Hi again!!!!! :)
Okay, so basically I'm incredibly sorry for not updating much freakin' sooner, I have no valid excuse for doing so, and my reason was purely because of writer's block/procrastination. All I can say is that I hope you enjoy this chapter, it's pretty long (yay!), and that any and all reviews I receive are much appreciated!!!! :D
Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom. If I did, I would scorn the Nick execs that decided to cancel the show in America :(
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It seemed like her head had just touched the velvety pillow when Sam's cell phone suddenly began ringing from the small black nightstand situated next to her bed.
Mumbling a few swear words before moving, Sam sighed before propping herself up on her elbow and sleepily reaching for the phone through the darkness.
Danny probably ran into the box ghost on his way home, she thought grumpily. She hastily checked the caller ID before answering the call. Sure enough, it was Danny. A little worried but mostly annoyed by the unexpected call, she sighed once more before flipping open her phone.
"Danny?" she mumbled groggily.
"SAM!" Danny's alarmingly loud voice immediately snapped Sam awake; her eyes popped wide open, and she sat up on the bed, clutching the phone with both hands and extremely worried. A million panicked thoughts went through her mind:
Why does Danny sound so frightened? Is he hurt? Oh my God, he has to be all right!!!
"Oh God, thank goodness you're okay!" Danny was yelling into the phone so fast, it was hard to catch every word he was saying, but the relief was apparent in his voice that she was all right. Sam however, was beginning to truly panic.
"Danny, what the hell is going on? Why-" Sam abruptly stopped her furious interrogation when she heard Danny sobbing on the other line.
Sam felt the blood drain out of her face.
Whatever had happened to Danny was bad. Very bad.
Having immense difficulty finding her voice, she barely managed to audibly stutter, "D-Danny?"
"Sam," Danny sobbed loudly from the other line, and once again Sam had to strain her ears to understand his words, "T-Tucker's d-d-dead!"
Sam almost dropped her cell phone when she heard this. She was stunned, horrified, and unable to comprehend what she had just heard. "Tucker's dead!" Danny cried again, confirming that what she had been told wasn't a mistake. Tears began to well up in her eyes, and she placed a hand over her mouth, trying to muffle the sob that was building up in her throat.
Danny seemed to find the strength to continue, because he began explaining what had happened.
"Sam, there's a ghost, I've n-never seen her before. She's l-lethal Sam, she sent this h-huge ball of purple ectoplasm towards Tucker's truck, and it-it exploded, and he...he...."
Danny didn't need to finish the sentence for Sam to know the terrible ending to the story.
Somehow, probably due to the critical fact that Danny needed to leave where he was straight away, Sam found her voice.
"Danny, you need to leave wherever you are right now!" she screamed into the phone, refusing to let the overwhelming fear growing in her take over her mind. She was barely holding on, a thread of sanity all she had left before she would totally lose it.
"NOW!" she shouted again, getting more anxious by the second.
It took a minute for Danny to answer. Like Sam, he was trying to put a control around his emotions also, or at least long enough so that he could finish talking to her.
"I k-know Sam, I'm on my way to your house right now," he said. "I'll be there in just a-" Danny suddenly stopped talking.
Sam sat frozen in her bed, her breathing hitched, very confused by the unexpected silence.
She was about to ask Danny if everything was all right when, all of a sudden, a choking sound could be heard.
Sam immediately knew this was Danny.
Terrified, she started screaming into the phone, "DANNY! DANNY!"
Sam was already out of her bed, tears pouring down her cheeks and threatening to blur her vision as she limped as fast as she could towards her door. Grabbing her car keys from her dresser positioned next to the door, she halted sharply when a new voice came into the receiver.
The voice was definitely feminine: sweet, beautiful, and almost musical, but all the same giving Sam the shivers, because it had a horrible hint of evil in it.
"Hello, Sam! Danny's a little busy right now- the boy's idiotically fighting a losing battle against my beautifully manicured hand, which also happens to be suffocating him! But don't worry dear- if you leave him a message, I should be able to carve it into his grave stone," the sweet, unnerving voice said.
Sam's knees buckled at this and, too weak to keep herself up anymore, she fell to the ground. She began shaking uncontrollably as tears rapidly flowed down her pale cheeks, and she couldn't seem to find her voice. She was absolutely petrified.
On the other end of the phone, the sweet demon voice laughed happily.
"Nothing to say? Aw, that's a shame. Well he's almost dead anyway-"
"NOOO!!!" Sam screamed into the phone. "Stop it!!!"
