This, it would seem, is the last real chapter before the epilogue. I hope everyone's enjoying it so far; I work really hard on this thing. Last night I was so tired that I collapsed on my laptop. Ironically? I landed on the delete button and I had to rewrite the last half of this. Honestly, I'll be glad when this is over…
---
Have you ever experienced one of those moments when time stops? When the earth is shaken to its core and, for a few rapidly passing seconds, all chronological order is abandoned just so that the universe can make a point? Everyone has. Even if they don't know it.
For, usually, these instances are so short-lived that nobody notices. Sometimes they are longer, drawn out on a thin line so that you can feel the seconds guttering to a halt and freezing in the dark mists of time.
And sometimes, the regular order of things is thrown out like so much dirty bathwater. As the Wolf stood, pressing Dash Baxter against the wall, ready to tear him apart, everything seemed to stop. The clocks and watches in the room shuddered to a halt and, for the great majority of everyone in the room, time froze solid, trapping them in a timeless world of blue and black shadows.
But there are exceptions to every rule. It is a universal circumstance; there will always be, for every situation, one element that simply will not fit. The existential equivalent, if you will, of trying to fit the round peg into the square hole
Danny Fenton, or what remained of him, was that exception. As the time around him froze and filled up the room like a glass of water plunged into a vat of liquid nitrogen, the Wolf created a pocket of resistance. After all, there is only one thing Nature abhors more than a vacuum, and that is a werewolf.
Come hell and high water, there will always be those places high and dry above the flood. Time, in its infinite wisdom, has a sense for what needs to be done. Sometimes things will work out for themselves. So the time stream was carefully woven into place, leaving space for both Sam and Tucker while the rest of the world had hit the pause button on itself.
Sam carefully took a breath. It was like trying to inhale whipped cream. The air was stale, locked in place. She shifted a bit, and felt akin to if she was pushing her way through a pool of water. Time was shifted aside as she crept forward, edging towards Danny. There had to be something she could do. This wasn't like him at all. What was happening? He needed help.
In Danny's mind a private war was being waged with the simple weapon of willpower. If the assault had been a storm before, it was a straight-up tsunami now. Wave upon wave of wolfish, bestial thought crashed down over the last vestige of his identity. He had a bad feeling about this. It was as if he gave in, he'd never return. The Wolf would have him completely, and his heart and mind would be gone forever.
He concentrated hard on not giving in, not giving up, but it was a losing battle. Bit by bit, he was changing, morphing. His memories, for example, were disappearing. Instead, all that came up to his consciousness were flashes of color and sound that felt as old as time. And he wasn't just seeing them, either. He was feeling them. They were all around him, consuming him, adding to the senseless chaos. The power pumped through him, racking his body with spasms of confusion and fear that were not his own.
The sky was blood red. The island of rational thought that he stood on was rapidly disintegrating into the pounding, churning sea around him. It was a lake of endless, reaching scarlet, which hit the horizon at a point that was nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. Senses that, technically, belonged to his body but in a different form besieged his soul. It inflamed him, and, had he still been in possession of his actual, physical brain, he would have been mad with coursing adrenaline. As it was, part of him was. Scarily enough, it was the part he couldn't control.
The ghost images fed by he eyes of the Wolf told him he had attacked Dash, and he remembered what Kai had told him. She'd said that the Wolf found his hidden desires and implemented them. While he was the Wolf, he wasn't responsible. While he was the Wolf, he could be forgiven. Everything he'd ever wanted but had been too scared to outright take was his if he let it be, if he gave in. Rejection? Who cared about rejection? It was only a word. Fear? He didn't know the meaning of the word. It was all gone if he wanted it to be. The world was at his disposal…
No! A weakening part of him cried out, shouting as loud as it could over the buffeting winds that had sprung up amid the force and threatened to tear out his eardrums. This isn't my thoughts! This is… that wolf again! The black one! What was his name?
And then everything was gone. In a rush it was swept away, and nothing was left but a great, red void of swirling waters. Distraction had been fatal. By taking the memories first, the Wolf had captured the last strongholds of Danny's mind.
The Wolf smiled. The day was his to seize. The host was gone. The desires would be executed. Starting, literally, with Dash Baxter.
---
Brother Bartholomew, last of the dark Fates, the counterweight balance on the teeter-totter of eternity, stared in blank frustration at the metal walls of the cage, which glared defiantly back, strong as they had been half an hour previously. Time worked differently here, Antigoras knew. He hadn't known it was so twisted that no human contrivance could measure it. The crystals of his digital watch lay glistening on the damp, rocky floor of the cave. They sparkled in the smoky torchlight.
