Behind Blue Eyes
Goth and Geek
I don't own Danny Phantom, but man I wish I did.
Lo and behold, another step closer to an ending! Do us both a favor and read on, readers.
The hospital at the Far Frozen reminded Star of something straight from a sci-fi movie. She hadn't enjoyed a good one in years, as Paulina thought they were way to nerdy, but she enjoyed watching them occasionally with her brothers when she was younger.
There was flat tables with plenty of glowing buttons, glass chambers filled with water(?) that hooked up to towers of computer screens and an entire corner of the room for monitors to display all kinds of data being taken by their equipment.
Danielle and Mayor Masters were each submerged in a tank, hooked up to a breathing apparatus to be monitored. Danielle was finally allowed to fall completely unconscious while Mayor Masters had adamantly refused to be rendered inert.
He also refused to undress in front of teenagers, so Star thought it was almost comical to see him floating in a suspension chamber in nearly his full suit.
Frostbite asked a number of questions, but they all seemed equally hard to answer. They hadn't wanted to drill either of the injured ghosts for information on the way here, having felt the situation was too dire for it. Even now it was impossible to say what their condition was and if Frostbite could help. It seemed Mayor Master's wasn't in as much immediate pain as he was outside, but he still couldn't communicate with anyone while being monitored under the water. That meant they were working with minimum details for the time being.
Star knew that wasn't great, medically speaking. But they were hopeful Frostbite's tests would conclude soon and reveal something useful.
She couldn't help but stare at Danielle in her chamber. They had dressed her in a stark white one-piece swimsuit for the water so her clothes wouldn't get wet. She floated aimlessly, held in place by whatever force was built into the bottom of the chamber and a mouthpiece for oxygen. She assumed oxygen. There were wires connected to parts of her body, over her heart, her sternum, up and down her arms and one on both her temples.
Her face was, as she expected, a spitting image of Danny Fenton's. There was a dashing thought that she looked more like him than Danny Phantom did. How was that possible? For her to look more like him than… than himself? She was visibly a girl, and she was shorter than him by a wide margin, but her face was like that of a mirror image of his.
"I'm afraid I must ask you all to exit the room for now. Tundra wishes to bring in a full team to read over their vitals and conditions and examine them from head to toe." Frostbite said as he entered the room.
"How long?" Sam asked. She wasn't resisting, just worried.
"I do not know. It depends on what they find. You may do whatever you wish here in the meantime, my Lair is yours as you well know." Frostbite said apologetically.
Sam and Tucker nodded so Star quickly stood beside Tucker as they made their way out.
"Actually, I'd really like to stay if I could. I think I can be of some help in regards to human and halfa biology." Jazz offered.
Frostbite considered this, bringing his icy hand to his chin before nodding.
"Yes, that would probably be very useful. We are no slouches in human biology either, but surely there are intricacies we do not know. Especially about human-ghost hybrids." Frostbite agreed.
Jazz turned to wave at them.
They gave a solemn wave back before leaving the room, passing no less than eight huge white yet-like monster ghosts on the way.
Star, despite all the twists and turns the last week had taken her, was still being surprised. You'd think she would get over that by now, but it was the opposite. Now every little thing seemed to intrigue her and make her question everything in ways she wouldn't have bothered to think about a week ago.
She knew Frostbite only asked them to leave the room because, logistically, it was a tight fit with so many people and the yeti ghosts too up a lot of room. Plus, the equipment the other team brough, plus the equipment already inside? It made sense to empty out non-essentials.
But considering how protective of Danielle Sam and Tucker were back at the school and the entire ride here, she almost expected a bit more of a pushback on leaving. They were clearly very close, and Star had seen similar things happen in hospitals back on Earth where people absolutely insisted on staying by a patients side. She had almost said as much, before Sam agreed.
Star had surprised herself at how immature that was at a time like this. She said as much to Sam and apologized for a scene she almost made.
"It's not just you," Sam assured her. "I can't completely walk away yet. But Frostbite is their best chance, if he needs room to do tests, we have to give that to him."
"If he thinks we'd just be in the way, we would be. No sense in crowding the room and slowing down progress." Tucker agreed.
They were all dressed a little warmer now, each taking out heavy orange parkas out of the Speeder while they waited. They were indoors, but even the walls were made of snow, so it was still beyond freezing. Sam didn't sit. She paced back and forth, occasionally asking Tucker a question as he sat and poked at his PDA.
