Dedicated to: a young man I've created my own imaginary world around...
7) Imaginary
An alarm clock's beep filled the room, but the sleeping figure the machine was supposed to wake remained asleep. A smile graced her lips, and a small strand of raven hair fell across her face. Someone knocked on her window and grinned as she groaned and rolled over, ignoring him. Danny phased through the glass.
Two rings moved up and down his body. His white hair became black; his unnatural green eyes became blue, and the black and white jumpsuit was replaced with a white and red t-shirt and blue jeans. He walked over to the bed and watched his sleeping best friend Sam Manson. She looked so happy; Danny hated to wake her.
He gently shook her. "Come on, Sam. It's Monday."
She sighed and opened her eyes. She let out a yelp and toppled off the other side of her bed. "Danny, don't do that to me!" Her voice was muffled by the blankets, but her anger didn't go unnoticed.
Danny turned off the still beeping alarm clock. "You're the one that decided to sleep in," he told her. "You're lucky you have a friend that can fly you to school. You're going to miss the bus."
"Damn it, I slept in again?" Her raven-haired head poked out from her blankets, still rubbing sleep from her lilac eyes. I've been doing that a lot lately. She stood and yawned. "Hey, go around and knock on the front door while I get ready."
"Yeah, your parents will kill me if I pull another disappearing act with you." He laughed nervously before changing to his ghost counterpart and leaving her room.
Sam searched through her closet and drawers, idly humming as she went. She'd been having another good dream about Danny in the imaginary world she'd built to hide her feelings for him. She pulled on her usual black shirt with a purple oval across the middle, but her black skirt with green stitching had been traded in her junior year for black hip huggers with gray stitching. She smirked as she caught her parents in the middle of interrogating Danny yet again.
"Come on, Fenton. The dealer's waiting," she joked as she grabbed the poor teen by the arm and dragged him out the door. The look on her parents' faces was priceless.
"Are you trying to get them to murder me?" he mumbled. "They already think I've gotten half the girls at school pregnant. I'm the drug king of Amity Park, and I'm going to die at twenty from liver failure because of my alcoholism."
Sam couldn't stop the laughter that escaped her. He just looked so pathetic when he said it. "Oh, come on, Danny. They do not."
"You ask them next time. They'll tell you." He slipped into a side alley, a blue flash appeared for a moment then Danny Phantom emerged from the alley. "Come on, we're going to be late."
Sam gazed at the town below her, her thoughts returning to her many dreams. She sighed almost contentedly as her imagination drifted.
"Sam!"
She was jolted from her thoughts by Danny's voice. "Huh?"
"You okay? You looked like you were daydreaming or something." Danny touched down in an alley near the school.
Damn, again. I've been doing a lot of that lately too. She shrugged as Danny returned to his human self. "Just thinking."
Danny grinned. "It's about a guy, isn't it?"
"What? No!" She blushed. "Why?"
"You were smiling the entire time."
Oh, great. A smiling goth... "No, I wasn't." She'd go down denying it all the way.
He was still grinning. "Yeah, okay."
The two were still playfully arguing over it as they walked into the school. Meanwhile, a figure suddenly appeared in the empty alley. Her strange red eyes looked thoughtful, her teal hair floating around her dead body. She was a ghost, but she wasn't just any ghost. Her name was Imagery, goddess of daydreaming and imagination, and she had the power to trap a person in a nightmare of their own imagination. She watched the ghost hybrid and the goth girl meet up with their techno geek friend with glee.
"It will be all too easy to destroy the ghost child and the girl," she whispered before disappearing once more.
Danny shot an ectoplasmic ray at the box ghost. "He has got to be the most annoying ghost ever," he muttered as Sam caught the ghost in the Fenton Thermos, and he returned to human form.
"But he works well to distract you," a silky voice said from behind.
i linger in the doorway
of alarm clock screaming
monsters calling my name
let me stay
where the wind will whisper to me
where the raindrops
as they're falling tell a story
The three friends turned to find a ghost dressed almost like a Greek goddess. She smiled at them as she twirled around Danny and Sam, chanting under her breath. Both Danny and Sam were starting to get a little freaked out, edging closer to each other.
"Who…or what are you?" Danny asked.
"My name is Imagery, goddess of imaginary light, and yours," she turned her gaze to Sam, "has just become a nightmare."
Something white shot from her hands and struck both teens between the eyes. Both toppled over, their eyes closing. Imagery laughed as Tucker knelt beside them.
"And they shall never be free until she can denounce her imaginary world and embrace her true feelings of he beside her!" She disappeared with a flash.
"Ah, man, this has got to be the worst matchmaker plan ever," Tucker muttered. "Come on, guys," he whispered.
Danny opened his eyes. He stood in a field of flowers and clouds were gently floating by, but the sky was purple. Danny blinked. 'A purple sky?' He reached down and touched one of the flowers. It was paper. 'And paper flowers. Oh, boy...'
