Chapter Five: Igloo
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Holding the necklace was like holding onto an icicle.
Danny stood uncertainly on the tile in Sam's kitchen, pretending to rifle through the fridge for something to eat. He wasn't really hungry. He toyed again with the idea of putting the necklace down but he didn't. It dangled limply, coldly from his hand at his side. He hadn't let go of it since he'd taken it from Sam inside Narira's castle.
Sam came up beside him. "Staring at the fridge isn't gonna make more food appear."
Danny didn't answer. He wanted to joke with her, play it off as no big deal. He really did. But Narira's words kept playing over and over in his mind. When he closed his eyes he saw that dark abandoned castle, and when he looked at Sam he couldn't shake that image from his head.
Sam slid between him and the fridge, looping her arms around his waist. "You ever gonna put that stupid thing down?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
He shrugged, looking away. Reluctantly, he lifted his hand and let the silver necklace clatter to the countertop behind him. He strode away without waiting to see if Sam would pick it up, letting himself sink into the cushions on the living room couch.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam approaching him. He shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, suddenly wishing he was fast asleep. Where he wouldn't have to think about any of this anymore.
"Danny, stop."
At that his eyes snapped open. "Stop what?"
"Just stop. Stop thinking what you're thinking! I can see the wheels turning in your head and it's driving me crazy."
She didn't know what he was thinking, he was pretty sure of that.
"I know you too well," she said, arms folded defiantly as she sat down next to him. "You're totally giving this whole thing metaphorical meaning that it doesn't have. I am not Narira and you are not Icehand. So you can just stop worrying."
She was only kind of right. His eyes drifted over to her and he saw she was cupping the necklace in her palms. He had a sudden vision of Sam's ghost fading away just like Narira, and it was painful.
"I'm going to put it on now, okay?"
As her hands rose to clasp it around her neck, he couldn't help himself when his hand shot out to stop her. "Sam wait."
"Why?"
"Are.. are you sure you really want to?"
Sam's facial expression looked like he had just slapped her. "Are you even serious? Of course I want to."
Danny still didn't take his hand off her hands. "I just.. want to make sure it's really what you want."
He was being serious, and couldn't help feeling slightly annoyed that Sam seemed almost amused at his concern. She gave him one of her snarky half-smiles. "Danny, it's not like it's a wedding ring." She started to laugh, but it died as soon as she saw the look on Danny's face.
"You're right," he admitted. "It's not. It's… kind of bigger than that."
All Danny could think of was that cold, dark chamber, and that feeling of empty endless eternity.
Sam's hands fell back into her lap as she watched him uncertainly. "You really think that?"
The two of them had never actually talked about marriage before. Simply because, well, it didn't really matter, you know? Marriage was something that other people talked about, people who hadn't already found the person they were going to be with forever, people who were still looking. With Danny and Sam it just kind of went unspoken. He knew, and he knew that she knew, that marriage was a formality and whatever the two of them had was already more permanent than a legal term could ever make it. Besides, they were so young. He supposed that's the only reason thus far that had kept him from flying Sam off to Vegas in the middle of the night to make it official. Even though he knew she loved him, he couldn't help but hope if they kept it unofficial maybe someday she could still escape him. Not that he would ever tell her that. How do you tell someone you're scared to make it official because you're hoping they'll see sense one day and leave you, while at the same time praying they never do?
Up till now, he'd been able to imagine that it was possible Sam could see reason one day. Leave him. Have a much better life. While at the same time he was aware that what he and Sam had was.. well it was permanent. It was a constant, like gravity, like the theory of relativity. It was perpetual. The two feelings were contradictory, to say the least.
And after seeing Narira, that sense of eternity was more real to him than it had ever been. To most people death and afterlife was a vague abstraction, but to Danny it was always fresh and immediate. Not something he could push to the back of his mind. Seeing that ghost like that, looking at Sam now, he couldn't help but feel the potential 'forever' laying there between them like a tangible object, something that could be wonderful or something that could end in a sad, dark, freezing chamber of ice.