From the questions he asked or statements he muttered it sounded like he was trying to piece together aspects of the Guys in White's activity. Star sat quietly beside him as she tried to warm her hands.
After ten minutes of rubbing them furiously together, Sam knelt and took her hands into her own.
"Focus. Just breathe." Sam said gently. "The entire Ghost Zone is colder than home, but this place pushes it. Before Danny got his ice powers, he would sit between me and Tucker and not move the whole way home, he was so cold from just flying around."
Star paused, smiling at the information.
"The key to staying warm is controlling your breathing. Breath deep through your nose, hold it longer than you normally would and exhale through your mouth. Like this." Sam took in a deep breath through her nose, held it for twenty seconds, and carefully blew the breath out her mouth. "Breathe it out, like your trying to dry wet nail polish after a manicure." she said with a wry smile and a final gentle pat on the back of her hand before she stood up again.
As she sat there trying to breathe like Sam told her, she found herself surprised. Again.
And more surprised than ever before. If you had told her last year, she would find herself sitting in the Ghost Zone she wouldn't have believed it at first. But with enough convincing she would have, she already knew it existed and that really, really weird things could happen in Amity Park. There was that time the entire town was transported into some type of other dimension, which she now realized was the Ghost Zone, and the time Mr. and Mrs. Fenton tried to petition the school to let them take kids into the Ghost Zone. So really, not an enormous stretch.
But the revelation that Samantha Manson got manicures?
If she hadn't heard it herself, she didn't think she ever would have believed it.
It wasn't particularly about her getting them. Star had seen her hands plenty and more often that not she at least wore plain black or purple nail polish. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less done, but never unkept. But she never imagined being one to mention it, or ever bring it up. It seemed a little too girly for her to want to really engage in.
But that's all she was, right? She was just a girl.
Just like Star, Sam was a teenage girl. She could see that a lot more clearly now, for whatever reason. Her hair was always extremely straight, too straight to be perfectly natural. So, she had to straighten her hair often to get that look. She wore makeup just for fun, Star could tell because she was wearing more eyeliner than foundation, so she had to enjoy some part of the experience. And her nails, she had just implied she received manicures; that was a step beyond painting them just for fun.
Even seeing Sam in a whole new light recently and she didn't realize how far from the truth old misconceptions were; that was how deep in the ground her head was buried.
At Casper High, Sam was largely regarded as an outcast. But unlike Danny and Tucker, it seemed she went out of her way to make it happen. Danny and Tucker had wanted popularity and attention for as long as Star could remember- until the accident changed everything. But Sam had never been that way and couldn't be bothered to give the 'popular' crowd the time of day.
That's why Paulina couldn't stand her, Star knew. Because Sam was neither intimidated nor impressed with them, like she could see through everything they weren't.
Sam spoke her mind and seemed to go out of her way to do so and many people found it abrasive and off-putting, but that was due to the social world created by Paulina since they were in the third grade. She made it impossible to do things like watch certain shows, eat certain foods, go to certain places or you risked being excluded. Everyone found it easier to follow Paulina's lead than Sam's, and she was left out for it.
She was different and that was enough. She liked black instead of pink, she liked boots instead of heels, she liked her hair in a messy bun rather than gorgeously flowing and she made it obvious. She liked things that were weird and scary like spiders and bats, not things that were fluffy and cute like bunnies. She liked monster movies and gore instead of chick flicks and rom-coms. But Star was beginning to understand that it wasn't that Sam hated those things; she hated that she was expected to like them and only them. That was where her ultra-contrarian attitude came from; she was just not one to be forced into something, and when she was, she fought back. Hard.
Black wasn't her favorite color; it was the lilac purple that accented her outfits. Her favorite movie wasn't Beetlejuice; it was The Hunger Games. Bats actually were her favorite animal, but she did find them cute, and it wasn't out of spite. She wasn't entirely different, she just refused to be exactly the same.
And again, unlike Danny, she didn't seem to talk to anybody at school except Danny and Tucker. Classmates joked with Danny, he quipped here and there; nobody at Casper High except Dash Baxter would say they didn't like Danny Fenton; he was inconsequential. A nobody.
But people didn't like Sam and Tucker.
Tucker Foley was another animal altogether, Star was realizing.
