Sam expected to be frog-marched back to her own house (or, at least, the twisted copy that served as her house in Bizarro World) when she ended up sandwiched between eerily button-eyed Kwan and Dash clones, each made up in elaborate corpse paint and tailored Victorian-aristocrat clothing. Not a good look for either of them, Sam decided, even as she struggled without much success against the hands that gripped her upper arms like a vise. Although, she had to admit, neither of them looked half as creepy as the not-Danny creature leading them, turning every so often to grin smugly back at his prisoner. Sam tried to calculate how hard she'd have to spit from this distance to hit him in the eye.
Strangely, though, even though they walked back along the same route Sam had run away down, it didn't take them back to what passed for Sam's house. Instead, the familiar tangled observatory of Fentonworks came into view over the tops of the backdrop buildings between them and their destination.
"Wha -" Sam started, but the not-Danny turned to face her, raising a finger to his twisted lips in a gesture for silence.
"We're almost there."
There was no one in the house when they marched Sam in, but the door hung open as though someone – or something – was expecting them. Sam remembered her parents' faces, distorted with gleaming black buttons over their eyes, and couldn't hold back a shudder.
They didn't go in far, though, not-Danny making a beeline for the basement stairs, not-Dash and not-Kwan dragging Sam along behind him. She tried to go limp, to fall down so that they'd have to pick her up and maybe give her a chance to escape, but they only scooped her up bodily under her arms and carried her, kicking futilely, down into the basement.
The resemblance here to the real world was so striking that, for a moment, Sam almost thought they'd let her out after all. Then she caught sight of her mother in her uncharacteristic black Morticia gown and her father in Gomez' pinstripes standing to either side of a steel door that Sam was sure shouldn't be there, Paulina leaning, bored and skeletal, against the portal, examining her nails, and Sam stifled a groan in the back of her throat.
"Oh, good, you're still here," an unfamiliar voice rasped, and Sam looked around for its owner, seeing no one speaking. It wasn't until she saw that everyone else had turned to face a shelf above one of the worktables that she saw the small, sleek black figure from which the voice came.
Sam blinked, her surroundings momentarily forgotten. "You're a cat?"
The cat gave a little nod of its head, and leapt lightly down from the shelf onto the table below, prowling along it until it was face-to-face with Sam. "And you're a girl. Now that we've established that..." It turned its back to Sam as elegantly as only cats can, and stalked farther along the table, to face the steel door that shouldn't be there.
"Hey, I was talking to you!" Sam protested. "You think you can just trap me here like this?"
The cat half-turned, fixing her with baleful blue eyes. It seemed to be considering her carefully, before answering, simply, "Yes," and turning to face the door again, lying down and placing its head carefully on its paws.
Before Sam could explode, however, the cat added, "Although it's not you I'm particularly worried about trapping. Now hush. We're about to have visitors."
...
The first thing that Coraline saw, as she carefully peered around the door to the other lab, were the curiously reflective blue eyes of the cat.
"You!" she yelled, not bothering to open the door all the way. "I'm going to pull out every single one of your whiskers, one. By. One."
The cat's mildly disapproving expression didn't change a whit. "So much for gratitude. Did you already forget that I saved your life?"
"Yeah, for later!"Coraline crossed both arms across her chest, giving the cat her best glare. "I should have known you just liked to play with your food."
The cat rolled his eyes in an exasperated and strangely human fashion. "It took you this long to figure that out? I am a cat." He got to his feet, stretching with a huge, exaggerated yawn, and began to stroll along the table he had curled up on. "Why don't you and your -" He glanced back over his back, waving his tail in a way that could have meant anything – "friend there step inside so that you can yell at me properly?"
"I don't think so," Danny answered, before Coraline could think of a clever comeback, the ghostly echo making his voice sound about a thousand times more menacing. "What did you do with Sam?"
The cat's grin only grew wider.
The angry sound that Danny made couldn't have been put into words, and Coraline reached out to hold him back just a second too late, her hand slipping through his wrist as he phased right through the door. She blew out a frustrated breath, and turned to look at Tucker, who held up both hands, shaking his head as he took a step back into the tunnel.