No one made a sound as Bartholomew advanced upon the locked gate. He touched one claw to a crossbar. A spark of blue lightning crackled between them for a moment, creating a temporary thread between living and non-living matter. He did not feel it.
Antigoras trembled in fear. This was powerful magic from the dawn of time. Then again, most things in their work were. The electricity filled the air and made his fur stand on end. The feeling was not pleasant, and if he'd had any concept of what a dryer was, he might have imagined being stuck inside of one. The air was hot and sticky, like a thick blanket of molasses dripped over the two. This was not how a dank cave far below ground should feel.
Another spark, in the form of a jet of flame. A distant echo rumbled throughout the vast chamber, like a clap of thunder. A tremor through the ground, and the tarn rippled, the earth seemed to split in two. Bartholomew's face was screwed up in concentration.
Time stopped. Everything went back to normal. Bartholomew adjusted his grip. He smirked. "Got it," he growled happily, his strength depleting fast. "Just one… minute… more…"
And then the world, simply put, went all to hell.
---
"Now," Drake snarled, slashing his tail in the direction of the school. "Take it now!" The time wave smashed over the land, ignoring the wolves as they broke out in a chorus of slivery howls and hitting the hallowed walls of Casper High. It was a grand feeling. The world was his. The Wolf was a pawn, easily steered.
Long ago, Drake had stopped playing the conventional game of worlds. When others of his (original) species had been preoccupied with killing one another for food, or glory or –and this was a big one –women, when all the rest were fighting a bloody game of rugby, he was sitting in the dark corner playing a one-sided game of chess. He liked to play against himself because he always won. And now, the game had changed. Where once he had fought Bartholomew over every little detail, over every unnecessary human life that no one would miss in the first place, now he played against the world.
A world which, do to the time glitch, now consisted of him, the other wolves, and a few meaningless people.
The doors blew down, revealing a forest of humans stuck in time. He grinned. This would be too easy. As he approached, the Wolf turned and glared at him. Part of Danny drove the Wolf at a very base level, and that part wanted Drake dead.
He backed up a pace, lowering his body to the ground in mock submission. "Master," he growled, "by all means finish the boy off. Do not let me intrude. Then we shall talk."
The Wolf nodded to the best of his capacity, and lowered his drool-laden maw to the boy's throat. Fear had taken Dash Baxter over. He was screaming to wake the dead and struggling to break the Wolf's grip, but it was to no avail. Even in absolute silence, nobody took any notice.
Except Sam Manson. She had no love for Dash, that was true, but far be it for her to stand back and watch as her friend- no, that thing –took someone's head off. Even if said head did not contain a brain.
The thought nearly made her cry, and she never cried. Danny Fenton might as well have been dead, for all the good it would do him to continue existence. He couldn't live with himself, she knew, if he came back to a world where his hands (paws) were stained with blood.
So, risking everything for the friend she had lost, Sam stepped forward. Behind her, there was a small squeak of fear and some frantic beeping- Tucker rapidly researching everything he could about werewolves on his ever-present PDA. She gave a discreet little cough, and shouted, "Hey, fur ball! Get away from him, damn it! And you," she rounded on Drake, "I know you! I've never met you before, but I know you! You and your smarmy little face could only be Drake! Besides," she continued, pouring as much contempt into the words as she could manage, "I saw you at school yesterday. You got in a fight with Kai."
The Wolf turned to her, emotions mixed into a dangerous cocktail of crazy. The part of him that was the Wolf wanted to kill her to remove an intruding force, and the part of him that was Danny wanted to jump her for entirely different purposes. A flash of uncertainly rushed briefly through the Wolf's veins as it deliberated what to do. Nothing had been this complicated before. Before, it had been: see something, kill it. Now, there were morals to worry about. The part of the thing that he had forgotten, if he had enough brain to forget, was that assimilating Danny's soul into his own had given him a conscious.
And currently, that conscious, whose name was Danny, was saying calmly, Well, we could always not do anything. That would be quite simple. We could wait the transformation out. But the last part was added hopefully, as a sort of suggestion.
Sam was beginning to think that this hadn't been such a good idea when the Wolf dropped Dash. Good. That was a start. Wait… he was coming for her instead. Dash, now lost to the minds of everyone in the room, stepped out of the hypothetical high ground and froze in suspended time. The Wolf took a shaky step towards her, one clawed paw outstretched… his face was screwed up in concentration… he was fighting it… Then his eyes narrowed, and the Wolf had returned in full. The creature dropped low to the ground and was… wolf shaped.
