" as Tucker snored over the low volume of the soundtrack.

Smiling at his friend, Danny hauled Tucker up with a hand under each shoulder. "Tucker, get up. Go to bed, okay?"

The techno-geek stirred, but didn't make it quite into wakefulness. "Huh? Wuzzat? Whosh there?"

"You should sleep in a bed, Tuck. It's much more comfortable than the floor. Okay?" Danny guided his friend to the bed, where Tucker collapsed into the pillows and was snoring again within two seconds. Shaking his head and smiling, Danny righted the fallen desk chair, then phased through the wall as quietly as he'd come.

By contrast, the gothic princess was sleeping fitfully in her big bed. Her heavy lashes fluttered on her pale face, and her breathing came in gasps. The hand that wasn't clutching her black sheets was opening and closing, as if she were reaching for something.

He hadn't planned to disturb her. He'd just wanted to look at her for a second, see the brilliant contrast of light and shadow she made under the dark canopy, but he knew how disturbing nightmares could be. Racing to her side, he shook her gently. "Sam, it's okay. Wake up, you're safe."

She woke in stages, propping herself up on one elbow, blinking the fear away. "Danny?"

"Yeah," he said softly, turning her to face him. "Bad dream?"

She nodded dazedly. "Yeah. I dreamt I was prom queen again." She followed it with a little laugh, and he knew she was lying, but she smiled so sweetly at him that he didn't press her. Didn't matter; he was there and she was awake now; they were together. And she wasn't afraid; she thought nothing of waking up to find a ghost boy at her bedside.

"What about you? Are you okay?" She stroked his upper arm soothingly. "It's almost five. Are you in trouble?"

Suddenly Danny remembered what he'd come here to tell her. "No, not in trouble. I…I wanted to tell you something." He laughed nervously. "I couldn't sleep, and I thought maybe if I told you, then I could sleep. Maybe that sounds stupid."

Sam stroked his arm again. "No, it's not stupid. Tell me."

He felt more than heard his voice crack as he told her. "Sam…I'm sorry you always have to pick up the pieces. But—I wanted to thank you, too." He looked down at her hand on his arm. "For always being around to pick up the pieces."

Sam laughed, but sweetly, not the way she would have if she was teasing him. "I have no idea what that means, but you're welcome."

Danny sighed, relief coursing through his veins. She didn't have to know what it meant. Not yet. What was important was that she knew.

"Think you can sleep now?" Sam asked.

He nodded, smiling. "Yeah, I think so."

"Good, lay down." Drawing the sheets back, she moved over in the bed, leaving enough space for him.

He was too shocked to stop a blush from staining his face—a neat trick for a ghost. "Sam?"

"It's late, Danny. I'm tired. Can you do me a favor and change back to human before you lay down? Ordinarily I wouldn't mind, I just don't want to freeze to death." She rolled over as she was speaking, so half the sentence was muffled into a pillow.

He shook his head and smiled as he obeyed. "You're the best friend a guy could have, Sam."

Sam rolled over again, sighing and opening one eye. "Danny, that's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me," she sighed. "Now, shut up and get into bed."

And just like that, Danny was laughing, a good, rib-aching belly laugh. Just like that, everything was all better.

After unlacing his shoes, he slid almost timidly into the bed, unsure of himself until Sam cuddled up to him and sighed. Making sure she had enough of the blanket, he allowed his own eyes to drift closed.

Just before her warmth and the lullaby of her soft breathing relaxed him into slumber, the feeling that he was holding the world in his arms stole over him again.

Author's Notes:

I've been meaning to write this for a while (ever since Flirting With Disaster, actually), but I was in a hurry to post some things on DeviantArt (which is a very cool and friendly place) and I'm still plugging away at my DP chaptered fic (which is hopefully a lot funnier and far less tragic and angsty than my last, like, three pieces). My dearest friend likens creativity to giving birth; I think of it more as not being able to turn on and off like a faucet. In fact, half the time you're under the damn sink whacking at the pipes with a wrench.

But Danny is always there for me when I need him, and so I made sure I kept my promise and we set this down for good tonight.

Please forgive the over-used and oft-abused "Danny goes to Sam's window" thing. I tried for hours to write it a different way, but that was where the story insisted on going. (dies.)

For those of you who read and review, thank you for your kindness! It's so nice to know that my work makes someone else smile. That's very important to me.