The evil ghost's only reply was the sound of Danny choking until, a second later, the most horrible sound of the night was heard: complete silence.
At this, the realization that Danny had just died, Sam started sobbing uncontrollably, her entire tiny frame shaking even more viscously than before, if that was possible.
Tucker was dead. Danny was dead.
And so brutally.
She might as well kill herself now.
As if Sam's thoughts had been heard, the room startlingly turned pitch black, the strip of moonlight coming from the large window in Sam's room unexpectedly disappeared, and a sudden freezing cold draft swirled around Sam's room, rapidly lowering the temperature.
Sam's gut-wrenching sobs ceased as she looked around her room, stunned, and wondering what in the world had just happened.
However, her heartbeat insanely sped up when a single pair of beautiful, yet sinister lavender eyes with light purple pupils appeared in the darkness, floating midair and staring right down at Sam.
"Two done, one more to go," came the wicked voice of the evil ghost, though only her eyes could be seen. A purple endoplasmic ball suddenly appeared; floating innocently in the air, save for the fact that it was growing larger and larger.
Sam balked; she knew this was being made for her.
"It was nice meeting you Sam," the unseen ghost concluded.
Sam then saw the purple ball spiraling backwards, an easy method ghosts used to gain more power into her throw, before it sped at a supersonic speed towards her.
The last thing Sam saw was the glowing purple ball furiously flying towards her...
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"NOOO!!!!!!!!!!!" Sam sat up, her eyes wide open, covered in a sheet of sweat.
She started sobbing, unable to control her emotions, and curled up into a ball, though it was a little difficult to do with her broken ankle. She rocked herself back and forth, still sobbing in anguish and overwhelmed with grief.
Danny and Tucker were dead. And she was dead.
However, as realization dawned on her, she stopped rocking, her sobbing halting for a moment as well.
Wait.
Wasn't she dead?
But how could she be, if she was sitting on her bed right now?
Sam quickly looked up at the window. There was the moon, providing light into her room at night like it always did. Her room was definitely not pitch black.
Confused, she looked at the dresser. Her keys innocently layed there, not having moved an inch from where she put them before she went to bed.
Shaking a little, Sam finally looked at the one piece of evidence that would determine everything. She turned her head to look at her cell phone, lying still on her nightstand, not having moved either from where it was put in the evening.
Her hand trembling, Sam reached for the phone and flipped it open. She quickly navigated to her "received calls" section of the phone. The last call she had received was from her mother, who had called her yesterday after school to say hello.
There was no call from Danny.
Relief washed over Sam so strongly, she felt lightheaded for a moment.
It was just a dream!
Actually, a nightmare; there was no way what she had just seen would simply count as a dream.
New tears came from this revelation, and Sam just sat there on her bed, trying to relax her over-beating heart.
She looked at the clock on her dresser. It was 4:21 AM. Exhausted but knowing there was no way she was going to get a wink of sleep tonight, Sam jumped out of bed and went into her huge bathroom.
Sam's bathroom was quite nice. It was huge, with a jacuzzi bathtub, stand-up shower, two sinks, and of course a toilet. On top of all that, the entire room was made of white marble. This was the only room Sam couldn't personalize too much, thanks to the white marble, but she had to admit that it was actually a very nice bathroom just the way it was.
Sam looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing black cotton shorts and a black tank top that were both clinging to her with sweat. Her hair was all messed up from thrashing around so much in bed, and her face was stained with tears. Ugh, I'm a mess, she thought.
Without a second's thought, she stripped out of her clothes and took a shower. She then got out, washed up, blow-dried her hair, and changed into a black cotton tracksuit. She looked at the clock.
5:30 AM.
There was still plenty of time to kill. Sam wanted to talk to both Tucker and Danny as soon as she could; the nightmare was still haunting her, and she would only be totally okay if she could see them and hear their voices again, especially Danny's.
The nightmare had been so real; it still unnerved her.
In desperate need of a task that could distract her from thinking about her horrific dream or calling the boys, Sam limped to the kitchen and decided to make breakfast for herself and all the butlers; they deserved a break once in a while. She turned on the switch for the 85-inch plasma television to come down from the middle of the huge kitchen's ceiling (a feature of the mansion that Danny and Tucker absolutely loved), and switched the channel to MTV, since it was only playing music videos at this time of the day instead of those reality shows Sam loathed.
Sam loved to cook, and she soon lost track of time once she really got into what she was doing. The kitchen was always stocked with all the groceries needed, so she made pancakes, waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, ham, and more. She was beginning to take out the ingredients she'd need for omelets, when a kind old butler that had been working for the family before Sam was even born, Milton, walked in.
