A/N: Yes I realize I totally flaked out this week. :P I intended to have this chapter out BEFORE I left for Chicago to see the Play! concert on Friday (actually, before my friend Gaia arrived earlier in the week to attend my grad ceremony, really) and while I worked on it here and there I wasn't able to finish enough to actually put the chapter up until now. Sorry!
If anyone's wondering, though, I did have a ton of fun. :D And I got the autographs of some of my favourite composers (Yasunori Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger, Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy, and Koji Kondo of Zelda to name a few) as well as getting to spend time with my boyfriend, who lives in another country, and two other friends I don't see in person very often. We had a fabulous time and I'm really going to miss them! I also was able to catch some American TV during downtime in the hotel, I got to see the FOP special Fairy Idol while I was there (omfg Cosmo singing oO) as well as scattered eps of various other shows I like. Forced the boyfriend to sit through King Tuck again, which is an episode we both hate. :P
On the bright side, though, now that I've graduated and finished at my part-time job, I'll have a lot of spare time that ought to be spent writing. n.n;;
And listen, like the last, I know this is a really short chapter, but I honestly did want to finish it before I went to bed and I didn't want to go back to Sam with another scene change, so I left it for chapter 23, which will not take long, I assure you.
Thanks to littlekittykat, L'ange-Sans-Ailes (I'll address your question in this very chapter!), Phantom of a Rose (I have indeed read her work, and I love it! Looking forward to more Moments of Clarity, let me tell you!), conan98002, luv2bamom, shadow929, dPhantoMfreak, Anomaly25 (thank you for the offer and suggestion! I tutored English myself for a time, and am generally all right with proofing my own stuff, my problem lies in my impatience…I usually stop writing because I'm looking forward putting the chapter up to see the response or, like this chapter, I reach my limit of scene changes and as a result am too excited to give it more than a cursory second glance XD), dArkliTe-sPirit, Leppers, SilverstarsEbonyskies, dessyweird51, Jimmy the Gothic Egg, HAlFa34, Epyon Zero, Lt. Commander Richie, Melodey70, animeobsessed3191, Fanficaholic, The Person Who Rights, SummersSixEcho, Yoshi and Crossover Fiend for their reviews last chapter.
Enjoy!
Estrelas
Chapter 22
by Shimegami-chan
Sam was awakened by a sharp knock at her door, accompanied by the sound of the handle being jiggled loudly and her father's voice. "Samantha! Are you in there?"
She breathed deeply, wrapping her arms around herself. It was time to face reality. Danny wasn't here, and her parents were, and she was possibly grounded for the rest of her life and would never be able to get back to Amity Park. Great. "Yes."
"I hope you don't intend to stay in there all day."
"That was the plan."
There was a pause, and Sam imagined her father scowling. "Well, we wanted to let you know that Penelope Spectra is coming by to see you. She called a few minutes ago and she's on her way here from Amity now."
"I'm not talking to her," Sam said with finality. "She's wasting a trip."
"Samantha," Thurston hissed, and she had trouble hearing him over the hum of the fans. "Penelope is coming, and you will talk to her, or you'll be locked in this room for far longer than you'd prefer. She'll be here in an hour, so you'd better have calmed down by then."
"We'll see," Sam grumbled, rolling angrily off the edge of the bed and standing upright. Sorry Dad, there's a limit to how much of this crap I can take. There was no way Spectra wouldn't assume Sam didn't know Danny's secret – she couldn't take the chance that the ghost wouldn't try to use her against him again. Even with the Specter Deflector and the Fenton Thermos Danny had given her (which she really didn't know how to use, and was now conspicuously sticking out of her violet spider-shaped backpack) she couldn't guarantee that she'd be able to resist Spectra's manipulative abilities long enough to stop the therapist for good. She ran the risk of putting her parents in danger and getting herself killed with no way to contact Danny for help.
So Sam did the only rational thing an oppressed and defiant seventeen-year-old independent thinker such as herself could do. Slinging her backpack onto her back, she yanked on her fingerless black leather gloves, heaved the window open and climbed out onto the ledge, leaving the purple curtains blowing in the frigid air. Then, she moved catlike along the centremost boughs of the tree, steadying herself with higher branches until she reached the trunk.
When she finally paused to catch her breath, Sam glanced down and spotted something strange moving out of the corner of her eye. A dark-skinned man was prowling around the bottom-floor windows, trying to peer into the living room without actually laying hands on the house. He was elderly, with a receding silver hairline and thick glasses, and wore a grey argyle sweater. She thought at first that he might have been one of the servants or a new gardener, but the way he uncertainly peeped only into the corners of the glass arose her suspicion.