He was a big, white dog. A white wolfhound with eyes like green embers and paws the size of dinner plates. Two fangs like ivory steak knives jutted out over his thin black lips. The eyes were haunting, as if there was another soul lurking behind them, trying to break free. He took another, smaller, faltering step, almost as if he was afraid to move closer.
"Danny?" Sam asked tentatively. "Danny, I'm going to help you through this, I promise. Everything's going to be alright, okay? Please, Danny. I want to help you. The real you is in there somewhere, fighting for freedom. I can feel it."
The Wolf had another spurt of confusion, and reared up on his back legs, paws scraping at the closed eyelids. Given that he was an animal, this gave her a bad view of his anatomy, or would have if she hadn't looked away. The Wolf fell back to his feet, ears plastered against his head.
Drake scowled dangerously. "Forget her. She is nothing. Kill her! Do it now!" The Wolf whined and paced in circles, chasing after his tail. He snapped at Sam, smirking. "He will be mine, girl. As we said in olden days, 'get thee to a nunnery.'"
"He means you're a whore," said a disdainful voice by her shoulder, which then proceeded to sniff haughtily. "What kind of an idiot quotes Hamlet to a high school kid, anyway?"
Sam took a quick look around. Kai was leaning sadly against a nearby wall, a glass of punch in hand. She was in the same half-wolf mode that Danny had been in up to recently, but had managed clothes. Tucker scuttled up behind Sam. Kai gave a wan half smile. "So," she sighed, "the gang's all here. Far be it for me to get in your way."
"What am I supposed to do?" Sam hissed, snatching the PDA from Tucker's hands. The beeping was breaking the profound silence, and being very annoying all at once.
Kai closed her eyes and took a torturously slow sip of her drink. "I'm not going to interfere. I've done enough for one day."
"But…" Sam risked a glance at the Wolf, who had gathered himself up and was coming to grips with the fact that someone had to die today. "What do I do? Danny's gone nuts."
"Are you willing to sacrifice everything for him?"
"Yes," she said quietly, facing the Wolf who was working himself into a frenzy.
Kai took a deep breath. "Have you ever heard of the berserkers?" she asked. "Vikings. Always a source of fun. I've met a few. But the berserkers, now… they were absolutely insane. They wore wolf skins into battle, and not much else. Or, at least, that was what people thought for years." There was a drawn out pause. "They were really the first turnskins, the first werewolves. There are still a few of them among the legions of Fate. They're different from the rest. They remember how things used to be, in the days of darkness when the earth was new."
"So, you're saying…?"
"Just making conversation."
The Wolf was ready, and stood tense. "Get her," Drake howled triumphantly. "You know you want to! You want to taste good, sweet lifeblood, boy! You want to watch rivers of it pour over the floor! The revolution starts now, and it starts with us! We are the alpha and omega!"
"Aye, but who is who?" An older wolf called from the background, giving Sam a start. She hadn't noticed them standing there. They had seemed to… fade in to the scene. "You cannot control him, Drakkus. We all know that. He will overpower you."
Sam stored away what Kai had said about berserkers. Was this one of them? Drake left the comment alone.
The Wolf advanced, his paws working independently from the orders they were receiving from his brain. He prepared to jump.
"Danny, don't!" Sam pleaded, staring him down. "This isn't you! You don't like killing, remember? You want to help people! And I'm your friend!" He stopped in mid-stride. "Drake is the enemy, but you don't need to kill him either!" The Wolf turned on Drake, ready to tear the life out of him.
"No!" The black wolf shouted, as every other wolf began to creep towards him. "No! You are all on my side! My side, you hear? Stand down!" The wolves he'd brought, fearing his legendary wrath, fled, their pelts blending together as they ran.
"Cowards," said Kai in a stage whisper.
"You!" Drake screamed at the Wolf. "You are mine! My pawn! Forget the girl! She is nothing! NOTHING!"
The Wolf cocked his head to the side and, reaching a decision, smiled perilously at Drake. "I can make my own choices, thanks," he roared, with some effort. Every syllable tore from his mouth with vengeance. Drake had done this to him. Drake had done this to Kai years before. Drake had ruined his chances with Sam. Drake had done the inexcusable. Drake had broken up his date.