"Oh no, I'm not running out there after you guys, I learned from last time. I'll stay here. As backup!" When Coraline didn't look convinced, he added, still in a half-whisper, "If something goes wrong and he loses that key, you're gonna want somebody on this side to open this door for you, right?"
Coraline sighed, and rolled her eyes, but it wasn't a bad idea. "All right, fine," she hissed. "Just don't get caught!"
"Hey, not getting caught is my specialty." Tucker tried to force a grin, but there was worry in his eyes. "Don't you get caught. Or eaten."
Coraline pulled a face, and turned and slipped through the door before she could lose her nerve.
In just about every way, the room she found herself in was identical to the lab they'd just left behind, lined with steel and chrome, reflecting the eerie green glow of bottled things and strange devices that Coraline couldn't put a name to, all dwarfed by the massive portal set into the far wall. Its huge, heavy blast doors stood firmly shut, but a faint sound, more of a dull, rhythmic thump than its usual hum, filled the tense silence. The only things that really seemed out of place were the people arranged around the room like an honour guard.
Coraline was certain she'd seen them all before, around town or in the halls of the high school, but they were so far changed that it took her a moment to work out whose facsimiles she was looking at. Two of the jocks, now looking like would-be vampires in crushed velvet and top hats, stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the stairs up into the house, blocking the way through. Paulina in a black leather corset and platform boots leaned against the portal, examining her nails, which were nearly an inch long and pointed like tiny daggers. And in the middle of the room, glaring down a scrawny black cat, eyes blazing green, was Danny.
There was no sign of Sam.
A sudden metallic crash made Coraline jump, and she spun around only to see a warped, button-eyed version of Sam's father pushing the door to the real world shut behind her. Coraline gritted her teeth at his and his wife's matching placid smiles, silently hoping that Danny hadn't forgotten he still had the key. She had a sinking suspicion that her stone had been stolen by the cat or one of his minions; if Danny so much as set the little black key down for a minute, if the cat had the door locked so Tucker couldn't open it from the other side, they'd have lost their only way out.
Coraline eyed the portal on the far wall. Well, maybe their only way out...
"If you don't give her back right now I'm gonna -"Danny seemingly ran out of words and substituted jabbing a finger threateningly at the cat, who started to lick his paws disinterestedly. "Well, you won't like it!"
"Is that really the best you've got?" a voice that sounded uncomfortably familiar said from out of the stairwell, echoing slightly off of the steel plating along the walls, and both Coraline and Danny turned to see someone stepping out from between the cartoonishly bulky jock-clones blocking the staircase. Coraline gave the newcomer a quick once-over, noticing first how similar he looked – and sounded – to Danny, and then picking out the differences. He was taller, she realised, and looked stronger, maybe even a little older, and – she had to admit it – better dressed, even if he was wearing more black than Danny would ever have willingly picked out for himself. But maybe the most obvious difference, other than the black buttons that took the place of his eyes, was just in the way he carried himself, with confidence and even a bit of swagger, less like Danny the kid and more like Danny the ghost.
Coraline looked up into his smirk and hated him instantly.
She wasn't alone, either. Across the room, Danny tensed, sinking a little deeper into his defensive crouch, hands curling into fists. "Who are you?"
"Isn't it obvious?" The other Danny spread his arms out wide, grinning like a cat who'd just swallowed the goldfish. "I'm everything you're not."
"Is that why you're such a jerk?" Danny asked, and the smile dropped instantly off of the other Danny's face.
"That's not what your girlfriend said," he retorted, and then raised a finger as though suddenly remembering something. "Oh. Sorry. Forgot. She's not your girlfriend."
A strangled noise of frustration tore out of Danny's throat, and his clenched fists began to gather an eerie green glow. "Where is she?"
The other Danny only winked. "Wouldn't you like to know."
He barely got the last word out before Danny lunged at him.
AN: Thank you so much to everyone who's read, who's reviewed, who's stuck around to see this story through! It means a great deal to me, and I'm glad you've enjoyed it enough to put up with my glacial updating pace. :)