She and the rest of the girls in school largely regarded him as only the horn-dog of a teenage boy, and a bit too reliant on computers to the extent that it damaged his social skills. But you could only feel so bad for a boy before they took pity as interest, she had learned, so it was easier to treat him harshly.
But after watching him all week, she noticed the cracks forming.
How much of his flirting was a distraction versus genuine interest? How much of it was an attempt to build up his own confidence in the face of his best friend having super powers? How much of it was in the hopes and desire for a genuine human connection that wasn't part of a double-life?
Star couldn't say, really. Not that any of it excused some of his more persistent behavior, per say, but he was hardly the only boy in school with more than a passing interest in girls. Maybe he was a little one-track minded, but never forceful or invasive.
The girls didn't like Tucker Foley very much because it seemed like he wasn't genuinely interested in them. And Star thinks they might be right, but not for the reasons they think.
She was absolutely certain that, while he wouldn't really turn down an opportunity to hook up with a couple girls, he was not flirting with the intention of "getting some and getting gone". But she was absolutely certain that he wasn't interested in them because he didn't have any spare time to commit.
Between keeping secrets, helping Danny and his own life, Star was very certain that Tucker would never be able to prioritize a relationship with a girl who wasn't inside their inner circle.
Then there was the other angle, the Techno Geek thing.
Last month she thought it was abhorrent the amount of time he paid technology. She liked her phone as much as any teenager. She liked to text her friends from the dinner table instead of talking to her mom. She liked to take weird pictures of herself with her brothers. She liked to post status randomly for her friends, and then check those status in class instead of listening to whatever a river delta is. She even understood the appeal of video games, having brothers at home that played frequently for her to watch and join in sometimes.
But he needed his phone and PDA like they were hits of oxygen while he was drowning. It wasn't really until she saw him use one up close that it wasn't like a drug, or oxygen. It was like coming home for him. He was familiar with their buttons and noises, and he knew what each one could do, and which one had what.
He knew them in a way that he didn't know people, is the thing. He could read code like he couldn't some social ques, he could recognize the sounds of a computer more than the words coming out of a jocks mouth and he could enjoy his own interests in there and not out here.
And with other people who enjoyed the same, as she found out. Tucker had at LEAST one friend in every state and several overseas that he was constantly messaging with. Sometimes about nonsense, sometimes about tech, sometimes about life.
Not to mention how much time and attention creating the Ghost Files took.
Sometime one day after school Sam and Tucker had brought her back to Tucker's house. Sam was the rich one, and you knew it from looking at her house, but Tucker's attic looked like the entire electronics department rented its equipment from him.
He had so many towers and monitors and servers they had taken as scrap and fixed that he fixed them up. They currently held more information about ghosts than probably any government organization could ever hope to know, even the Guys in White and even the Fenton's.
They meticulously kept files on Danny's enemies, more detailed than any sports stat sheet Star had ever seen. Enemies, allies, everything in between. Plans and blueprints were scanned in of Danny's parents Ecto-weaponry that Tucker played with in his spare time. He liked to understand every one down to the last letter, otherwise it could hurt Danny later. Pages and pages of notes about Danny's biology and powers, instances that happened, questions they had, training routines and practice schedules.
Tucker was Home Base, and he was probably the most well-educated person on the planet about all things Ecto-related. All of which was made possible with his PDA.
And unlike both Sam and Danny, Tucker seemed to have a handful of friends. He was president of the AV club, and most of the nerdier kids in the school liked him a lot like Mikey, Nathan and Lester.
They made a really strange trio.
Star had already known that before, but it wasn't until very recently that she understood how strange.
A ghost, a goth and a geek.
Who knew?
Back into one of the most fun aspects, character study and breakdown! Woo-hoo!
I love doing these from an outside prespective, but if there's anything I love more than that it's showing one from a recently recontextualized perspective. Star has to basically relearn and go over everything she thought she knew and understood about Sam and Tucker becausely clearly the way she was thinking about them was flawed.
I tried not to make it feel like she's done a complete 180 here, as she still has habits like calling people by their place on the social lader and accidentally grouping the nerds and anyone not A-List together a lot. But she IS trying, and I hope that's coming through.
Next time I think we'll check in on Danny for a minute... just a minute, or we might miss some character development for Star. I know that's what everyone is here for, surely.
Also I hope as I get closer to finishing this, I'll tell you more about the secret project I plan to adopt and continue! I think everyone will be pretty shocked and excited. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed!