So my computer crashed on Christmas Eve. The same day my dog almost died. Fantastic.

But I'm back now and my dog's alive and kickin'. (:

This. Was. SO EPIC TO WRITE.

I went back and rewatched the episode of Criminal Minds. Particularly, the scene between Morgan and Prentiss, for those of you who are familiar with the episode. Lauren is the name of the episode, for those of you who are not familiar with it. If you want to see the clip I based it off of, go to YouTube and type in "Criminal Minds Emily dies" there's like five different ones you can watch.

SO EPIC.

I just finished The Hunger Games trilogy. I cried. Not gonna lie.

The reason I mention that is because I got the tone of this chapter from that series. Also, I got the bit of Danny in his parent's lab from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the scene where Hermione is being tortured in Malfoy Manor, the way Ron reacts to it). SO, I believe the list of things in this chapter that I do not own goes (in no particular order): Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and last but DEFINITELY not least, Danny Phantom.

Okay. I think that's everything. Gah.

Enjoyyyyyyy (:

Darkness

Chapter Six: Dark As The Night

December 29, 2011

Once, when Sam was seven, she fell and broke her arm. She literally tumbled down from the top of the stairs in her house, taking care to hit every step on the way down. At first, all she felt was confusion. And then she looked down. And saw a single, jagged piece of bone protruding from her otherwise flawless skin.

At the time, it felt like her world was ending.

Looking back on it, it was really more of a scratch compared to the pain Dan inflicted on her in one fluid motion.

He had stabbed her. She hadn't even been prepared; she didn't even have enough time to gasp. The point of the wooden stake drove directly into her stomach. She could feel it inside her body.

The pain was so intense, she couldn't scream. She couldn't even draw a breath. I'm in shock, she thought faintly. I'm in shock because there is a piece of wood in my stomach. It was not until the second stake had lodged itself in her left shoulder that she screamed.

Long, drawn out, gutteral screams. The kind that start right at the base of your spine and convulse through your entire body until they find their way to your throat. The desperate sounds of a dying animal.

Somewhere deep down, it registered with Sam that making these noises would greatly upset Danny. Might drive him to insanity. Because if the roles were reversed, if she was on the other end of the speakers, if it were Danny making these noises while she stood by, completely helpless to save him...she would do anything to reach him.

With the most effort it had ever cost her, Sam clamped her mouth shut. She felt her body folding over the stake in her stomach, the stake in her shoulder touching her knees as she drew herself inward into the fetal position. In the space of sound following her silence, Sam heard several things:

First, Dan was not laughing, as she had expected him to be. In fact, it sounded as if he was fighting with someone. The sounds of knuckles meeting flesh, of claws tearing through fabric, of grunts of pain reached her through the haze of pain. Danny must be here, she thought with weak happiness. Good. At least now he would be able to take her body back to her parents.

Second, the sounds of desperate screams cutting through static reached her. At first, they were unintelligable, but as she listened closer, she realized it was her name. Someone was screaming her name repeatedly. No, not someone...Danny was screaming her name repeatedly.

But that didn't make any sense...Danny was here, fighting Dan. Wasn't he? If that wasn't Danny fighting Dan, then who was it?

Suddenly, the sounds of the fight were cut off. A mass crumpled to the floor. She felt an incredibly painful tug in her shoulder, followed quickly by a similar feeling in her stomach. Sam's strength flooded out of her body as a large pair of exceedingly gentle hands lifted her from the floor. A familiar aroma filled her nose; she couldn't quite place it, but she didn't worry much, as it invoked a feeling of complete safety in her belly. The last thought that formed in her mind before she dropped into oblivion was: Danny, I love you.

Danny was not aware of how long Sam had been screaming. It could have been seconds, it could have been hours. It may as well have been months for the effects it had on him. He could literally feel her pain through the speakers. He became infintesimally aware of the fact that he was screaming his own head off, shouting his throat raw. But he didn't care. The discomfort he felt was nothing compared to what Sam was feeling. The window had cut off just moments before her screams began.

He became aware that tears were streaming down his face. He could feel the veins bulging in his neck and temples as he strained to reach her through the speaker. He realized that he was sprinting back and forth across the floor of the lab, desperately beating the ectoplasmic walls with his fists in a fruitless attempt to escape and ignoring the pain of the burns the ectoplasm left on his hands.

The sounds of Sam's screams went through him like physical pain. His chest constricted so that he began to choke and cough after he gulped down air. It was while he was choking that Sam's screams suddenly stopped. Fearing the worst, he began screaming her name even more loudly than before, hoping that somehow, she would answer him, assure him that she was safe, that he could come and find her, that Dan was gone forever...