Milton's eyes widened dramatically at the sight of the surplus of food Sam had already made and placed on the black granite counter in the middle of the kitchen. Having heard the shuffling of feet, Sam turned around from the stove and smiled when she saw who it was.
"Good morning Milton! I'm so glad you're here! I was just wondering what you would like in your omelet!" Sam said, cracking an egg open into a frying pan as she spoke.
Milton seemed to regain his composure and cleared his throat before asking hoarsely, "My goodness Samantha, it's only-" he paused mid-sentence to check his watch- "seven thirty in the morning! How long did it take you to make all of this?"
Sam shrugged. "A few hours I suppose; I woke up around four in the morning and wasn't able to go back to sleep, so I decided to make breakfast for all of us!"
Milton chuckled while grabbing a plate from a cabinet and taking a seat on one of the bar chairs besides the counter. "Well then I'll have spinach, ham, and onions in my omelet, please."
Sam nodded absentmindedly before turning back to the stove to begin making the omelet.
It was only seven-thirty! Danny and Tucker (and herself for that matter) always slept in until at least nine in the morning on Saturdays, and there was no way either of them were going to pick up the phone, so she just had to wait for thirty more minutes before she had a chance of them answering the phone.
As Sam kept cooking, more butlers and maids gradually joined Milton and her, until the room was full of chatter and laughter. The atmosphere was relaxing and spirited, and soon Sam started to genuinely relax.
It wasn't until breakfast was over and everyone started cleaning up when Sam looked at the clock once more. She was startled to see that it was 9:30 already, and after quickly excusing herself from the room, she quickly limped to the house phone in her living room.
The anxiety that she had somehow managed to store away in her mind for the past few hours suddenly hit her with full force. Sam grabbed the phone off the tiny coffee table it was sitting on and frantically started dialing Danny's number.
However, as Sam held the phone apprehensively next to her ear, thinking about what she was going to say to Danny, an unexpected feeling of foolishness washed over her, and she lowered the phone until it was resting on the smooth mahogany surface of the coffee table.
What would she say to Danny once he picked up the phone? Obviously what had occurred in her nightmare never happened, since it simply was a dream. If she was honest with herself, she was only calling Danny because just hearing him talk to her would make her feel better, safer, and let her have a much easier time forgetting about the horrible nightmare.
At these thoughts Sam flushed in anger at herself. She was acting so immature, depending on someone else to comfort her about a nightmare.
How childish.
Having made up her mind, Sam forcefully snapped the phone back over the receiver, not giving it a chance to finish dialing Danny's number. All she had experienced last night was simply a nightmare; something that happened to everyone every once in a while, and something that she could endure by herself. She refused to make a big deal out of it.
As Sam finally put the phone back in its' place, she suddenly felt very exhausted. Although she would not allow her nightmare to get to her head, she could not ignore the fact that it had at minimum taken away all the precious sleep she needed.
Not in the mood to climb up the absurdly long stairwell that led to her room in her condition, Sam resorted to taking a nap on one of the silky, soft sofas in the living room. Her eyes finally fluttered close after some quick adjusting on the couch, and she sighed in content.
Her genius plan of catching up on some sleep was interrupted, however, by the image of the horrible, purple-and-blue-eyed ghost staring down at her through the darkness inside her head, and she immediately forced her eyes open and gasped out in alarm. The image of her had been so real; as much as she hated to admit it, it had absolutely terrified her.
Placing a hand over her racing heart, she quickly decided that sleep might not be a good idea for now.
Sam quickly peered through the large ornate window across from her in the living room. To her dismay, the skies were dark and cloudy, and it was apparent that it was going to rain soon. So much for going outside for some fresh air...
Lonely in her huge home yet aware that Danny and Tucker were just waking up at the moment, Sam sighed as she realized today was going to be devoted to tackling the bucket load of homework she had from her dear teachers. Although the thought of filling her mind up with knowledge on a Saturday was uninviting enough to her, Sam realized that she was also apprehensive to go back to her room. She was afraid that the moment she walked in there it would ignite her memories and let last night's nightmare become crystal clear once more to her.
The moment these thoughts passed through her head, however, Sam determinedly grabbed her crutches and limped up the stairs and to her room. There was no way she would let a lousy dream get to her in such a way! She pushed away the unavoidable feeling of dread that enveloped her the moment she set foot in her haven, and constantly told herself to "Get a grip, Manson," while completing her various homework assignments.
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