In a few, hectic seconds, positions changed. Drake yelped an ungodly cry as he was hit and thrown into the wall, where he lay still. A blast of white light surged over the Wolf and he was Danny again, jumpsuit and all. Sam, relief flowing through her, ran up and hugged him… before blushing and letting go. "Danny," she said breathlessly, backing up to look at him. "Are you okay?"
He grinned broadly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Are you?"
"Tucker?" Kai propositioned, trotting up to her pen pal's side.
"Yeah?"
"Care to manifest some destiny?" she jerked a thumb at the two 'lovebirds'.
Catching her meaning, he nodded, and circled around behind Danny. Kai did the same with Sam… "Three," she muttered, "two, one… NOW!" They pushed the friends together, and the two fell compromisingly, Danny lying on top of her, his lips meeting hers…
They stayed that way for a long time, not thinking, not talking, and just going with it. "Congratulations," Kai whispered to Tucker, winking at him. "You've officially interfered with Fate. Feels good, don't it?"
"I'm just glad they're happy. But I would like my PDA back."
"Here." She supplied it. "I nicked it off Sam when she fell. 'S the least I could do."
"For what?"
She winked again. "Everything."
And it might have been perfect, a fairy tale ending, if it weren't for Drake. Danny and Sam had stood up again, and were busy looking deep into each other's eyes, when Drake leapt. He cannoned into Danny's side, and sat on top of him, growling, "You will be mine, damn you! I will rule the world! I've waited to long for my dream to die…"
There was a flash of blue light that rebounded in the room. And silence reigned for a precious second, as Drake was picked up and thrown into the wall once more.
"Drakkus!" A voice bellowed, dominating everything.
If you have never seen Fate before, this was not a good way for it to happen. What you especially do not want to see is a cowled cat, two feet tall, in a singed purple robe and glaring like Satan himself.
To those unfamiliar, it seems odd that the fates are cats. It makes perfect sense, really. Cats have always been the undeniable champions of steering people. A pitiful mew here, a bit of pressure with a claw there, and a cold bowl of cream for a reward… it was much similar here. Fate could influence events, but couldn't force anything to happen. Still, never underestimate the power of a dark stranger shouting "They're charging!" at a worried and jumpy army on the march. The whole Trojan War thing really had been fun…
Brother Bartholomew was skinny, black furred, with a long neck (for a cat) and a wedge shaped face. Antigoras was the direct opposite; white, fat, and pleasant looking. He was smiling. Barty was not. The time for reminiscing was over. The time for punishment had come.
Bartholomew still held a sizzling, melting piece of iron bar in his gloved paw. He blew on it, and tucked it in his cord belt. "Drake," he hissed, "it is time to go home, where we will have a… violent talk."
"But master-"
"No buts! You will come back. This is not open for discussion. You will be punished. This too is fact. I told you not to interfere with this one, but you did. There are some things that should be left well enough alone." He looked pointedly at Danny. "I make no apologies for what I must do now," he said solemnly. "I know you are very happy with your new… consort, but fate demands I erase all of your memories of tonight."
"You can do that?" Danny asked, gripping Sam's hand tightly, not wanting to let go. "Why would you?"
"It is protocol. Would you prefer the town hunted you down as a monster?"
"No," Danny mumbled morosely.
Antigoras was addressing Kai. "We… I have decided you need time off," he said jauntily, shaking her paw. Bartholomew made eye contact with her, and then looked at Drake and Danny in turn. She nodded, understanding everything. It was but a temporary leave.
Danny gave Sam a final kiss, and told Barty, "I'm ready. Turn back time."
A large blue portal materialized in the center of the room. Barty, in a rare moment of something approaching kindness, hung suspended in motion before stepping through and said, "Daniel, if it was meant to happen, it will happen again. There is no true present or future, only history repeating over and over. If it was meant to be, it will." Then the light enveloped the world again, and everything just fell away.
But even to the last, Danny kept a tight grip on Sam. Because all we want, really, is one more second. One more second with the one we love, one more second of life. One more second to do the things we need to do, say the things we have always needed to say.
One more second.
Just one more second.
And it was a perfect moment.
---
Next time: epilogue. Will anything good ever happen to Danny? Will he hook up with Sam in the end? Or will I wimp out and leave that for an as-yet-unplanned sequel? Tune in next week for the heart-rending (not really, but it will be sweet) conclusion of Full Moon over Amity Park. I love you all, dear reviewers and readers! Oh, and if you should wish to contact me outside of reviews, send me an e-mail. Hotmail is being a bitch again, and not receiving contacts from fanfiction.