Okay, this one's a little beefier than the last chapter. I enjoyed writing it (:

I think that's pretty much it. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the amount of reviews that this has gotten so far. I'm pretty sure y'all are gonna break 400, which is a new record for me. AH. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! I can't say it enough!

I don't own Danny Phantom bwah.

I hope you guys enjoy this! (:

Wide Awake

Chapter Twenty-One

February 6, 2014

The name wrenched itself out of his chest, jagged edges scraping along his throat as it went. Sam nodded against him, but the shock of seeing his sister alive and well made his body go numb.

Her shockingly red hair was much shorter than it had been the last time he saw her; she'd hacked it off to just below her chin, much like Sam's before the Event. She was much thinner, to the point of almost being unhealthy. He barely felt Sam pull away from him, so intent was his study of the woman in the doorway. Her eyes were swimming in tears and she laughed breathlessly. "Danny?"

He almost groaned at the sound of his name. They moved forward at the same time and collided in the middle of the ring of bystanders. For several moments the only things he could really process were choked sobs and flailing limbs; they seemed to challenge each other at who could hug the other the tightest. Eventually, though, he felt her stranglehold loosening, and he relaxed the muscles in his arms to give her enough room to pull back and see his face.

"God, your hair is so long now," She mumbled with a watery laugh, picking a lock that had fallen into his eyes and flicking it out of the way. "And you grew seven feet!"

"You shrank and went bald," He grinned when she laughed again, pulling her in for another hug at the sound. "Jesus Christ, I missed you. I never thought I'd ever see the day..."

"I missed you, too, you freak." She hiccupped and pulled away from him, brushing her bangs out of her face. "How did you guys end up in Texas?"

"I could as you the same thing!" Danny exclaimed. "Last I heard, you were in Boston."

"The Boston Harbor got hit hard. It was such a highly populated area that we had almost no room to get out, so we - and by we, I mean the survivors - sort of barricaded ourselves in the library. We broke open a few vending machines and survived on that for a few weeks, until the initial hysteria sort of rolled over."

"The campus burned down, though," Danny said blankly.

Jazz's brow furrowed as she nodded. "The library is on the far east side of campus. The fire didn't touch it. How did you know it burned down? That happened right before we left campus permanently, mass media was already dead..."

He stumbled backwards, running a hand through his hair and glancing around blindly. In the back of his mind he noticed that their audience had already gone inside, taking Sam with them. "I went there after it hit Amity, looking for you,"

Her face went blank. "I went to Amity looking for you," She said faintly. "On the way into town I started smelling smoke...I'd been hoping that maybe it hadn't hit there yet, like maybe if I made it to our house I'd find a note or something..." She inhaled shakily. "I saw this car had crashed into that gas station at the end of our street -" Danny made a small sound of distress in the back of his throat, which Jazz appeared not to have heard - "and I just got this feeling...and then I saw the house..." She paused, covering her mouth with one hand, as if she was shoving the sobs back down her throat. "I knew as soon as I saw it what happened..." Danny nodded helplessly. "Which one of them was it?"

"Dad," He whispered. "But mom was too late. He bit her." Jazz's face crumpled. They stood in silence for a moment, sharing the weight of the tremendous grief Danny had not realized was still crushing him.

"I always said she was too proud for her own good," Jazz muttered bitterly. "She couldn't just let herself go, no. She had to go and kill herself instead..."

Danny snorted and clapped a hand over his face. Jazz peered up at him, a small, tentative smile on her face, and before he knew what was happening they were both laughing hysterically. Danny doubled over, clutching his stomach, ignoring the tears streaming down his face.

"I'm sorry," He gasped a moment later, straightening slowly to find her in a similar position. "That wasn't funny, I just..."

"It was kind of funny," Jazz shrugged. Danny snorted again. "Anyways, how I ended up in Texas. After we passed through Amity we kept heading west, until we hit the mountains. It's true what they were saying about zombies not being able to climb."