"I have a feeling this is going to be bad," he muttered aloud.
in my field of paper flowers
and candy clouds of lullaby
i lie inside myself for hours
and watch my purple sky fly over me
Sam opened her eyes. She stood in a room surrounded by mirrors. Each mirror held a reflection of someone prettier or more popular than her, someone Danny was more likely to go after. One mirror was empty. She trembled and wrapped her arms around herself, her eyes wide. How was she supposed to get out of here? What game was that Imagery woman playing?
"Don't you wish you knew," a voice taunted.
She whirled around. "D-Danny?"
He stepped out from the shadows, but it wasn't him. His eyes were glowing red. "Which girl would Danny choose? Can you make yourself believe that he would choose you instead?" The mirror behind the Danny look-alike, the empty mirror, changed to her reflection. "The only way out is through your own reflection alone, but can you convince yourself that you are the one he would choose over all these prettier, far more popular girls?" The look-alike disappeared.
Danny didn't know how long he'd been walking until he saw a figure in the distance. He ran toward it to come face to face with a red-eyed Sam. He watched the girl wearily. Imagery had done something, and he wasn't sure what to expect.
"How many times will you deny that you don't love Sam?"
"I don't—"
The look-alike raised a hand, shaking her finger disapprovingly. "If you want to hurt her, by all means speak, but if you want to save her you will listen to what I say." He remained silent. "Can you unbury the feelings you know you hide in time to save Sam from her misery? Or, will you deny them to the end and send the poor girl screaming to her death?" The look-alike grinned wickedly. "Only then can you pass to save the one you love." Then she disappeared.
don't say i'm out of touch
with this rampant chaos—your reality
i know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge
the nightmare i built my own world to escape
Danny swallowed and took a few steps forward before smacking his head against an invisible wall. "Ow," he muttered, rubbing his forehead. He felt around and found a door knob. "Damn, locked." He sighed. "But I don't love Sam..."
Sam stepped away from an image of Paulina as Danny suddenly walked into the mirror. The two were laughing and hugging, and then they started making out. Sam closed her eyes and covered her ears. She wouldn't believe it; it wasn't true. Tears dropped down her cheeks and she screamed in frustration.
"Danny doesn't like her anymore! He told me!"
The giggling died, and Sam opened her eyes. The mirror before her was cracked; she had passed. Danny, meanwhile, felt his heart drop to his toes when Sam had screamed like that. His heart had suddenly stopped at the thought of her hurt, and for a moment he thought he saw her in a room full of mirrors. He shook his head in surprise, and the image faded away. This was pointless. He didn't love Sam…right?
in my field of paper flowers
and candy clouds of lullaby
i lie inside myself for hours
and watch my purple sky fly over me
Sam screamed again as this time Danny was with Star, Paulina's best friend. It wasn't real; Star was dumber than Paulina. He could never like her.
"Sam!" she thought she heard Danny shout.
She stopped screaming and opened her eyes. The mirror was broken again, and she could have sworn she heard Danny call her. That thought soon left her mind as Danny's image joined every girl left. She was alone in the mirror and in the middle of the room. He looked so happy, and Sam felt tears trailing down her cheeks. 'It's true,' she thought miserably. 'He'd be happier with someone else not like me.' She allowed herself to sink to her knees, sobbing pitifully.
Danny paced in front of the invisible wall. Everything had been quiet for almost ten minutes. He was starting to get worried. An image appeared in his mind of Sam standing before a broken mirror with a piece of it in her hand, poised to cut her wrist. 'No!' He ran to the door, throwing himself at it, but it didn't budge an inch. It didn't even tremble. He had to stop her; she couldn't die. She meant everything to him. Realization struck him as these thoughts passed through his head.
"I do love her," he whispered.
The door clicked open, and he didn't wait to see what else would happen. He pushed through the door to find Sam crumpled up on the floor, sobbing. There were two broken mirrors and the others held images of girls from their school. These images disappeared leaving Danny looking at a reflection of himself and Sam lying on the floor. She finally looked up, tears still falling from her lilac eyes.
swallowed up in the sound of my screaming
cannot cease for the fear of silent nights
oh how i long for the deep sleep dreaming
the goddess of imaginary light
She gasped, staring at him as if it were the first time she'd seen him. Danny felt like he could relate. He walked up to her and helped her up, hugging her tightly. She returned the embrace, her face buried in his shoulder.
"Are you okay, Sam?" he whispered.
She nodded then looked up at him. "H-how did you do it? How did you beat Imagery's game?"
He just smiled and kissed her lightly on the lips. "I'll tell you when we get out of here."
A/N: And so Danny and Sam escaped the imaginary nightmare. Once again, no deep speech. It's all fluff and dreams anyway. If you really want a speech with a deep meaning about this story, write your own. Or, if you wish, write about what happens after they wake up. Does Danny manage to get the courage to explain how he beat Imagery's game and why he kissed Sam, or because Tucker's right there, does he loose his nerve?