"I do," he answered her softly.
He raised his eyes slowly to meet hers, wondering what emotion she was feeling. Wondering if she was as conflicted as he was. To his surprise, she broke out in a toothy grin. "Well that's good. And here I thought you were never going to pop the question!" There was a twinkle in her eye; she was joking, trying to lighten his mood. To his chagrin, it was working.
"Sam, I'm being serious here…"
"So am I," she countered. "Danny, don't you know by now that I'm not planning on going anywhere? I know you don't want me to take this necklace lightly, and I'm not. You want me to think long and hard before I decide to put it on. It's a commitment, I know. But I've already done my thinking Danny. I've thought about you since the seventh grade when we met. I already made this decision. Years ago, before we even started dating. You already know that my answer would be yes if you asked me to marry you, duh, emphasis on the duh. So I know you can't be surprised about this." She raised a hand to his face gently, looking steadily into his eyes. "Oh Danny," she said softly. "This is another one of your stupid fits of nobility isn't it?"
He almost choked. "What? No it's not-"
"Stop trying to protect me from yourself. Yeesh, can I ever convince you that I don't need protecting? Least of all from you."
Danny rolled his eyes, resting his own hand against Sam's, savoring the warmth of it. Instead of answering her he let his hand trail down her arm to her shoulder, pondering his answer. Then he pulled her suddenly, closing the gap between them on the couch, turning her and scooping her onto his lap. He kissed her lightly on the cheek, wrapping his arms around her so that she was leaning back on his bicep. A very comfy spot, he assumed. He rested his cheek on the top of her head, nuzzling her sleek black hair. It seemed to smell like a different kind of flower every day.
"It's just that forever is a long time, Sam."
He hoped she knew what he meant. What he was hinting at, that he couldn't really put into words.
Forever. Such a foreign concept to most people. Not to them. They had seen forever. They had met forever, in hundreds and hundreds of lost, lingering spirits. Forever could be a lonely thing.
"I know it is."
There was something else that had been bothering him, and he couldn't stop himself as he blurted out, "What did you mean when you said you wouldn't wait?"
"Do you think you could still love him," Narira whispered at Sam, and again her voice filled the entire chamber, "if he left you alone? To wait, for eternity?"
"I wouldn't wait," Sam replied without hesitation. "I would follow him."
She didn't answer for a moment. "Heh, I was hoping you'd forgotten about that."
"I didn't." His tone sounded gruffer than he'd meant it to. He had been mulling over her frightening words for the last few hours since she'd said them, trying to understand what she had meant.
"Don't get your panties in a twist Danny. I was trying to make Narira understand what she did wrong. I wasn't saying I would straight up off myself if you died okay? I only meant that I wouldn't linger around the Ghost Zone for hundreds of years mourning you. …If you moved on, I- I would move on too."
"Oh." That was all he could think to say.
And for some reason, his heart suddenly felt a little bit lighter.
He could see Sam fiddling with the pendant on her lap, turning it over and over in her hands, examining it. The pendant's faint blue glow made her hands shine the lightest of blues. He saw by the white in her fingers how tightly she was clutching it, like it might try to escape her at any moment.
So Danny removed one of his arms from her waist and plucked the necklace from her fingers. "You realize though that now when I buy you a real ring it's gonna have to live up to this?" he joked. "I mean, where am I going to find a diamond ring that glows blue? That just isn't fair."
He unclasped the silver chain and made to loop it around her neck.
"Woah," she uttered, the moment the pendant made contact with the skin on her chest. "Weird."
"What?" Danny said, as he snatched the clasp into place.
"It's… it's really cold. Really, really cold."
Danny peered around her other side to see the necklace, and saw that the bluish glow had intensified threefold since he'd put it on her. It really was beautiful; he hadn't been exaggerating. The pendant itself was like a rounded vertical rectangle, with silver lining to match the chain. The clear gem embedded in it could have been a diamond, but the bright light originating from the very center of it cast small fleeting sparkles of blue light all throughout the gem, making it appear more like a sapphire laying in a fireplace.