Deftly Sam manoeuvred out onto a thick branch that hung over the next window over and balanced there until the man stopped trying to look into the living room and moved on to check out the kitchen. Just as he stopped under her, Sam bent her knees and leapt off the branch, landing non-too-gracefully behind him and causing him to jump with fright and spin around to face her.
Sam reached out, as though to grab a fistful of the man's shirt, but as he turned she stopped suddenly, not wanting to scare him into cardiac arrest or worse. Instead she assumed a stern expression and put her hands on her hips. "What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm sorry, I swear I wasn't—ah! You've got to be Sam!" he cried, eyes widening behind thick bifocals. "Thank goodness!"
"Say what?" Sam's anger was replaced by curiosity, more so when she noticed that the man was wearing a Fenton Phone in one ear. "You know me?"
"I don't," he replied, "but my best friend does, and he's the one who sent me to look for you. Does the name 'Danny Fenton' ring a bell?"
"Danny! Danny's here?" Sam's heart swelled. He'd come all the way to Whipstaff already? Much of the anxiety she'd been feeling dropped away, like throwing off a wet coat. It couldn't have been better timing, she thought, especially with Spectra on the way. She couldn't wait to see him again!
"Er, not quite," the man said apologetically. "Danny had some stuff to take care of back home, so he sent me. I'm Tucker Foley, by the way." He held out his hand with a smile. "Nice to meet you."
"You're Tucker!" Sam shook the proffered hand, relieved at finally being able to put the name from Danny's epigraph to a face. "Nice to meet you, too. I'd love to stay and chat, but my psychotic ghost therapist is on her way here, so can we finish this elsewhere?"
Tucker did a double take. "Not Spectra, I hope."
"Wish I could say it wasn't so."
The man groaned. "Okay, then, I'll take you over to my son's place and we can talk more over there. I'd better let Danny know Spectra's coming, though." He raised his hand to the communicator on his left ear and toggled it, clearing his throat before beginning to speak to a Danny whose responses Sam couldn't hear. "Hey, man, are you there?"
A pause. "I found Sam and we're getting out of here before trouble shows up. Apparently Spectra's on the way." Tucker gestured for Sam to follow him across the manicured lawn, with one last glance back at the mansion. "How did your visit to the Ghost Zone go?" A longer pause, and the bespectacled man began to look worried and his steps slowed. "It can't be reversed at all?"
"Wait, stop," Sam said loudly. "What can't be reversed? Did something happen to Danny?"
"Oh, er, of course not, Danny's just fine," Tucker lied, his face betraying his thoughts. "Finer than usual, really, I guess."
Tucker then became the recipient of Sam's most threatening glare. "Tell me everything."
On the other end of the line, Danny sighed and leaned his forehead against one hand, the other drumming impatiently on the tabletop. "Vlad says that he didn't really have a 'reverse mode' in mind when he created it. It isn't exactly supposed to be used on people who are part ghost, you know."
"I know that, but can't it be reverse-engineered or something? And," Tucker's voice became muffled as he put a hand over the microphone to address Sam. "I'll tell you after I'm finished talking to Danny…if Danny wants me to."
"You may as well tell her for me," the former halfa sighed, glancing at Jazz, who was buried in one of her mother's research books on ectoplasmic properties. "The thing's kind of like a weaponized Fenton Ghost Catcher, or maybe more like a permanent Plasmius Maximus, with a little more pain involved. Jazz is doing some work on it, but as far as we can tell there's no cure. My ghost half is still there, it's still bonded to my DNA, but I don't have enough ghostly energy left in me to actually access it. Probably, nothing short of zapping me full of it will fix the problem, and that's risky."
"So we couldn't just put you in the portal and turn it on."
"Not in the state it's in now. I really don't know what the settings were back during the accident, so for all we know I could end up a full ghost instead. There's no cure for that either."
Tucker's voice in his ear sounded encouraging. "Don't sound so glum, Danny. What's so bad about this, in the end? You couldn't hang around Amity Park fighting off ghosts forever, right? Now that you might be aging again, can't we just look at the bright side and go after Spectra with your parents' old weapons instead?"
"I'm pretty sure I'm aging again," Danny confessed, again holding back on expressing his mixed feelings. "I'm not healing as fast as I used to, and I'm getting tired and hungry more easily. Could just be after-effects of the gaping hole Val blasted in me, but Jazz doesn't think so. She thinks its because all of the ectoplasm drained out of my bloodstream somehow."