"Yeah, I know," Danny nodded. She arched an eyebrow. "Firsthand experience. I'll explain later, keep going."

"Well we climbed for a few days until we found something in this big valley. We still don't know for sure what was going on, but it looks like someone was trying to construct an exact replica of some castle in England. The thing is huge. It wasn't complete when we found it, but we've been able to finish it since then. Anyways, it had all these high walls and a moat and everything. It was the perfect place. By the time we got there, there were only about forty of us left, but it's such a huge place that we had room to spare. There was this huge stockpile of non-perishables, like, enough to feed everyone in Amity Park for two months. It's like they were preparing for an apocalypse or a war or something. After about a month or so, we spotted a guy hiking through the valley, and we let him in when we realized he was uninfected. He started saying that he'd seen a bunch of other survivors, but none of them had it as good as we did. One of the survivors from Amity was a medical doctor, and he started talking about how he thought he could develop a cure. We ended up splitting up, half the team staying with the doctor, half volunteering to go out and search for survivors in the area."

"Let me guess...you stayed with the doctor."

"Nope. I volunteered." She crossed her arms over her chest and jutted her chin out proudly. "I...well, I was trying to be like you."

"That was dangerous," Danny said quietly. She seemed to deflate slightly. "You should have stayed with the doctor."

"Well I wouldn't be standing here right now if I had decided to stay." She said it rather crossly. "Are we gonna stand here and argue over choices that have already been made, or are we gonna move on with our lives?"

"Moving on!" Danny said loudly, rolling his eyes when Jazz laughed.

"That's what I thought. Anyways, it took a few months, but eventually we found enough survivors to double our numbers and we gained access to helicopters and SUVs. We started expanding our search. This camp is the furthest we've gotten so far."

"Are you gonna keep volunteering?"

"I mean I'll probably take some time off to be with you, Sam, Valerie, and Tucker now, but I'll keep doing it," She smiled softly. "You and Sam looked cozy."

He could hardly believe the amount of heat rising in his face. "Yeah," He ducked his head and subconsciously reached for the back of his neck.

"Oh my God, you haven't changed at all," His blush intensified. "Okay, relax, I'm sorry. She got pretty beat up...what happened?"

"It's a really long story," Danny sighed, dropping his hand to his side and straightening. "Let's go inside,"

She kept a slow pace indoors, and he fell into step beside her easily. "To really make sense, I have to start from the beginning..."

Fifteen minutes later, they rounded the corner of the hallway on the eighth floor that housed Sam's room. "...like magic, this helicopter comes out of no where and lands right in the middle of the cots, and this lady pops out with a cure and a way to be rescued." Jazz's mouth was hanging open slightly, her disbelief evident in her facial expression. "So Sam, Tuck, Val, and the kids got on the first flight out and I was on the second. And now we're here."

"So...okay, let me get this straight," She shook her head and took a deep breath. "You thought they were dead and they thought you were dead...and then you saved Valerie and then...lied to Tucker and Sam about who you really are?" She stopped short in the hall.

"They didn't believe us when we told them who I really am," Danny shrugged. "It was the only way they were gonna let me stay."

"And then this Lars guy comes in and turns into a zombie?"

"Humanoidus Infectus, Miss Fenton," A clinical voice drifted across the hallway as a man in a white lab coat with his nose buried in a report passed. Danny stared after him, before turning to Jazz to find her rolling her eyes.

"He turned into a zombie," Danny said forcefully, loud enough for the doctor to hear. "And then I killed him."

"Wow." Jazz blinked rapidly.

"How did you find Sam in all of this? It's like Pan's Labyrinth in here."

"I deal with trauma patients. She's the first one I've had since getting here," Jazz shrugged. "She was cognizant and recognized me as soon as I walked in the room, and if I'm being honest it took me a few seconds to recognize her. They hadn't even gotten an IV in her yet and she started flipping out."