Hsss. Sam's sharp intake of breath, her hand flying up to cover the pendant.
"What? What?"
"Nothing," she said immediately. "It just feels strange. I can feel the cold of the necklace, like it's seeping down into my heart, into my lungs..." She must have seen the terrified look on Danny's face, because she hastily added, "Don't worry it doesn't hurt, it's just strange is all. So strange. It's like, brain freeze for my whole body." She chuckled at her joke but Danny's throat felt dry and he realized he was squeezing the couch cushions so hard it was a wonder they hadn't ripped yet.
A minute passed as Sam adjusted to the strange sensation, her hand resting on the necklace in a fashion eerily similar to Narira.
Then Sam abruptly swung her legs off the couch, sliding off Danny's lap.
She laughed, glancing down at her legs. "Weird. Kinda feels like my legs are asleep."
Danny's inner alarm bells went off. That would go away right?
He stood up and followed Sam as she sauntered into the kitchen, wondering what she was doing. To his profound amusement Sam stopped at the fridge, flung open the freezer door, and stuck her hand inside the ice box. He wanted to laugh at the way her eyebrows were furrowed in concentration, and he had to remind himself that this was a serious situation, not a funny one. But he couldn't hold in a snort when she pulled out a full handful of misshapen ice cubes.
She stared at them ponderously. "Huh." She sifted them through her fingers to her other hand. "Hmm."
"I've never seen anyone concentrate so hard on ice cubes."
She glared at him, without any menace. "I'm experimenting."
"And the conclusion..?"
"These ice cubes," she replied, "are not cold."
"Fascinating," he said jauntily. "This experiment has done wonders for the scientific community."
"The test results were inconclusive," she said, tossing the ice cubes into the sink. "I think I might need to do additional testing if I want to prove my hypothesis."
"Additional testing?" he sniggered. God she was such a dork. As much of a dork as he was.
"What do you say?" she said demurely, looping her arms around the back of his waist.
That look in her eyes. Why did she have to give him that look? It was the same look she'd given him back on the roof, days ago, the one that had finally busted his streak of self-control.
Only… It wasn't the same now, was it? Now his eyes fell on that necklace, that little silver ray of sunshine, as Sam leaned up to kiss him.
And any self-control he may have deluded himself into thinking he still had was out the window.
Suddenly they were kissing as though none of this had happened, as if they had just picked up right where they left off on the roof before everything turned sour. After all, he couldn't focus on his shortcomings or his doubts or his fears while he was kissing Sam. She blew every other thought out of the water.
And then his hands were on her waist, sliding under her shirt- when they got there he never knew. He had backed her up against the island countertop in the center of the kitchen as he pushed forward into their kiss, felt her stop stepping backwards when there was nowhere left to back up. He was lifting her up onto the countertop so he could run his hands down her legs, feeling a rush of pleasure in the fact that they were exactly eye-to-eye when she was sitting up there, her knees pressing against both sides of his hips.
He pulled back for a breath of air, but her hands snared into the fabric on his shirt, refusing to let him go. A shuddered foggy breath escaped from his half parted lips, but Sam didn't notice and kept kissing him. She had her hands hooked under his shirt now and was tugging it off- jeez, she didn't mess around did she?- and her cool hands where running down his stomach- and he felt a jolt of that ever-present energy surge down his arms. Opening his eyes he saw that a ring of ice two feet wide was spreading out from his hand on the countertop. And Sam still hadn't noticed.
Normally his panic would be bubbling over at this point, but it was like someone had turned the panic alarm on mute in his brain. He knew it was there going off but he'd be damned if he could hear it. All he could hear was the blood rushing in his own ears, beating furiously- kinda sounded something like Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.
His shirt was somewhere behind him on the floor and his hands were sliding up the outside of Sam's thighs under her short skirt- God, it should be a crime to have skin this smooth. Or a crime to hide it under clothes. And she kept pulling him closer, closer, even though they couldn't get any closer, but she just kept pulling. Her hips on his hips. The counter froze solid and Sam still didn't stop kissing him.