But slowly, he began to realize that the fact that she was no longer screaming could mean only one thing: his entire world was crashing down around him, that he no longer had a reason to fight, that he would do well to dive head-first into the ectoplasm on the walls around him. As he moved to do so - while sending a quick mental message to Sam that he loved her and he would be there with her soon - the ectoplasm vanished. He started, not quite believing what he was seeing, before taking off through the ceiling before it had the chance to re-activate his ectoplasm prison.

He rocketed across the tops of the buildings of Amity Park, not entirely sure where his body was taking him, but allowing his primal instincts to take over. The reasonable part of his brain tried to understand why the walls had suddenly stopped working. It would mean that the person who put the walls there was gone. Dead. But Ghosts are already dead. What happens to a ghost if it's killed? Where does it go? And most importantly in his current situation, who kills them?

Start from the beginning. Dan had known Danny would go to Fenton Works. He knew that Danny would rush in without pausing to consider a threat, because he knew Danny's judgement would be clouded from the threat on Sam's life. If Dan knew all of those things, where would he keep Sam?

Somewhere comfortable for him, a small voice in Danny's head said.

Yes, somewhere comfortable. Now where would Dan be comfortable? Well, the answer would lie within who Dan is: half Danny, half Vlad. Vlad was obviously a bit more potent than Danny, but still. Where would Vlad/Danny feel most comfortable?

Near the Ghost Zone, that same small voice said.

Near the Ghost Zone. That would mean being near a portal. There were only two constant portals to the Ghost Zone. The first was in Danny's parent's lab. The second was in Vlad's lab.

Just as he realized where he needed to go, he realized he was already there. His ghost senses had carried him right to Vlad's front door.

Without pausing so much as to knock, Danny phased through the doors and shot through the floor. His vision was obscured momentarily by the darkness of being in the ground, phasing through rocks and dirt and concrete foundation, before he found his way to Vlad's lab. And what he found within the lab shocked him.

The speaker on the desk was spattered with blood. Or, what appeared to be blood. Danny went to it immediately, his eyes on the thick green ectoplasm he realized was a ghost's version of blood. So a ghost had been attacked here. His eyes roved over the rest of the scene, taking in the overturned chairs, the bloody handprints, the occasional shattered glass vial or beaker. But his heart stopped when he found a pair of bloody wooden stakes tossed carelessly in the very corner he had seen Sam hunched in through the window. He went to them, dropping to his hands and knees, and feeling tears rolling down his face and sobs wracking his body as he realized that it was real, human blood on the stakes. He nearly retched when he realized that they were laying in a fair-sized pool of human blood.

There was no one around. Sam and Dan were both gone. And by the looks of it, at least one of them was critically injured. While a desperate part of his brain began trying to formulate a plan to find Sam, he realized that he no longer felt a instinctual pull toward her. Which meant only one thing: even if he did find Sam, it wouldn't be her. It would be the shell of a spirit, an empty body. Sam was gone.

A new thought formed in his desperate, grieving mind: maybe she would be there, in the Ghost Zone, waiting for him to find her. But that thought went as soon as it came; he knew she wouldn't be there. She wasn't be the kind to get trapped by this world or its' mirror. She would have gone on, away, to a different place where he could never reach her in this life.

And he knew that if he went to look for her there, she would never accept him.

So he lay there, curled on his side, his eyes fixated on the blood that had once coursed through her beating heart, unseeing and unfeeling. It was over. It was all over. He waited there, waited for the people to come, to see what had happened to her, to wail and lament and grieve with him, to realize that the light of the world had gone out because of one sick, twisted person bent on spreading darkness and despair to the world.

No one came.

And...CUE THE GOOSEBUMPS!

Just kidding. Kind of.

I got a little teary writing that last paragraph. It's a little exhausting, trying to imagine the feeling of losing the love of your life and writing how you would react. That's how I would react at first, anyways. Break down.

Or, you know, that's how I think I would react. Because all my life, I believed that if I was ever held at gunpoint, I would be calm and try to talk the gunman out of shooting me. Then I had a dream where I was held at gunpoint, and I just broke down crying and begging him not to kill me.

Then again, I had a dream where I was an FBI agent in a house that had a serial killer trying to break in. He shot me and I played dead long enough for him to turn away from me, and then I shot him, saving the whole family in the house.

BAM!

Man, that was SO off topic.

If y'all haven't seen it yet, I've started a new story called All Around Us. Go read it. I'm gonna update it right after I'm done updating this one. It's considerably lighter than this one. If you're looking for something light to read. You know. (;

Okay, so. To the story. Tell me how you reacted to it. Seriously. I wish I could be there to watch all of y'all reading this. Not to sound like a creeper. I just want to see what you guys think at my attempt of ripping your hearts out (;

So you know the drill.

Pwease.

:D

- Tori