"Wait, I thought I saw she had torn her IV out -"

"Yeah, a bit of brilliance on her part. They don't let ex-students out when there are patients that need tending, and they wouldn't have let you up here without a doctor or ex-student's escort. The only way this could have happened is if she escaped her room and happened to run out just as you arrived. She downed a few pain killers and I put in a fake IV and we snuck down to the first floor. She pretended to be drugged so that I wouldn't get in trouble for going outside and you could get up here without revealing yourself."

He leaned back against the wall and sighed. "She's an evil genius, I swear," Danny shook his head.

"She really is. You hit the jackpot, little brother," An involuntary smile curled her lips up. "I can honestly say that I never thought I'd ever say those words again, and it feel really good to say them." He snorted. "So...I just want to confirm this...you and Sam are...like...together, right?" He smiled and nodded. "I want to hear you say the words."

"Me and Sam are together."

"It's actually 'Sam and I' but whatever, close enough!" She clapped her hands together excitedly. "Finally! All it took was an apocalypse!"

He laughed. "It was gonna happen this year, regardless. It just got postponed a little because...you know...we both thought the other was dead."

"I've heard that tends to slow budding relationships down," Jazz nodded seriously, though her blue eyes twinkled with mischief.

"How's Tucker doing?" Danny asked suddenly, nerves dropping like steel into his stomach.

"Last I heard, he was responding to the treatment well. Valerie got checked out and she's actually perfectly healthy, which is a relief. I think they were gonna do a sonogram to check on the baby, but I haven't heard anything from either one in a while."

Danny clenched his jaw and nodded. "I wanna see both of them, but..."

"She's right over here," Jazz said with a knowing smile. He shot her a grateful look as they walked away.

Sam's room was dimly lit by the morning light filtering through the window, around which a set of thin curtains were drawn. Her bed was against the side wall and she was tucked beneath the sheets, her upper body propped up slightly on a small mountain of pillows. Her head was turned to her left slightly, so that she could see the door. She perked up when Danny and Jazz entered, eyes half-lidded. She extended her left arm and made a quiet, happy sound.

"Hi," Danny dragged a chair tucked beneath the counter along the wall beside the door to the side of her bed and took her hand. The IV was connected properly now; a bag full of clear liquid slowly drained into the tube. "How are you?"

She nodded slowly, eyelids fluttering slightly, as if they were fighting to close. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead lightly and when he pulled back her eyes were closed.

"I'll leave you here with her, if you want," Jazz whispered quietly. Danny glanced over his shoulder to find his sister leaning against the doorway. He was violently reminded of the day before, sitting at Sam's bedside with Valerie watching from the doorway. His head spun at the realization of exactly how much had happened between now and then; exhaustion hit him like a brick wall. "There's not much left to do for now. Her body just really needs a lot of sleep."

"Are they gonna get mad if I get in the bed with her? It's big enough to fit both of us and I wanna be as close as possible to her," He fought the urge to yawn.

"Since I'm the attending doctor for all intents and purposes, you can do whatever you want. Just don't pull the IVs out and stay on her left side." He nodded slowly. "Get some sleep. I'm gonna go let Valerie know you're here."

Jazz left before he could respond. For a moment he just sat, fighting against the heavy feeling in his limbs, but eventually he forced himself to stand and stretch. He kicked the chair back and gently nudged Sam over until there was enough room for him to slide in beside her. He kicked his shoes off and pulled the blankets up, curling his body around hers and draping an arm across her stomach. She sighed quietly in her sleep, but made no other movement. The last thing he thought about before sleep pulled him under was the lovely way the morning light brought out subtle violet highlights in her long raven hair.

Such fluffy cuteness. I have his headcannon where Sam has secret highlights and Danny's the only one who ever notices them. Hehe (:

If anyone's gonna point out that I've already mentioned the highlights in this story (or that the last line is almost word-for-word with the part I'm talking about) I already know. I did it on purpose. :)

Okay, I think that's pretty much it. Squee!

Thanks for reading!

- Tori