But Danny pulled back between kisses, if you can call it pulling back since his face was the only thing he managed to tear out of Sam's grasp. "Sam wait-"
"Wait what?" she said with barely hidden annoyance. God he loved her like this. He felt that icy fire churning up like a hurricane inside his chest. It was a wonder the whole apartment complex wasn't a glacier already judging by the energy he felt boiling inside him.
He had to chuckle at her response. "I was only going to ask if you wanted to take this out of your kitchen. Maybe.. out of your apartment." He eyed the counter warily, which now looked like it had been imported recently from Antarctica.
Sam followed his gaze to the counter, looking a bit shocked. "Huh." She looked at her own legs, where the bare skin was touching iced-over marble. "Huh. Yeah, I cannot feel that. It.. tickles. More like a breeze than ice. How cool is that?" Her amethyst eyes were sparkling with excitement when she looked at Danny again.
"Way cool," he said smoothly, a vast understatement of how he really felt about that. Inside, his heart was doing somersaults. "So.. you wanna take this elsewhere?"
"I don't know. I've been thinking about redecorating anyway. I heard igloos are in this year." That snarky smile of hers again. Somehow, it just turned him on more. Though she probably could have crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue and he still might've thought it was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen at this point in the afternoon.
"Nah," he quipped, sweeping her off the counter unceremoniously into his arms. "Igloos are so last season."
He let the transformation wash over him and flew through the wall of her apartment, away into the late golden afternoon.
They ended up settling in a spot in the outskirts of town, in a thick of close-knitted trees. There wasn't a soul around for miles. And just because he could, because he was a sarcastic asshole and he was on top of the world, Danny served up a fresh wall of ice and formed them an igloo at the foot of the trees in the grass.
She didn't shiver when his icy breath formed beads of frost on her skin, she didn't shy away from the cold touch of his hands. The walls of the igloo glowed yellow from the dying afternoon sun, but the snow inside glowed blue, reflecting the light from Sam's necklace and from Danny's hands. He could see the green flashing on Sam's skin, knew that it was the light from his own eyes, and still he didn't care. Didn't try to squash it, force that energy back down. He just let it flow out of his hands into the ground, out on his breath into Sam's hair, let it cover her skin- and she still wasn't shivering. He supposed maybe he should thank those textbooks from the Far Frozen after all, because this, this, was the best thing he had ever felt. That free flowing of energy, unchecked, for once. For the first time.
And damn was it good. He didn't have to ask Sam to know she felt the same. He couldn't help the narcissistic feeling that nobody, anywhere, had ever had sex as great as this. After all, he'd always heard of sex as a hot and sweaty affair. But this was anything but. It was like a splash of cool water to the face, it was like a glass of lemonade of a summer day, it was like a breath of fresh air after emerging from a cave. It was refreshing, and he was more alive than he had ever been in his life. Even before, back when he'd been one hundred percent alive.
More than once he had to light up a flare of green ectoplasm to melt all the snow that had formed around them, pressing in on their bodies on all sides. He supposed if anyone happened upon their igloo it would really be a sight to see. What with it being an igloo in the middle of a forest devoid of snow, full of bright flashing lights and soft ragged breaths. But he was really too far gone to care about the possibility of being noticed.
Later, years later down the road of their relationship, Danny would have all but forgotten about that frightening night of 'almost' on the roof of Sam's apartment. Whenever he thought about the first time they made love he always thought about that hour under the trees, in that stupid igloo he'd conjured up on a passing whim.
Woohoo! So yeah, finally done! Sorry I got writer's block for this last chapter. I wanted to make it good but like, I don't write smut yo. Lol. So it's good without getting tooo good, if ya know'm say'n.
If you liked this, check out my other DP stories. :) As an expert on myself, I'm pretty sure my other ones are all written better than this one is. Haha.
Thanks for reading, folks