"Whatever she shot you with forced your body to expel anything ghostly, if you want me to put it in layman's terms," Jazz said, though Tucker couldn't hear. "If she'd done it when you were Phantom, you probably would have been ripped apart. When it hit you your ghost form was forced to superimpose itself over your human form and take the hit, then it essentially bled to death after running out of ectoplasmic energy."
"Thanks, as though that made any sense at all," Danny grumbled, paying only half-attention to his sister as he listened to Tucker dictate plans to meet them at his son's house as soon as possible. Danny could barely hear Sam's voice in the background of the transmission, worrying loudly about the trouble that Tucker had alluded to. The boy ghost smiled at the sound, unable to believe that he could miss her so much after being without her for only a few hours.
This is love and you know it, Fenton.
Ah, but maybe being fully human again won't be so bad. A normal life, without ghosts and crazy bullies and having to hide all the time? That'd be nice. Really nice…
Of course, things were never that easy, Danny thought. He'd been declared dead seven years after the lake accident, since his body had never been found, and the only things he owned were a few items in the basement of FentonWorks and a bank account under a false name. Jazz had been putting funds into it periodically over the years, though Danny didn't know how much, in anticipation of her own eventual death. He'd never really wanted to think too much about what he'd do after Jazz was gone.
But now, he thought to himself, the money might be of some use. Danny toyed with the idea of settling back down and getting his sister to help him fund a house, establish a new identity, and just live and die like any normal person would. It didn't matter that he still looked fourteen if he could get in touch with someone who knew how to deal with fake identification. But it couldn't be in Amity Park, he remembered sadly, not after his secret had been exposed to the entire town. Heck, he might not be safe anywhere in the country, though outside of the area the idea of the paranormal was still treated with a lot of scepticism. No matter what he did, it seemed, he'd always be hiding from someone or something.
"Danny? Are you still there, dude?"
Danny had to fight back a laugh - some things really never did change. "I'm here. Go on and take Sam somewhere safe, and as soon as I get the weapons together, I'll go after Spectra."
"Roger." Tucker's voice fell silent, and the disappearance of the static on the line indicated that he'd cut the transmission. Danny sighed again.
"You'll go after Spectra?" Jazz repeated, emphasizing the first syllable. "I hope you don't think you're going alone."
Danny stared at his sister. "I don't mean to be insulting, but last time we saw Spectra she nearly toasted you. I'd rather not put you in that position again."
"You are not going alone, and that's final."
"Jazz…"
The fiery-haired woman huffed and crossed her arms. "I admit I'm not exactly top-notch ghost fighting material, but you know you need an ally, and I'm not afraid to take her on after what happened. I may be old, but I can take care of myself."
Danny's heart sank. He knew Jazz was capable and that she was in excellent physical shape, and her quick-thinking had been of great use to him before. But he still couldn't get past the fact that if Spectra got in a lucky shot, his sister could die trying to protect him. He couldn't believe she'd dismiss Bertrand and Spectra so quickly knowing what a powerful combination they made.
"Hey," Jazz said softly, as though reading his thoughts. "I know it'll be dangerous. But right now, your life is more important than mine. You've got years ahead of you now, and I want you to enjoy them, not get yourself killed before you have the chance."
"It's not that," Danny whispered, his voice breaking embarrassingly in mid-sentence. "I don't want you to die on me, Jazz. I don't really have many people left to care for on this side."
She fell silent for a moment, searching Danny's pale face. "Then I won't, I promise. But I'm still coming with you. I owe Spectra a blast in the face with an ecto-gun."
Danny couldn't help smiling at the thought. "Thanks."
"Sure. Now grab the weapons and get into the car, little brother. We've got a date with a psycho therapist."
He groaned at the pun, but threw her a mock salute and went to collect the Jack-a-Nine-Tails from the basement. It was time to prove to Spectra that Danny Fenton wasn't going to be intimidated by her anymore.
-to be continued…
A/N: I almost put in a terrible cliffhanger, but then I shunted it to the next chapter instead. Aren't you guys glad. :D
Time for some extra reading; I wanted to recommend AkoyaMizuno's story Phantom's Sketchbook to anyone looking for a good, multi-chaptered fic. Two chapters are up so far. n.n Akoya is my best friend IRL, and a talented writer (though she will not admit to it, however I think the number of positive reviews she's gotten should really be an indication, har har), so if you're interested you'll find her at the top of my Favorite Stories list.
That's it! See you next chapter!